My Socialism Beats Your Capitalism! Or Does It?
80We do have a lot of discussions around here nowadays about what exactly went wrong and which exactly out of available "isms" is responsible for our current turmoil. Lots of debate really that does not seem to go anywhere, and all involved parties seem to take a firm stand defending their respective "ism."
Taking part in many of those debates I finally come to realization that we really doing nothing that could bring us any closer to the solution. Putting labels on one another and different policies does not really solve anything and just tends to mud the waters. Nobody really cares to check with the dictionary a definition of ism they are defending, and for example scream hard to defend democracy when in reality they mean the first amendment to American constitution.
Similar thing about socialism, where many people tend to equate totalitarian regimes to socialism, while if you take your time to look into the dictionary you will find that socialism is just the measure of government involvement with economy. Granted, heavily socialist countries do have totalitarian governments, yet not every tyranny is socialism.
Others tend to mix free markets with capitalism, totally forgetting that if you impose any regulation on the market, it becomes not free. Some degree of free markets probably exists under every imaginable state variation, and calling them capitalism does not make any sense. Again, quick look at the dictionary reveals that capitalism is a certain way of running economy, which assumes more or less free markets, but does not equate to them. When you go to garage sale and buy an old garden chair for your backyard, it is a free market, yet it has nothing to do whatsoever with capitalism.
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SOCIALISM (Lib Works Ludwig Von Mises PB)
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Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
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The Case for Socialism
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Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
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So, what is the point I am trying to make? Easy. Why don't we try to forget about those "isms" and instead try and observe laws of nature at work, and try to apply our observations and conclusions that we draw out of those observations to the current situation. I think only that kind of approach can possibly bring some fruit. While we are stuck with ironing out the differences between our understandings of certain "isms" we are going nowhere.
What the heck laws of nature have to do with this you may ask? Well, if you did not think about it yet, there are underlying laws that govern all what happens in this world. Not laws of the man, not God-given laws, but laws of nature. We do discover those laws time to time, but there are many there to be discovered yet. Some of those laws do govern economies and societies. And no country or population group is exempt from these laws, pretty much like nothing is exempt to the law of gravity.
Talking about the law of gravity, I just came up with an analogy to our method of solving society problems. Our does not mean hubpages, our means society as a whole.
Let's imagine for a moment we do not have any knowledge of the law of gravity. We do see thing falling one way, yet we don't really pay attention to that. Because of that we build our houses with any degree of a slope to the horizon, cause we don't know any better. Some people like it to the right, others to the left, and there are even those who like it to the back or front, claiming that this is a middle solution and everybody should follow it to avoid the problems that leftists and rightists have.
What problems? Well, nasty problems. Nothing tends to stay on place. It all slips to the right or to the left, according to the floor slope. We have to use all kinds of wedges and stoppers to prevent things and people from slipping down the slope, especially in extreme cases. And every new thing brought into the house requires yet another stopper, and every new person have to adjust before they start feeling comfortably enough on this particular slope. Those who try to live without stoppers and stuff pretty soon find themselves in a total mess.
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Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It (Paperback)
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Wealth: How the World's High-Net-Worth Grow, Sustain, and Manage Their Fortunes
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100 Ways to Create Wealth
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Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
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Now, coming back to our real society - does this imaginary picture ring any bells in relation to how we approach our societies operation? For me the perpetual chain of regulations looks very similar to those never-ending stoppers. If this is the case, what could be a solution? In our imaginary example, when we finally learn the law of gravity, we realize that houses should be built without slope to comply with this law, and everything snaps in place. We don't need no stinking stoppers anymore!
How this relates to the real world? We need to figure out fundamental law(s) that apply to societies, and build with consideration to these laws! How do we do this? There is no better way then observe and analyze. Discussion and opinions exchange definitely help too - but only when they are discussions, not a mud slinging match...
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Comments
Three cheers for no mud-slinging matches. Why is it so hard to have a discussion on the points, without pushing everyone's buttons? I think you opened up a can of worms, and I can't wait to see what all the worms say. Thumbs up.
Misha,
Good start with this hub.
