Capitalism and Socialism: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Another example of the "free market" veneer is the idea to privatize large-scale industries because then they will compete on the magical free market. Except there is no free market and it's just pathological networks out to plunder resources. Ya know, people form alliances to enrich themselves across institutions - who would have thought!?

In my state government job with the state of Pennsylvania we often contracted IT projects by privatization to large-scale companies like Deloitte. In some cases (or many cases) I think it was more expensive to the tax payer in the long run. I suppose one of the main selling points for privatization was to decrease the need to keep or hire new state employees thus eliminating the need to pay health and retirement benefits. I would not say the quality of contracted staff was not good but I sensed that the contractors themselves worked for higher salaries without the health and retirement benefits that we had.

"Ya know", plundering resources is not on the radar for this "privatization" mentality . I guess the "selfish gene" may be more of a part of reality than we like to think...I don't know it is not always "black and white".
 
I really like the idea of different structures at different size social groups. Specifically, what drives this. I think the problem with socialism and capitalism on a national scale is that they are inherently mechanical. They were designed and invented by man. So this ties into the idea of sacred things - these were “made up”, and enforce a system on a group of people by other people. They are not from the heart - no system of enforced order of things is ultimately from the heart. Animals and plants have systems that work well because of their design, their nature, and this stem from a “higher level”. Human systems are arbitrary.

When a family is communist, this isn’t enforced, it is chosen out of love and sharing. When a man works to support his wife and kids, if he is able, this is because of love and is a choice - it acknowledges the “higher” reality, which in this case is that kids need to be raised, and a mother is designed by nature (as in, consciousness etc) to be most suited for that job.

You know that saying - whenever you go, there you are. Human nature is selfish with some STO tendencies (in some) if developed and allowed to flourish. Psychopaths and OP’s are also part of humanity as a whole and as has been noted many times before, all of our systems ignore that they exist and ignore human nature, or nature in general, and thus fall victim to the reality on the ground. Whatever we design will always be impacted by the “human condition”, and will ultimately lead to the same end result. Systems have loop holes - whether the government gets all the money and power, or corporations, or an anticompetitive combination of them, it will always end up the way it is.

If we are to have a system where more people are happy, it has to come from the heart and from wisdom of individuals and small groups. Love and knowledge need to be the driving force, which means also love of humanity, love of the universe, and abdication of nihilism and materialism which do not permit love to even exist in the first place. No one tells wolves how to live in their forest “nation”, and they don’t need a “system”. No firewall or antivirus will protect your network without the constant vigilant hard work by dedicated network engineers and security experts. No mechanical system will ever be unexploitable - no amount of checks and balances will stop nature, which comes from the individual, from exploiting it.

So in my view, it still comes down to needing an informed and vigilant citizenry combined with love to create something that works. I don’t think STO needs a system enforced on them for their society to function in a way that benefits everyone. It even sounds absurd that they would need one at all that isn’t a natural consequence of their nature anyway. Just like the sharing in a family happens naturally. And STS will always be STS with the resultant hierarchies of haves and have nots no matter how many systems they dream up, no matter how hard they try to ignore reality and find “the perfect system”.

So in conclusion, as long as we are STS, as long as there are psychopaths and nihilists and materialists running around doing what they do, as long as people are looking for ways to exploit “the system”, we will be stuck. Like Lennon said, all you need is love, but just saying it ain’t gonna do it.

If you want to be happy, join a group of like minded people who love, share, and are wise, and form your own mini society away from the “systems”. Create a group of conscious individuals to work together to protect the group from the invasion and whims of pathologicals, much like caring network engineers protect.. their network actively. Kinda like this forum ironically, a network, protected by caring and wise people. I think Laura’s project of FOTCM and communes is anyone’s best hope, as long as this planet is what it is, and people are what they are.
 
That is why I think that maybe Dr. Jordan Peterson embraces some Darwinist ideas without having given
a deep tough to them.



As usual just my two cents...

