Socialists and Communists do NOT believe all people have equal abilities, they believe that all should have equal rights and opportunities.

Capitalism gives people some equal rights and laws, it's illegal for both rich or poor to sleep under bridges. Poor and rich people have the right to buy that life saving medical operation, or send their child to private exclusive schools.

Socialists would say that all should have equal opportunities to power, success and happiness in life.

The rich mostly inherit their wealth. The idea that the clever get rich by their "hard work" is a propaganda myth.

The rich get wealthy by employing people to produce wealth for them. The worker for example would produce goods for his employer worth 1000 dollars per week but only get paid 200 dollars per week.

It's called "intelligence". Something hard-working, yet dumb, people usually lack, which is why they turn to socialism to voice their discontent.

There's no such thing as "free education", "free housing" etc. It doesn't matter if the government gives it away for free, there will always be a costs involved. School buildings cost money to build, to maintain, to heat,... Teachers don't work for free. They too need to eat and feed their families. etc.
The difference between free market capitalism and socialism here is that under free market capitalism, you are free to buy the services you want and you are free to not buy the services you don't want. Under socialism, the government will use force to take away part of your earnings and use that to pay for those so called free services.

I live in one of those Western European countries with so called "free health care". When I go to the doctors, I pay him for his services and he gives me a piece of paper. I can then mail that piece of paper to some government licensed organization and they'll send me a refund for the amount I paid the doctor. Guess what I do with those little pieces of paper. I throw them in the trash. I refuse to ask the government to rob my fellow human beings in my name.

How can you give people "equal opportunities" if they are all different?

To use a saying that once used to be popular on GFY:
"When the wind of change blows, some build walls, others build windmills".

When the wind blows everyone has the same "opportunity", yet everyone will use it differently. As a result, some will make a profit, others will not. What are you suggesting? That after people have taken advantage of a certain opportunity, we should "reset" things so those who made the right call won't have any advantage over those who made the wrong decision?

I'll quote Rothbard again:
Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible. And each person could not begin from the same point, for the world has not just come into being; it is diverse and infinitely varied in its parts. The mere fact that one individual is necessarily born in a different place from someone else immediately insures that his inherited opportunity cannot be the same as his neighbor's. The drive for equality of opportunity would also require the abolition of the family since different parents have unequal abilities; it would require the communal rearing of children. The State would have to nationalize all babies and raise them in State nurseries under 'equal' conditions. But even here conditions cannot be the same, because different State officials will themselves have different abilities and personalities. And equality can never be achieved because of necessary differences of location.
-Murray N. Rothbard

i would refuse to live in a society that is only survival of the fittest.

i have no problem that my taxes are used to finance things like schools, streets, government, police and so on. i dont even have a problem with unemployement benefits and social welfare.

what i insist on is that "my" money is spent responsibly and that people are encouraged to not rely on benefits but move their asses. here i some room for improvement (mildly said)

but in general i believe that the 2 countries i come from and live in are pretty great compared to many other places

Socialists are thieves that are too lazy to steal.

A free market is not survival of the fittest. In a free market it's those who best serve their fellow human beings that make the biggest profits. In a free market you actually have an incentive to help your fellow human beings.

In a socialist economy, you have an incentive to do less than your fellow human beings because if you do more than the "average worker" does, your earnings get taken away from you by the state.

Voluntary donations are not prohibited in a free market. Voluntary transactions are what free markets are all about. If you want to voluntarily donate part of your earnings to a local school or a fund for children with special needs you are free to do so. The whole point of a free market is that you or the government can't force anyone to give away his earnings against his will.

did you notice that i didnt use any of those labels like socialist, capitalist etc?

i described what i consider a society worth living in - no matter what people call it

but: you know that "voluntarily" many things will not work. Would i donate part of my income voluntarily to help children (i actually do that for christmas), schools, unemployed etc?

probably not and most other probably neither

am i ok that my government does that with my taxes?

yes

So it all boils down to this simple question: Are you allowed to commit acts of injustice when your intentions are good?