I agree as far as this hub describes the problem.
Government should use the KISS concept, Keep It Simple Stupid.
Writing all those thousands of new laws and regulations each year, you might as well put them on an etch a sketch board. Like the laws of nature that you mention, there has to be some reference points that are constants. In the cases, where we just don't understand how something works, we can change our understanding as we move forward in the quest for the final solution. In science, we can't put together the classical physics with Quantum Mechanics to fit under one unified theory.
Social and Political science are even more elusive than physical science to solve.
You are right, putting a label on something doesn't give us a solution and it may not even let us truly understand the problem.
One things that we can probably agree on is that whatever label we put on what our government is doing today, it is not working.
Heck, Misha, 'Whatanism' I quite agree ,slanging matches solve nothing. It's time society as a whole started singing from the same hymn sheet.
Does this mean that you are finally going to step down from the 'Socialism is evil' pedestal and engage in rational discussion?? Come on in. The water's lovely ;)
Misha, yes, there are fundamental laws in nature that enforce themselves. It's good to observe what happens, and to learn to predict. I like your analogies.
Part of the problem is that people are built into the structure of government. We know what rules are best for the economy. But we don't know the natural laws that will ensure that people won't backslide once the good rules are in place. We can ensure a free economy only if people don't vote against a free economy. What can we do to ensure that people don't do that? Explaining it to them works, only if you assume that they don't understand. But what if they do understand and prefer a small benefit today, even if disaster will inevitably follow? What possible structure can build against that?
Great Hub, Misha.
I suspect that many people are swinging towards your way of thinking - we argue amongst ourselves about the -isms whilst the governments/corporations/banks run off with the family silver. Too many soundbites with too little substance - divide and conquer.
Agreeing what the laws are is another can of worms, determining what are rights, areas where regulation is essential etc. Still, this is a good baseline to start, finding out where beliefs overlap and trying to work on those, rather than highlighting the differences.
Issues is right - it ain't working!
It doesn't matter what country you live in and what 'ism' government you are under. They are all corrupt. They might have started out with the right ideas, but when in power they fulfil the saying, 'Absolute power corrupts absolutely.' They just get greedy.
Misha,
I agree completely that investigating the laws of nature (in this case, economics) is a good idea.
I am in the slow process of writing a hub about elasticity of supply and demand and its relation to the deadweight loss from taxation.
I hope you'll drop by when it is finished.
Nets
OK, let's raise the game! I don't believe there are 'natural laws'. This is an old way of thinking that began with Isaac Newton. He had huge success by advancing the Laws of Motion and of Gravity. Newtonian Mechanics seemed to come out of nowhere (except his genius) and solve the problems of the whole world. It was the basis of the industrial revolution. But even then, people confused the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive law. Newton described, accurately. Nothing more.
Riding on his coat tails, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith and many others claimed to have discovered 'laws' of politics, human psychology, economics. But they were wrong and wholly deluded. These laws do not exist. At best, they are old wives' tales dressed up in verbiage. Everything is pragmatism, or it is nothing. What is the situation? What is most wrong? What can we do to help it? There isn't an 'ism' poised to save the world.
Paraglider, even self interest is something that can be explained scientifically. (Coincidentally, I, too am working on a hub on this subject.)
Why does socialism work for bees? Because bees have very little genetic variation. They are not all clones of each other, but the situation is very close to that. This means that that there is no natural selection for an individual bee to be aware of its own self-interest, in contradistinction to that of another bee from the same hive. For the bees, socialism works, and this is why it works.
Man is a primate, with lots of sexual competition and genetic variation. There is natural selection in favor of those who have developed self-awareness and awareness of the conflict between their own personal interests and those of the group to which they belong. That is why a system that appeals to self-interest works better among humans.
LOL I knew it would cause some interest :D
Thanks everybody for coming, I will answer all comments eventually, just a bit later, I am off for dinner :)
Feel free to continue discussion without me, I don't mind at all :)
Paraglider - in full agreement about Freud. The guy was a total numpty.
I think this just about does it for me " Why don't we try to forget about those "isms" and instead try and observe laws of nature at work, and try to apply our observations and conclusions that we draw out of those observations to the current situation."