What Peterson says about dominance/competence hierarchies is, IMO, true. And remember that we have never said that all of what Darwin or neodarwinists says is wrong. Some of it self-evidently true, just not in all cases and at all times, and in the cases/species where it is true, it cannot be extrapolated out to any or all other cases/species. The thing we've primarily taken exception to is the idea that random mutation can produce improvements.
 
What Peterson says about dominance/competence hierarchies is, IMO, true. And remember that we have never said that all of what Darwin or neodarwinists says is wrong. Some of it self-evidently true, just not in all cases and at all times, and in the cases/species where it is true, it cannot be extrapolated out to any or all other cases/species. The thing we've primarily taken exception to is the idea that random mutation can produce improvements.

Yep, and there's a difference between recognizing that all sorts of biological systems are operational both in animals and humans, which is a truism, and saying that all this "evolved" from dead matter by chance. The points JP is making about lobsters, dominance hierarchies, standing upright, knowing one's biology and using it appropriately etc. are really trivial in a sense. They are only so explosive because of all the absurd postmodern nonsense denying basic biological facts.

In general, JP doesn't strike me as a Darwinian thinker at all, though he apparently hasn't looked into intelligent design, or if he has, he doesn't talk about it. But he always emphasizes the role of consciousness, even when he talks about evolution, and often employs religious language instead of the typical "evolution-speak" of the evolutionary psychologists, as far as I can see.
 
Has nothing to do with a gene; it's all psyche.

Yeah, while there do seem to be many 'survival of the fittest' elements in many species, darwinists assume this is a 'bottom up' process, i.e. that the inherent selfishness of the gene informs the organism as it develops and grows. No one seems to consider that it could be 'top down' process where the 'idea' of selfishness informs the gene and then the whole shebang (yes that's a scientific term) carries on from there.
 
Can you give some examples?

Some examples below, but to preface, I should expand a bit on what I wrote. I don't know enough about the Nordic countries specifically, just things I've read here and there. It may be that some policies work better there than in other places, and even that some of what they do can be replicated. But similar policies, when instituted in the U.S., for example, seem not to work as intended, or to create additional 'unforeseen' problems. There's probably the cultural element involved here, and the fact that human societies are so complex that the results of interventions cannot be accurately predicted.

Also, I think that some policies widely considered socialist are a good idea, despite the problems they create. Perhaps there is a better way - I just don't think human societies have discovered them yet. For instance, universal health care - countries like Canada and the Nordics are great in a lot of ways, or at least better than the U.S. system for instance (while using technology developed in the States) - but wait times and lack of specialists causes many to travel to other countries for treatment, if they can afford it. Worth it? Maybe! But I do think healthcare should be easily available for everyone - I'm just not sure what the limits are.

Next, there's public education, which is a good idea on the surface of things, until you read someone like Gatto, or just take a look at the state of public education in the States. Charter/voucher schools do way better, including in the ghettoes, where inner city, low-income children are better educated than their neighbors in public schools. Sowell wrote recently:

Some of these charter schools — especially those in the chain of the Success Academy schools and the chain of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools — operate in low-income, minority neighborhoods in the inner-cities, and turn out graduates who can match the educational performances of students in affluent suburbs. What is even more remarkable, these charter schools are often housed in the very same buildings, in the very same ghettoes, where students in the regular public schools fail to learn even the basics in English or math. (Education at a Crossroads, by Dr. Thomas Sowell)

Sweden actually switched to a voucher system recently.

Next, minimum wage laws. Again, great on the surface. Minimum wage increases, and those working minimum wage jobs then get more money. Except that increasing the minimum wage actually results in more unemployment (thus more welfare). More people apply for the jobs, fewer get hired. And it's the disadvantaged who get priced out of the job market. In Sowell's "Discrimination & Disparities", he gives examples. In 1948 there was no significant difference between unemployment of white and black teens. Black youths actually had a higher labor force participation rate than whites the same age. As minimum wage laws were restored, teenage unemployment skyrocketed, disproportionately among blacks. Minimum wage laws also force some small/medium-sized business out of business, who are then left out of the statistics when analyzing employment data of existing businesses (only the survivors contribute data).