Are you allowed to steal from the rich to give to the poor?

Are you allowed to steal from a family that has 2 cars in order to give to a family with no car?

Are you allowed to force someone to donate to charity?

Are you allowed to steal from a hungry healthy individual in order to give to a hungry sick individual?
...

You know what the road to hell is paved with? good intentions. The most heinous acts, the worst crimes in human history were committed by people who thought they were doing the right thing. it's a slippery slope. As Bastiat pointed out in "The Law", once you think it's ok to violate people's property rights when your intentions are benevolent, it becomes simply a matter of coming up with a good excuse and you can do whatever you want.

listen... i am sometimes sad that i dont have the time and energy to read all these clever books anymore and my times at the university studying business management and economics are long gone (11 years now). And i forgot a lot.

but what i clearly remember from economics is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good

i completely agree with that concept.


other than that i simply dont agree with what you wrote above because i dont see it happening. would you please provide me an example where someone had to donate his second car to someone else?

From a utilitarian point of view, the concept of some politician or bureaucrat determining what is good and what is bad, what is a merit god and what is a demerit good, simply won't work. As Hayek pointed out, it's a knowledge problem. See my post about the coordinating function of prices in a market economy.

From a deontological point of view:

Those example questions I asked all illustrate the same basic question: are you allowed to violate someone's property right simply because you have good intentions? My answer is: no, you are never allowed to violate someone's rights. The pro-intervention pov is yes you are allowed to violate people's rights when your intentions are good.

You can't blame him. You would probably talk same in case you are getting info from BBC; Cnn, etc..I guess he believes that there some armed people goig on the streets and taking other properties and shoot at site if you try to defend.

Equal opportunities meats the needs that all humans need, all babies need food and care, all need education.

The rich are not the most intelligent in fact it looks like they are more stupid. In the UK 3 private schools give the best education money can buy to their pupils. They then take the best places in Oxford and Cambridge, The same number of places as the top 2000 free state schools. This way the rich prevent poor children from going to the best schools and taking the best jobs. By hot housing their young in small classes, boarding schools.

If you don't like paying taxes you would like living in a socialist state, there were no taxes, there is no need for them.

What a laugh about the freedom not to pay taxes to help the poor, the rich don't mind sending the sons of the poor off to fight in their foreign wars for markets.

Tell me you object to paying taxes to fund police to break strikes and for the government to subsidies high tech industries? Should Microsoft and Facebook pay back all the state funding that build computers and the Internet and made all their profits possible?

You are missing the point completely so as I've said, once you feel that someone is giving you apartment just after finishing university (that you didn't pay)or when you go to doctor and no one is asking you how much you earn and do you have money to pay, maybe you will understand. Until then, you can continue to believe in some evil people taking other properties. Idea behind system is to balance differences. Humanity was basic principle and a little logic and empathy. There are many people not able to work or work so hard as others.

As Madalton said, I don't have a problem giving money from my salary if I know that it is spent to those who need it. I could be the one in years coming. You can't understand this principle if you never lived it because it look strange to selfish profit (market) ideology. And that's not any special money, taxes are not much higher. I think that maybe Scandinavian countries have biggest percent of taking from people, but at the other hand, there was recently published study that people living there are most happy compared to other countries worldwide.

you sure know a lot of clever words - but reality is not what is written in economic theories. the world is not black or white

my rights are not violated when i pay taxes. if i dont want to pay taxes, i can move somewhere else - like Antigua or something like that. Dont know if theres any country with completely no taxes. Besides Monte Carlo, but i cant afford that.

i voluntarily pay taxes, it does not violate my property rights and i agree that the government does its job with my taxes. i dont agree that they do sometimes stupid stuff or buy weapons, but i can join a party and try to change things if i really disagree.