It's perhaps only scientific to try and find a pattern in the longer term to how this works or can be made to work to benefit the most , but till the time that there are enough newer stats to make sense of it, it's perhaps best to avoid conclusions and focus on potential corrections.
Agreed, Bluewings, although the potential corrections could be the stumbling block.
Looking at history, the main stumbling block to progress has always been stagnation - politics is dynamic and if there is no constant change, things fall apart pretty quicky.
Could anybody tell me the difference between Republicans/Democrats, Labour/Conservatives or PASOK/New Democracy? These parties all appear to be exactly the same, merely fiddling around the edges a little.
If a voter has no choice, things fall apart quickly and some form of totalitarianism follows.
Pretty pessimistic about this one :(
Now we should remove genetic variations and we will be fine. See free system was tested over 200 years and worked. Now you guys figure it out what is now and what was before, if you know the history. People here do not have an idea what social... is.
Nice job Misha. See you around in the forums.
OK, so I am back from my dinner, and taking a comfortable seat I am going to go through every comment from my valued guests and answer them one by one. :)
Rebecca, you beat everybody to this hub, I appreciate it my friend :) Common sense works for me too - the problem is my common sense and your common sense may be slightly different. So I am not talking about one-fits-all solution, I am talking about trying to reveal the common laws of nature that govern the society, and to consider them when trying to rebuild individual societies using individual projects, pretty much like you would build individual houses all differently, still respecting the law of gravity :)
Sally, we were brought up to feel strong about some things that we think are important to us. When we feel strong about something, we tend to think that our opinion on them is THE TRUTH, so everybody who does not support it is either idiot or crook trying to con us. Hence the matches. :) But so far worms seem to be pretty civil, may be those from deeper levels did not get here yet :)
Issues, I would not tell government what it should do. It won't listen to me anyway, and I don't like to waste my effort :) I would not rely on government to discover those natural laws either, cause whatever government does it screws it up. BTW, if you think you can't put together Newton's physics and quantum theory, I think you may want to re-think it. They do not contradict one another. Quantum theory covers a wide area, and Newton's physics is a specific case of quantum theory application, given such and such circumstances.
Hawk, the question is - whose hymn is it?
Dave, are you looking for slinging match? ;) I think you can search the whole of Hubpages using their new search feature, and you won't find me saying this phrase. All what I am saying is that by my own observations, thoughts, and experience more government is not a solution to the current problem. More government definitely makes people more equal. Yet this is not because it makes more people rich, it is because it makes more people poor.
Aya, thanks, I thought you might like this analogy more than other guests :) And sorry, I don’t have answers, yet I think that correct question is more than a half way to correct answer. :) I would not state that categorically that I know what rules are best for economy. Some of us think we know, yet for some reason there are several schools of economists, and each one denies all others the right to be right. :) If you ask me, I would say that using physics analogy, our economic science is still before Newton, despite of all the effort we as a society put in it in the last hundreds of years.
Misha,
How much do you know about economics, as it would be taught in a standard Econ 101 course in the US?
Hawk
Sufi, yeah, we all have our experiences and thoughts. If only we could somehow put them together, I have no doubt we would have solved the puzzle. Otherwise one person's experience seems to be a sort of unrepresentative sample, hence all our battles of misunderstanding :)
Cindy, yes, they are all corrupt, I agree wholeheartedly. Yet there are still people around that argue that their government is not, at least much less than others. Remembering how I used to think the same myself, I don't judge them :)
Nhkatz, sure I will, those are issues within my current area of interest :)
Dave, now that is interesting! Ok, let's think for a moment about it. So you want me to prove that invisible omnipotent being exists? Come on, I am not that sort of guy to try to do this. :) Yet I have very simple line of reasoning that tells me that chances are those laws do exist, even though we do not know them yet. If you look around into virtually any other part of nature, you see that we already managed to discover descriptive laws that govern those processes. They are not something magical, they are universal, repeatable, and observable. They exist practically for everything - except for human society and economics. What makes you thinking that human society is an exception?