An example from Seattle: after minimum wage increases, employment in high-quality restaurants remained the same, but lower-quality restaurants shut down. In other words, some employees got more wages, but others lost their jobs, and fewer new restaurants opened, thus providing fewer chances for employment in that industry. Sowell:

In Seattle as well, the response to a higher local minimum wate rate increase was that a number of restaurants simply closed down. A study ... measured employment by hours of work, as well as by the number of workers employed, and concluded that "the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016." Thus a theoretical increase in income from a higher minimum wage became, in the real world, a significant decrease in income.
...
Internationally, unemployment rates have been markedly lower in times and places where neither governments nor labor unions set most wage rates. Most modern nations have had minimum wage laws, but the few that have not have tended to have strikingly lower unemployment rates.

Then there's affirmative action and affordable housing to "reduce inequality". One of the reasons for the housing bubble crash was the US regulators forcing banks to give out loans they knew couldn't be paid back in order to meet quotas. We've carried enough articles on affirmative action so I don't think I need to give examples there.

Regarding high tax rates, again that might be country-specific - how much citizens are willing to pay and what they get in return. But even in Sweden the richest Swedes evade over 30% of their taxes through moving money offshore (or they just move to another country). In the 1920s in the U.S., they income tax rate was reduced from 73 to 24%, and tax revenue increased, especially from the richest Americans. Similar thing happened in 2006.

As for welfare states in general, again it's mixed. It's not utopia, and I'm not sure how to weigh the net positives and negatives. Because welfare does incentivize laziness to some degree, and they need enough growth to keep them going. Sweden ran into economic problems in the 90s (high inflation and interest rates) and after public outcry put into practice a bunch of free-market policies to avoid disaster (including privatizing their pensions, cutting public spending, privatizing numerous government monopolies and businesses - not to say any of those were necessarily the best decisions or the best implemented, though!). But their economy still isn't growing as fast as it was in the 60s before the more socialist policies were implemented. In Sweden today, housing prices are going up and unskilled workers are priced out of the market (including many of the immigrants - Sweden actually had great assimilation in the early parts of the 20th century, not so much anymore).

In the U.S., the poverty rate was falling before the "war on poverty" started in the mid 60s. After that it leveled out and has stayed there, despite trillions of dollars trying to drop it and avoid the periodic increases in poverty levels. Like minimum wage laws, welfare actually traps the poorest in poverty - getting off welfare by entering the next tax bracket costs more than staying on welfare.

The single mom is better off earning gross income of $29k with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69k with net income & benefits of $57,045.
(https://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/welfare-trap.jpg)

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, because some will prefer to get off welfare, even if that means earning less money, but the problem is still there. Implicit tax rates can be as high as 80% to 100% or even higher for low-income individuals or families because of it (Who pays the highest income tax? - OECD Observer).

One last funny thing regarding anti-socialism hysteria:

One Swedish political consultant laughingly told me about an encounter he had with a Republican operative visiting from the U.S., in which he drove the Republican into a rage by citing all the ways in which "the U.S. is more socialist than Sweden." (https://www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...at-socialist-scandinavia-and-sweden-really-do)

As for why I consider such policies misguided to a large degree, that has to do more with the mentality behind them. Most political interventions are not thought through to see if they'll actually work. They just do whatever sounds good and sounds palatable to their voters. This has to do with what you said about competence hierarchies and politicians. I think the main reason for that is that competence is not actually a criterion by which politicians are chosen. And no matter how bad they are, all they need to do is get re-elected, which is fairly easy. So you have a bunch of idiots only concerned about re-election. What kind of policies do we think they're going to put into effect, especially because they have no skin in the game - no consequences for failure?

And those policies that ARE chosen are usually written up along an ideological basis - not based on any kind of empirical study of the probabilities that the policy will actually do what it's supposed to. And that ideological basis is usually vaguely utopian in nature: to "end inequality". Well, that's never going to happen (gini coefficients have been relatively stable for millennia, barring war and disaster, which are the only things to bring everyone down to equality). Better to see what can mitigate the effects while doing the least amount of damage in the process.
 