And sorry, no scientists i can cite for my point of view - just me

People aren't pawns you move around on a board, their every wish and desire ignored. People aren't plants you simply give some water and fertilizer. People are all different and all want different things. And there' nothing wrong with wanting something more than your neighbor. There's nothing wrong with wanting different things than your neighbor. In a free market economy, you are free to work to achieve your own goals.

The collectivist idea that some bureaucrat can somehow objectively measure what exactly it is people "need", ignores one of the basic facts of human life: our diversity.

LOL


I've done so many times already in the past. And if you would have read my posts in this thread you would know I object to all involuntary transactions and violations of property rights.

Ah the pseudoscience that is called "happiness research". It's the latest fad in Marxist circles. The idea that one can somehow measure happiness. For some strange reason all those "happiness research" studies all conclude that "more freedom and a higher standard of living doesn't make people more happy" and that "more government intervention in people's lives doesn't make them less happy". I wonder why.

In an earlier post in this thread I explained how value is subjective not objective. I'll refer to that post (the one with the Carl Menger quote) and add the following copy/paste from mises.org (I'm aware of the fact that a lot of people simply won't read it because of the source):

There is no way to measure an increase or decrease in happiness or satisfaction; not only between different people, it is not possible to measure change in the happiness of one given person.

In order for any measurement to be possible, there must be an eternally fixed and objectively given unit with which other units may be compared. There is no such objective unit in the field of human valuation. The individual must determine subjectively for himself whether he is better or worse off as a result of any change. His preference can only be expressed in terms of simple choice, or rank. Thus, he can say, "I am better off" or "I am happier" because he went to a concert instead of playing bridge (or "I will be better off" for going to the concert), but it would be completely meaningless for him to try to assign units to his preference and say, "I am two and a half times happier because of this choice than I would have been playing bridge." Two and a half times what? There is no possible unit of happiness that can be used for purposes of comparison and, hence, of addition or multiplication. Therefore, values cannot be measured; values or utilities cannot be added, subtracted, or multiplied. They can only be ranked as better or worse. A man may know that he is or will be happier or less happy, but not by "how much".

Accordingly, the numbers by which ends are ranked on value scales are ordinal, not cardinal, numbers. Ordinal numbers are only ranked; they cannot be subject to the processes of measurement. Thus, in the above example, all we can say is that going to a concert is valued more than playing bridge, and either of these is valued more than watching the game. We cannot say that going to a concert is valued ?twice as much? as watching the game; the numbers two and four cannot be subject to processes of addition, multiplication, etc

How much we value something is subjective. It's through our choices that we express that we value one thing over another. It's through voluntary transactions that prices are established. And again: it's those prices that play a coordinating role in the economy.

Without prices, there's no way of knowing how much of a certain product will be needed and there's no way of knowing what products shouldn't be produced.

What are you talking about,?Scandinavian countries are some of the richest in the world and with best living standard.(personally, if someone ask me where I would like to be those would be countries like Sweden or Norway...and I know why, because of how much they care for it's own people) I've just mentioned that and didn't think it is important. and if you have a time to comment sentence that is basically not relevant for the theme, better try to put yourself in situation where you have free college and free apartment (not to use but to become your property once and for all), instead of working next 30 years to pay off credists that and give money to already rich people running banks. That is not matter of choosing like you said on free market, all people have same basic needs (food, shelter, education, health and transportation) and idea behind socialistic (or call it however you want it's not important) is to take care about those needs. As I've mentioned, you need to live that before you say that's shit. Of course, I know many people that lived both system and say that capitalism is better, but much more of those who think oposite. (somehow those first now have money earned by fucking up other people and using their work) I really can't bother to type about this, no use. you already have your opinion.

George and U bob found themselves in a lifeboat after their ship sank. George was in the lifeboat first and he said that all the food and water was his. Why should he risk his chances of survival sharing with U bob?

Was the ship (and everything on it including the lifeboat) the property of let's say a company that George and I each owned 50% of or...?