Aya, not sure I understand how this works. May be your future hub will help? :)
Bluewings, yep, somehow I hope we can get it moving, at least in the scope of Hubpages :)
Sufi, that is actually a very good observation about the contradiction between our desire for stable structure and dynamic nature of things, thank you. :) And no, I can't tell the difference, and choice is almost always between bad and worse :)
Vladimir, yes, and that's such a pain in the ass to explain to them! They still don't get it. May be they had to feel it for themselves, only then they will understand. But that makes our current outlook pretty grim. :(
RK, thanks for visiting, see you there )
Hawk, I don't think I can somehow match my knowledge to what are formally taught here, I just have no idea what they teach. :) All my knowledge in this area is self-education and pretty hectic of course, yet my older son is a professional economist back in Moscow. The last thing I read in economics was Rothbard's excellent work "Power and Market"
HI Misha,
You are great trying to tackle this. You have written this is very professional fashion.
To furrther understand your definition and believes, I have one thougth for you to tell you believes on. I hope I do not take away from the professionalsim with this comments, and I am trying to write it the best I can to learn from people in other countries so we can all learn and be on the same understanding.
We in the U.S., we would feel earning money by on the internal through whatever means, Hubpages, Affiliate Marketing, and what ever means to be capitalistic principle. I would say you are doing capitalistic things. I would like to see how you view this. We feel in socialism world it is still the capitalism that makes the money, and government taxes the money maker, and redistributes the wealth to those who do not work for it.
Your thoughts would be appreciated on this so I can understand your society better.
Thanks,
Keep on Hupping.
Great points Misha,
All aspects of life (includes governments and economics) need to be consciously and consciencitiously based on the Golden Rule...ideally.
But, the only problem with that is that the psychological function/dysfunction within individuals are in varying states across the spectrum...so doing unto another as one would want done unto onesself, may not always be nice. :/
Hi Ed, thanks for your nice words :)
If I understood your question correctly, such things were just not possible under soviet-type socialism. Even leaving aside state monopoly to distributing information, the only legal way to make some money was to work for one of the government enterprises, and there were no employer that did not belong to the government.
Now, with my current view, I would not call this activity capitalistic, because you or me don't really employ any capital in order to turn in some profit from hubpages, just our labor.
Jewel, glad to see you here. :) You know, there is a method even to madness, and I want to know this method :)
Good, I understand where you are coming from. We feel this is capitalism because it is individual entrepreneurism (probably spelt wrong). The goods being traded, even if it is information, would be consider capitalistic.
So under our definition, we say only capitalism works because that makes the money. But under your definition, it isn't capitalism. Well, doing internet marketing, etc, is not what we would view as socialistic. So we need to, in my opinion come up wiith comparing apples to apples.
I do not have to have capital (things of great money) to do business. But if my business exchanges money, you then have money then capital is earned and it is capitalism. Your definition maybe, if I understand it, you have to have large capital, (money or goods) then use then to make money.
We say capitalism is the only preceedure anyone can make money. Not have to have a lot of capital, as the former USSR owned everything so no one had capital. I disagree, if a person had money, he had capital. If he grew a garden and sold the goods, he had capital.
Does this help any?
Misha,
Briliant hub, my friend. We are kindred spirits in our thoughts.
TMG
Ed, I think you need a dictionary :) Try this one http://www.thefreedictionary.com/capitalism , or any other one you prefer. Goods traded were before capitalism, and will be after. Individual entrepreneurship and production in general too existed before and will after. The thing that sets capitalism aside from other isms is the method of funding and ownership of means of production.
And no, legally you could not grow a garden and sell the produce in USSR.
Hi TMG, glad to see you here :) I know we are, and thanks for the nice words :)
"Great hub!"
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I like it Mischa! Although a devout capitalist, I agree with you that too many of todays "isms" are not fully understood by the folks espousing same.Good Hub, it made me think.
Hi Misha - hope that you do not mind me jumping in here.
Going to try and answer Eovery's excellent question about how Europeans use socialism. Please bear in mind that I am not trying to say that it is the best system for America, just explaining where we come from. I am not interested in any slanging matches or arguments, just giving an answer, in the spirit of this thread.
