So you've got the state subsidizing monopolistic corporations through corporate welfare AND giving out no-bid contracts AND engaging in questionable ethics through the revolving door of politicians leaving office and going straight to the board of directors (Nikki Haley just did that for Boeing). This is not at all how capitalism in its purest form is intended to function. It's obviously corrupted.
Pure capitalism is laissez-faire. Markets are self-regulating; the "invisible hand" of the market is an all-knowing God. Whenever government regulates a market it disrupts the functioning of this invisible hand. In a pure capitalist system there is no need for government because the concept of government is anathema to the idea of a free market. Taxes merely distort the equilibrium price for a good by raising its cost and lowering consumption. Corporations, or whoever the largest property owners happen to be, are the greatest sovereigns and should be free to make their own laws and maintain their own armies (some already do). The corporations might decide that some kind of world trade organization that would function as a sort of supreme court over property transfers and trade disputes would be better for business than total anarchy, but that would be about it as far as government goes. Minimum wages, social security, environmental regulations, consumer protection laws, these are all taxes on the productivity of firms, and reduce consumption by raising the cost of production, thereby reducing profits by creating an artificially inflated equilibrium price. Many capitalists would argue that when environmental degradation becomes severe enough, the market will dictate that the opportunity cost for preserving it is less than the consequences from its continued destruction, and thus firms will adjust their behavior to reduce profits now in order to make greater profits later. To that I say: "Yeah, right." Maybe if psychopaths didn't exist it might work...
maybe, but then you've got to go through all of that work and suffering to remediate an environment you never should've destroyed in the first place, just because you are a greedy bastard that wanted to suck as much monetary value out of it as possible. Most likely, the environment would never be restored, but made just "good enough" to perpetuate maximal wealth extraction. I actually took some economics in school and could go on and on with this drivel, but I'm going to stop there.
I was taught that capitalist countries had "market economies," (just described) communist countries had "command economies," and socialist countries had "mixed economies;" a sort of compromise between capitalism and communism. Due to the presence of the social safety net, my professor told me that the US is not truly capitalist, but mostly capitalist with some socialist tendencies. No countries are purely capitalist because it's truly the law of the jungle; maybe trade entrepots like Singapore and Dubai would be closest, but even they don't quite make the cut. My teacher conceded that some programs which help to smooth volatility in the markets might be better for their continuity in the long run, but government intervention in any market was very dangerous (he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative capitalist). This whole thing is reminiscent of the sex vs. gender issue where the PTB are changing the definitions of the words in order to pull the rug out from everyone and surreptitiously institute some egregiously dystopian ideology. What the left is now toting as socialism is more like fascism disguised as communism, where the government interferes in the market to support a privileged group of corporations and then essentially merges with them. In my opinion, Marx hijacked socialism and supplanted it with his extreme communist interpretation, because socialist ideas existed before communism.
In the market-mixed-command continuum, I could say that I'm a socialist, but socialism occupies such a huge grey area between the two extremes that it is a term with only a vague meaning. In the context of this thread, the fundamental axioms of the laissez-faire system are quite interesting. From Wikipedia:
- The individual is the basic unit in society.
- The individual has a natural right to freedom.
- The physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system.
- Corporations are creatures of the State and therefore the citizenry must watch them closely due to their propensity to disrupt the Smithian spontaneous order.
And what is this spontaneous order?
Wikipedia said:
Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process in social networks including economics, though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes, while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.
Oh, so we're supposed to be using our natural right to freedom to ensure that Darwinian evolution proceeds smoothly and without restraint, how nice. I wonder what happens to this whole philosophy if we change #3 to "The physical order of nature reflects the supreme intelligence and infinite wisdom of the consciousness that creates it from moment to moment." Betcha it invalidates the whole dang thing. I'm sorry, but anyone who espouses "pure capitalism" is simply ensnared in another facet of this nihilistic 4D STS mind rape which has been the subject of this whole thread.
I think that by applying the principal of relativity and scale, 3D laws should to some extent reflect the laws of higher densities. Human laws that do not recognize their fundamental divine derivation are not laws at all but delusions; like a district court that does not recognize the authority of the supreme court, they will not stand. In a sense, communism represents complete order and capitalism represents complete chaos. We are told that the 7D consciousness did not desire an idealized, unchanging creation where everything is frozen in a moment of perfection, like a painting on a wall which eventually fades. Indeed there seems to be a Law of Freewill and a Law of Equilibrium, with the Cassiopaeans describing themselves as the frontline for the universe's system of balance. Apparently, without the chaos, the order is meaningless, and this cosmic truth becomes evident in our attempts to create perfect economic realities. So this brings us back to some sort of middle path between capitalism and communism, and I suspect it begins with restoring consciousness to it's rightful place as the fundamental creator of all realities and necessary designer of all systems; not this spontaneous Smithian BS.
I apologize for the somewhat ranty post, but this capitalism vs. socialism thing, and the way conservatives are so enamored with their capitalist, antisocialist identity is something that really, really irritates me. Both capitalism and the new neoliberal interpretation of socialism drink deeply from the 4D STS trough of nihilism.