Never mind the technicalities. Let's just say, I'm in the water and George happens to pass by in his boat that is 100% his property. Why would he help me? Common decency? Morality? Because he's tired of doing all the rowing by himself? Out of charity?...

It's funny how collectivists seem to think that unless someone forces you to help no one will help his fellow human being.

you just have to read GFY enough to see the flaws in this concept. Or watch Fox news.

Doesn't the baker help his fellow human beings by selling them something they value more than the money they pay in exchange for a loaf of bread?

you're avoiding the point - read this place, all the threads where people say that foodstamps, unemployement benefits, bail outs etc. never should have happened. or that no one deserves health care who can not afford it. many people would agree to kill all that if they could. and they for sure would not pay voluntarily instead.

if you have no government that takes care of this and let everything run buckwild, you end up in african dictatorships.

sorry, but i dont want to live like that

Of course there's bad people out there and that's one of the reason I don't want the government to tell me what i can or cannot buy. That's one of the reason why I don't want the government to tell me how to run my business. Because government officials are also humans. Government officials also make mistakes and some of them also have bad intentions. When a local baker time after time makes a mistake and sells bread that tastes like shit, I can choose not to buy their and his mistakes won't affect me. When some unelected government bureaucrat makes a mistake his actions affect millions of people.

You mentioned bailouts. Do you think it's fair or productive that people who run their business in inefficient manner get rewarded by a government that transfers the costs of those mistakes onto the public?

i refuse to see the world as black and white as you do. under some circumstances i would say no, under other circumstances i would say yes.

Opel and Schlecker are 2 great examples in Germany at the moment.

GM screws up Opel and eventually without government intervention you will have 20-30.000 unemployed people from one day to the other in one city. The effect would be devastating - for the employees, the city in general, local businesses and lastly the government who has to pay unemployement benefits.

Schlecker went bankrupt with 11,000 people, but they are all over Germany. And the chances of finding new jobs are pretty good for them. Should the government intervene here? No.

i dont see the government as my enemy. as idiots sometimes, but i am not paranoid and think they're after me trying to steal from me.

I eat bread in Britain till I was 21, it was garbage, capitalism had destroyed small bakeries and produced crap like "Mothers Pride", went to live in Poland during communist times and eat fantastic healthy bread from the small bakeries.

Eastern European food is still better, and my experience in trying to buy good food in the US is tragic, outside of the big cities.

This little capitalism doing the best is a fairy story, without NASA , military spending, state building of the Internet the US would be on its back. No capitalism without a state to make it work.

isnt it funny?

i bet most of the people in this thread went to a public school, how socialist, those damn public schools, and all those roads and highways they use to get to the mall or walmart to shop.

we should rid this country of roads and schools immediately!

geez can you imagine america without socialism? LOL it wouldnt exist :1orglaugh

the word socialism is very loosely used here...

Ergo, if you really wanna be free, off yourself.

Correction: Everyone has the right to use violence. But only in self defense. It's the initiation of violence that is immoral. Initiating violence = aggression.

It's the institution of private property that separates man from the animal kingdom. Under the law of the jungle the strong prey on the weak. Under a system of private property, no matter how strong you are you have no right to violate another individual's property rights.

Under a collectivist system, the "collective" ("the state", "the majority",...) preys on the individual. A collectivist system is not much different from the law of the jungle. Collectivists are simply better at coming up with excuses to "justify" their acts of aggression.

Well said. Also there are alot of rich people in socialist countries. I think most people here are calling communism socialism because that's what fox tells them. Its not the same.

How do companies that make a profit by raping the environment fit into this? Weapons manufacturers who profit from war. How has the privitization of the prison system helped society?

The funny thing is that the poorer the region is the happier the people seem to be...

How does one measure happiness?

Well I have no method but just looking at the number of people smiling and having a good time around me I can pretty accurately measure if one place is "happier" than another....

I have noticed a trend...the poorer and sunnier the region is the happier the people are...the richer the region is the less people I see smiling and having a good time...

living standard and happyness do not seem to be related....or the poor people of the world have stopped trying to find happyness in money and they find it in other stuff while the rich regions keep chasing the money...