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A well-known team of inequality researchers — Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — has been getting some attention recently for a chart it produced. It shows the change in income between 1980 and 2014 for every point on the distribution, and it neatly summarizes the recent soaring of inequality.

The line on the chart (which we have recreated as the red line above) resembles a classic hockey-stick graph. It’s mostly flat and close to zero, before spiking upward at the end. That spike shows that the very affluent, and only the very affluent, have received significant raises in recent decades.

You see why certain people would have an interest in wanting everyone else to believe that this relatively recent pattern of income distribution is 'biologically-determined' and 'forever'.

Another study concludes:

Economists use Gini coefficients, percentiles and detailed survey data to study trends in income inequality. They find that inequality has been rising in the U.S. since World War II, reaching its highest level in 2013 since the 1920s.
 
I liken socialism to patriotism shared. The sum being greater than its parts, it's thus patriotism squared.

Imagine it's July 4th. The BBQ's going. You're on your second beer. It's hot, but you don't care because - for all their flaws - you love your family, your community, and your country.

Now imagine that your professional life - job, business, career - is substantially motivated by, or imbued with, that love of country. Like the way we here have an aim. Whether you like making trades, making money, making babies, working at the computer, building things, wearing uniforms, cooking food, doing accounts - whatever - you do it because you love your country. Yes, you do it for yourself as well. Serve self through others. I'm not saying it's full-on STO as we conceive it, but it's a reasonably productive and civil state of affairs, and most people around you 'feel good about where things are at'.

Everything else - the ideologies, the laws, the norms, the tinkering with policies - derives from this 'shared good faith'. If it has to be enforced with taxes most don't want to pay, and regulations most don't agree with, forget about it. If it's not coming from a place of solidarity between fellow compatriots, it can't be pushed on people because that'll just increase mistrust and eat away at whatever solidarity and social cohesion remains.

In a situation where 20-30% of the population are psychopaths or functional psychopaths, it's definitely not happening! If socialism is not 'naturally available' to a country now (and it isn't to many), postpone it for 'the new world', post-crash, post-comets.

I think nationalism and socialism go together. They ought to be practically synonymous. People instinctively don't want to see their taxes go towards newly arrived immigrants (out-group), but are generally content to support compatriots (in-group) in the interest of maintaining national, and thus social, cohesion. I wonder if that's - at least partly - why 'upstairs' engineered a situation in which this 'naturally emergent' symbiosis of nationalism/patriotism and socialism become forever tarnished by a certain Austrian...

The faux alternative we're being compelled to accept in Western countries today is 'anti-national socialism' (a.k.a. globalism), based on the unnatural premise that nations of people - as represented by their national governments - do not know what's best for themselves. The 'socialism' that emerges from its adherents is horrifyingly out-of-synch with real people and the real economy: centralized fiat banking, centralized war-making, centralized I.T. systems, centralized social engineering, and centralized 'climate control' have birthed an anti-cultural mono-culture that destroys nations, and thus social cohesion.

Increasingly, the fruits of a national economy's production are not redistributed within that country but pooled into a 'global economy' that redistributes it to transnational corporations, an 'offshore archipelago' where taxation doesn't exist, and 'world cities' - micro-regions of the new planet-wide 'country' of Globalistan. No wonder sizeable portions (most?) people in major cities from L.A. to Dubai to Sydney think everything's hunky-dory, while most 'outside' in more peripheral regions are lodging protests in ever more pronounced and revolutionary ways.
 
🔺 Beginnings of globalisation started here in Australia back in the 70's when Gough Whitlam signed UNIDROIT effectively bringing in private international law. At the time he also introduced the 'Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973' that deems anything within 12 nautical miles (26kms) landward of the low tide mark of a water source - ocean, dam, lake, river etc as being underwater and in the jurisdiction of admiralty law where claims in the main can only be about private contracts and in rem - or about property and things (Operators and Things anyone?)
 