Capitalism generates wealth - we see that no differently from you, although we tend to use the definitions socialist and conservative to mean 'left of centre' and 'right of centre respectively. The basic principle is striking a balance between the two, and also addressing the moral issues.
Like you, we have to work to make money. There are many levels of this, so we will look at the first two points, education and universal health. Most European countries have state funded education, the idea being that if everybody is well educated, they go on to make more money, or invent better things. The investment by the government results in a more prosperous society.
The same applies to health - a healthier workforce results in less days off work sick, and also increased productivity. However, this system is coming under pressure, the same as with most developed countries - an aging population and an unhealthy lifestyle are causing immense problems. This seems to be at the root of a lot of issues, regardless of whatever system is used.
Education and health are two things that are important - if the Greek government, for example, announced that it was removing public healthcare, the Greeks would burn parliament down. It is not government control, but something that the people actually want - we have no problem with handing over a portion of our taxes for health and education. On the idea of tax, most Europeans do not believe in taxing the crap out of the rich - closing loopholes and putting a halt to tax-havens, yes
Much of the rest is a moral issue and more of a grey area. Most of us agree that if somebody falls upon hard times, they must be helped. For example, many mining towns the UK reached 50% unemployment under Thatcher, with no alternative way of making a living, so these unfortunate families were given a living wage - not a lot of money.
Basically, to cut a long story short, we understand that there are always going to be some people who cheat the system. To us, that is a necessary evil, and we feel that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Hope that helps - as you can see, our system is a mixture of capitalist and socialist policies, and we are a long way from totalitarian socialism.
Of course, that was before the recent crisis - shovelling money into banks? What a clusterf!&k.
Great Hub, Misha! As you know, I used to live in socialistic country, which is now capitalistic, and only solution is combination of the best ways from the both systems.
Socialism can be one thing or the other. Socialism which was in Sowiet Union, or in China differed a lot from that socialism I experienced in Yugoslavia. In my time this was very, very liberal socialism, actually it was great time: big majority of people had jobs, flats, extremely good education free, social and medical security free of charge, laws were very flexible and above all were protecting especially rights of the working people etc. Nobody could have too much private property on the expense of other peoples, f.E one could own small company, which could not exploate workers. Nobody could own big company and risk the lifes of thousands people, like this is happening now. Everybody could have private property, but if was very big, had to prove if this property was earned on legal ways.
First real thyrany which I experienced was WHEN WE ENTERTED INTO CAPITALISM, DURING THE WAR IN 90ties. Privatization of capital was - cruel stealing the national property, everybody who was against that was proclaimed as "national enemy", and during the war, national enemies can be killed. I was vicepresident of Union in the hotel when I worked at that time - it was very "interesting experience".
I would always vote - for combination of both systems, but it is up to people - every country has exactly type of government and "ism" which people actually want, consciously or subconsiously. There is no "ism" or system which can improve other people´s life, only overal changing the conscioussness: this is lesson which I learned.
Your Hub deserves very many thumbs up, because the only solution for any human or overall society is to follow laws of the Nature.
Compliments, you are great!
Marx arrived at his laws of socialism by meticulously scrutinising natural laws as they manifested themselves in epoch changing events of human history such as the French Revolution and its aftermath, the several failed revolutions of his home country Germany and Britian, and the ups and downs of the imperialistic agenda such as the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857 which Marx and Engels watched very closely and commented upon at great length in their writings and with immense humanitarian sympathy for the Indians.
That is why socialism and its methodology, dialectic materialism, is timeless in its value and relevance, just like Newton's laws of motion, or Einstein's theory about relativity and have universal applicability.
India's great thinker and Hindi critic Dr. Ramvilas Sharma, has applied the principle of dialectic materialism to the study of such diverse subject areas as linguistics, literature, sociology, history and contemporary issues.
I doubt if you know how to read Hindi, otherwise I would have recommended these books to you. It is possible that Russian versions of some his books are available, as Dr. Sharma was briefly the Secretary of the Communist Pary of India, and in the sixties and seventies there were close cultural coopreation between USSR and India and many books on both sides were translated into each other's languages.