That may be the case in the UK, but not here:

"1. According to a study of Federal Reserve data conducted by NYU professor Edward Wolff, for the nation?s richest 1%, inherited wealth accounted for only 9% of their net worth in 2001, down from 23% in 1989. (The 2001 number was the latest available.)

2. According to a study by Prince & Associates, less than 10% of today?s multi-millionaires cited ?inheritance? as their source of wealth.

3. A study by Spectrem Group found that among today?s millionaires, inherited wealth accounted for just 2% of their total sources of wealth.

Each of these stats measures slightly different things, yet they all come to the same basic conclusion: Inheritance is not the main driver of today?s wealth. The reason we?ve had a doubling in the number of millionaires and billionaires over the past decade (even adjusted for inflation) is that more of the non-wealthy have become wealthy."

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/01/...herited-money/

There are numerous citations and studies that back this up...



.:2 cents:


.

Land belonged to the Native Americans, you lot came along and privatised it. I think you used a great deal of VIOLENCE in making land which belonged to everybody into land that belonged to a few.

In England the first thing capitalism did was with violence throw people of common land and into to cities where they were "free" to work if they did not want their children to eat rat.

This idea of free contracts is also a myth, free would be if both sides have equal power. Example Rio Tinto Zinc lock out all thier miners from the factory until they agree to return to work with reduced pay poorer conditions, The police and State support the "right" of the company to reduce a whole community to poverty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-e..._United_States


"evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much `stickier` than most Americans assume. ... would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society

What a surprise.

On free market capitalism and the environment: In a free market, a company can't simply for example dump its chemical waste in a river because that way it would be causing damage to the property of the people living downstream. I recommend Walter Block on this issue. He's an Austrian economist and has written tons of stuff on how based on the concept of private property rights, problems like pollution, the preservation of endangered species, offshore drilling etc can be handled.

On war and the prison system: The current system in for example the US isn't a free market. It's not free market capitalism. It's a mixed economy with strong corporatist tendencies. I would agree if you called it "crony capitalism", but free market capitalism it certainly is not. In a free market the majority of people currently locked up in US prisons simply wouldn't be in prison because their "crimes" wouldn't be considered crimes.

Take drug use for example. If you want to do drugs all day than imho that would be pretty stupid but since you own your body, you have the right to do that. The war on drugs has placed an incredible burden on society and the economy. People who have not caused damage to someone else's property are being locked up. The state then has to raise taxes to pay for the incarceration of all those people.

People who don't even have anything to do with drugs get caught in the crossfire. Mothers that buy a couple of boxes of sinus pills because their husbands got the flu and their children have allergies get arrested and thrown in jail because by buying more than a certain amount of sinus pills in a certain amount of time they get flagged as pseudoephedrine smurfs.

By limiting production and raising the risks (of violence etc) involved with the manufacturing and distribution of 'drugs' the state essentially guarantees that only people who are willing to take that risk move into that sector. As a result the most violent gangs survive and get richer and more powerful. It's Prohibition all over again. How many liquor store owners do you see shooting other liquor store owners these days? None. How much violence was there between gangs selling liquor during Prohibition? A lot.

Privatizing tiny bits of the state's infrastructure won't suddenly solve everything. Especially when the cause of the problem still exists. One swallow doesn't make a summer. A few privatizations here and there don't make a free market. On the contrary, most of those privatizations are just a corporatist way of rewarding cronies: Politicians use tax dollars to build something and then sell it at submarket prices to their cronies.