I think nationalism and socialism go together. They ought to be practically synonymous. People instinctively don't want to see their taxes go towards newly arrived immigrants (out-group), but are generally content to support compatriots (in-group) in the interest of maintaining national, and thus social, cohesion. I wonder if that's - at least partly - why 'upstairs' engineered a situation in which this 'naturally emergent' symbiosis of nationalism/patriotism and socialism become forever tarnished by a certain Austrian...

Still, there is a way for out-group members to be taken in, and that is to show allegiance to the group you want to join in various ways, such as learning the language, respecting the norms (laws of the land), participating in the groups commemorations of events important to it. This was the approach of immigrants to the US for a long time. How many people never learned their immigrant grandparent's language because they refused to teach it to their children? You didn't necessarily give up your religion (if you had one) but you made no special demands for it. You went to the parades and had the barbeques. There's far less of that now.

Canada had a nice balance going for a while. If you weren't a legitimate refugee, you had to have a needed skill or lots of money to get in. OR you had to have someone swear to support you for ten years on penalty of law. Bring your food, your music, your dress, but leave your quarrels back where you came from. A second language was great, so long as you were also competent in either English or French. Heritage Day was a blast of a street festival.

Now they will provide a translator so people bringing their second cousins over can take the citizenship test orally after living there for five years. It's insane.
 
I liken socialism to patriotism shared. The sum being greater than its parts, it's thus patriotism squared.

This is an important point. Socialism is based on redistribution of wealth. In a group, for redistribution to be accepted, you need cohesion, trust, solidarity, altruism. Patriotism along with religion and communities can instill this kind of moral values through the sense of belonging where the group is at least as important as the individuals who constitute it (see Haidt about those group dynamics).

Interestingly, Proudhon directly emphasized this point when criticizing capitalism. He saw that capitalists gave each worker a wage on a individual basis, although when hired collectively the group of workers was much more than the sum of its individual constituents.

Proudhon was an man of the XIXth century when the above mentioned group cohesion, trust, solidarity, altruism were very present. Of course the capitalists never acknowledged those factors and never retributed them.

Coincidentally or not, these are the very same traits that are denied by darwinism (the selfish genes). That's why in a previous post I wrote that "Darwinism is to biology what capitalism is to economics". Both are ideologies reducing life to selfish, materialistic and mechanistic individuals.
 
Also, I think that some policies widely considered socialist are a good idea, despite the problems they create. Perhaps there is a better way - I just don't think human societies have discovered them yet. For instance, universal health care - countries like Canada and the Nordics are great in a lot of ways, or at least better than the U.S. system for instance (while using technology developed in the States) - but wait times and lack of specialists causes many to travel to other countries for treatment, if they can afford it. Worth it? Maybe! But I do think healthcare should be easily available for everyone - I'm just not sure what the limits are.

Free healthcare in most European countries has worked amazingly well for most of the time since it was introduced and has made the US healthcare system looks like something out of the dark ages. The reason some Euro free healthcare systems are not working so well is due to a deliberate govt. policy of destroying them to forcibly encourage people to go private. In short, because "capitalism" and greed.

Next, there's public education, which is a good idea on the surface of things, until you read someone like Gatto, or just take a look at the state of public education in the States. Charter/voucher schools do way better, including in the ghettoes, where inner city, low-income children are better educated than their neighbors in public schools.

Free public education has worked extremely well in European countries, turning out far more and far better educated citizens than in the USA. But again, this system is under attack and in some countries turning towards a privatized model.
 
I think nationalism and socialism go together

:scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared:

sorry, couldn't resist!

They ought to be practically synonymous. People instinctively don't want to see their taxes go towards newly arrived immigrants (out-group), but are generally content to support compatriots (in-group) in the interest of maintaining national, and thus social, cohesion. I wonder if that's - at least partly - why 'upstairs' engineered a situation in which this 'naturally emergent' symbiosis of nationalism/patriotism and socialism become forever tarnished by a certain Austrian...

Good point, it would certainly fit their MO of demonizing in advance anything that has any real potential value for humanity.
 
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