You are right Misha, we should look at natural laws for solutions to our problems, but should we also keep reinventing the wheel everytime we need to travel (read face a crisis), when excellent cars (read Marxism/socialism) are available to us to take us to our destination?
Guys, I am mostly out of here today because it is my wife's b-day and we are spending it together, but please keep them coming, I will reply when I come back :)
Yeah, its my B-day too. Happy b=day to your wife.
I am after only learning and helping others learn. This is a great opportuinity where we are in contact to people from many places of the world an be able to see thier views and understanding of things. We look at it, how can socialism to best, and other look at it, how can capitalism be best. This is always happen when people do not comparing apples to apples, and have different difinition of the items.
I clicked on your link.
Guess what, the definition is the same mine
"An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."
Hubpages is a privately own corporation. You are partnershipped into it to make money off from it. Note the word accumulation of profits, You do not have to reinvest it. Money is capital. So from our points in the US, you are do capitalistic things. Do you own a website, and trying to make money from it. To US this is capitalism. You invest the money on the website, you privately own it, and make money off from it. The is capitalism to the fullness....Yeah it is not a lot of capital i.e. milions of money like owning an industrial plant, but it works off the same principle.
We have a story in the US that us conservative useA rich capitalist man and his daughter was visting together on her trip home for Chrsitmas from college. She starts lecturing him on his evil way as a capitastic pig, and that he needed to share his wealth. The father, being concerned about her well being, asked how college was going. She replies that it is hard and she is spending all of her time studying and working. And that her hardwork paid off and that she was getting all A's. Being happy about this, her father asked how her best friend was doing at college. She replied, the her friend was struggleing and getting only C's and D's. That her friend was partying most nights and not study very much. In response to this her father suggested that maybe she should share some of her A's with her friend/ His daughter, upset with even the suggestion replied, I worked hard for the A's, while she played aroung. I deserve the A's and she doesn't, The father only smiles and replied. Welcome to the capitalism way of thinking.
We view capitilism as opportunity. That is why the US was known for the land of opportunity. Now, we feel the government want to step in, tax the wealthy and redistribut to the poor. This is part of the state of socialism that we are at and many do not like. I know this is differnent from the government stepping in and taking over the ownership of large corporation. We feel we would rather have these corporation go bankrupt, and this would give oppportunity for rise of other corporations to take over the business that these failing corporations did.
I agree as time goes and systems get more complicated, there need to be laws to help regulate and try to keep crooks from taking advantages of others. Well, with the Bernie Madoff, it shows you can have all the laws and regulations and it still will happen. It is up to the individaul to make sure he/she is not getting ripped off.
As for as people trading goods before capitalism, I would say that this was actually capitalism. Capitalism is based on trading goods, by privite individuals or corporations. This may be where we are seeing things different and need to come together on.
I hope this helps us to get on the same page and learn from each other views. We feel when the government gets involved, then freedom is lost. This is probably the biggest problem there is. I do not hate socialism and love only capitalism. It is what ever it takes for the society to thrive. In both socialistic and capitilistic sociaty, there is a lot of corruption in the government.
Thanks A lot for you responses and being a friend.
There was A who was bigger and stronger than anyone in the class. The teacher gave them all assignments. B worked hard and came up with an excellent project report. She was about to submit it when A turned up at her doorstop, snatched the report from her hands and submitted it as his own.
A got A+ grading in his exam, and B, who quickly put together another report in the little time that was now available to her, could manage only a C.
Welcome to capitalism with an imperial flavour.
How did the capitalistic countries of now accumulate their capital? Did the imperial plundering have something to do with it?
How was it that the industrial revolution of Britian really took off only in the early nineteenth century after the looted wealth from India and other colonies started pouring into Britain and began to accumulate in the hands of the capitalists there who were able to set up large factory buildings and big machines for which earlier they had no finance.