I've promised not to get into this anymore. but I think you are under someone's influence . No one is taking anything. On my personal example, my father and my grandmother got their apartements from a state (not buying them or taking credit, simply got them for free). Grandma was just ordinary worker in Bank (nothing more) and father mechanical eingenner (never gave a penny for his education).Does that sounds that someone is taking them something? That's all. They never had a fear about loosing job or private property or anyone tried to do so. Of course, I don't know how it was in other countries, but as I've mentioned above, I guess it depends on country and it's level of socialism. I remember being in Poland somewhere back in 1988 and it looked really depressive, that's for sure. Once socialism went down, people mentioned (and their friends) went into big problems once no one protected them (free market and free will that you are talking about). Most of them loosed jobs and were treated bad because in capitalism, you are worth how much money you have. I can remember times when we were here also asking what kind of people are these when everything is looked through money. And now, first thing someone ask me when I go to doctor is: Have you payed? Humiliating.It just depends how you used to live and your experience. I can bet that radical Islamists don't understand your way of life and are also having their point of view but never tried capitalsim or socialism.

So the "apartment for free" and the "education for free" just appeared out of thin air? Did no one build the apartment, and create, and transport the materials, tools, etc...? Did the education simply float down from the heavens? Did the state then pay for them? If so, with whose money? There are so many things going on with this post in terms of basic economics that I should probably just give up now.

Never mind. Carry on....



:)
.

Yep, I could say the same. You are completely missing the point but it doesn't make a difference.

With the money and the wealth that society created together, the clever and the stupid, the lazy and the hard working all created the wealth that was then spent on a free (at point of use ) schools, universities, health service, culture theater and film industry, cheap heating and housing and basic food stuffs.

Of course there were no rich areas or poor areas, little crime, and Poland was not involved in any foreign wars. Compared to a country with the same GNP like Brazil only a fool would risk leaving under capitalism.

JohnnyClips, the Paul Markham of politics

Anyway, everything started as a free market system and then it evolved into what it is today. If its a free market to do whatever you want, people will take advantage of the system and morals with only prevent some of the people. Then everything will be back to an oligarchy Russia style, with a few controlling vast amounts of wealth above the rest of society. I mean c'mon the dropped communism what 30 years ago and switched to a much more free market capitalistic system and this is what it evolved into.

At least governments are in some way accountable to the people in a democracy even though it is far from perfect. Companies are accountable to no one except shareholders and there is no such thing as morals when there are profits on the line. Just look at this industry.

Thanks for the reply U-bob, I don't have your backround in economics and see more of the social side of things but I totally agree with you on the war on drugs.

The question is more, What the fuck world do you live in? I bet you don't even vote.

I live in Aus, the best country on earth.

good luck Johnny

Well gee, if that worker is so aware that his effort is worth $1000/week, why doesn't he produce the goods and sells them himself? Oh, he doesn't have the tools needed for it? Oh, he knows jack shit about sales and marketing? Oh, he doesn't know squat about market prospecting? Oh, he has no clue how to successfully do exports to foreign markets? You don't ACTUALLY think the $800 difference between what the worker earns per week and what the product's price is to the end-consumer is the business owner's profit, do you?

This is one of the most retarded myths peddled by brainless people, who not only failed econ 101, marketing, sales and whatnot, but obviously also failed basic math, not to mention common fucking sense.

This discussion doesn't matter most people are below animals in their thinking. People want to follow nature in a dog eat dog world where death and fear rules the mindset. Following nature or lets say "the ego" is below all animals. You have a great brain but you're not using it to evolve. You just want misery, pain, death, destruction and discrimination. Humans are the least intelligent animal on earth. People are actually arguing for death, famine, war, fear, stupidity, selfishness, greed and misery. Human beings haven't evolved one bit.

Quite often he does and very successfully too. It is call the cooperative movement.

The problem is that most people are born into a situation, if you are born in the town of Boron, where most of the work is the mine owned by Rio Tinto, it is impossible to do it themselves, the land has been grabbed.

The story of the capitalist who took his factory and workers to Australia lock stock and barrel, but complained because all the worker ran off, because there was land so the workers did not have to work for crap wages they could farm for themselves.

The State helped in colonies by forcing "criminals" and natives to work for the capitalist to make him rich.