There are three stages of capitalism: mercantile capitalism, which is the earliest and has a very old history dating back to slave based industries of Roman times in Europe and much earlier in older trading societies like India and China which were great sea faring nations. This operated on the principle of trading goods from one place for goods from another place.
The next stage is industrial capitalism in which capital is used to produce goods in factories which are then traded. This happened first in Britian (because colonial loot reached it first) and then spread to other countries of Europe, like France. Germany had no colonies so it didn't start there till very late. In fact, the two world wars that Germany fought were mainly to acquire colonies owned by Britain and France.
The third and more advanced type of capitalism is financial capitalism, which is what we find in USA and other advanced capitalistic countries. In this form of capitalism, money is not earned by producing anything, but by investing it and earning a profit or interest upon it.
That is why you see old style industries such as coal, steel, and even automobiles declining in most of the advanced capitalistic countries and industries like finance, banking and insurance seeing an upsurge there.
The danger with financial capitalism is that it can ruin many countries and industries. It can swish in and out of countries in its bid to earn maximum profit, leaving ruin and destruction wherever it has visited. It has happened in Mexico, it has happened in the far east and now it is happening in the heartland of capitalism, the US.
So what is the solution?
We need to change mind-sets. We need to get out of the syndrome that money-making is the mother of all human pursuits and give up our dogmas about freemarket that market will correct everthing.
Market never corrects anything. It is a mechanism for exchanging goods and earning profit. It will do that well and not anything else.
For taking humanity to higher levels of ethical growth, equitous growth and achieving basic moral principles of equality, poverty eradication, and other litancy of human problems, we need to have a vision about these things.
The only school of thought that presents such a vision is socialism. That is why it is of utmost relevance to us.
Let us all study it with an unbiased and inquisitive mind leaving behind the baggage of propaganda and falsification that has accumulated around it.
OMG, Julaha, you sound like an educated, erudite, intellectual person. How can you possibly hold onto opinions without a shred of evidence that are so thoroughly based in hallucination?
Or maybe I should say HalLicination. :)
Misha, I only have one comment. YOU DA MAN! :)
Howdy Hal - have read your e-democracy Hub, but want to think about it for a while. Very interesting.
It seems that the unthinkable is happening - whether we lean towards left or right, most of seem to agree that something is seriously wrong with the system.
I might regard shovelling money into the banks as feeding the capitalists. You may regard it as socialist madness.
Whatever we call it, they keep on doing it. It seems like an alliance is on the cards - that brings home how serious this issue is. Democracy is at stake, and I will fight against oppression as hard as you and Misha. No dissent here!
Great view, Misha!! I think as an evolving being, we are still so immature. The lack of ability in accepting differences, and the heated debate of ideas and solutions shows our infancy.
Patience is needed and the understanding of terms, as you so well pointed out. If we understand that we have not yet arrived to the stage of "being" and are but students of the universe, perhaps we will feel small and humble enough to listen to each other.
We trip over power and egos, and greed. I love it when great minds come together to rise to common ground for the good of people.
Very good points here...if one will open their mind, they will have less fear and more hope for the day.
"While we are stuck with ironing out the differences between our understandings of certain "isms" we are going nowhere."
I agree!!!
Hi Misha, I wish you had also thrown in a few books by Marx, Lenin and Mao in your handpicked list of Amazon books :-)
You would have made money, in addition to have contributed to an even-handed understanding of the subject.
Hi. Happy Birthday to your wife and Eovery and any other april babies out there. Excellent analogy with the crooked houses. I was amazed that the other hub turned into a heckling match that lasted for days?
Kind of makes one think that people enjoy the occassional fight...
Misha: I read your hub and have been following the comments for the past few days, and you offer very open minded thoughts on the subject and laws of nature. As a matter of fact my s/o and I were jabbering a few days ago about this subject before you published your hub and even if we didn't come to any "solutions" its good to explore it with an open mind.
Hi guys! :)
Thanks for coming everybody, and happy birthday and countless consequent birthdays to Ed!
Thank you for birthday wishes to my wife, I passed them and you have her big thanks and kiss :)
I think I am too tired tonight to answer something on the topic, so I will postpone this till tomorrow, if you don't mind :)
Awesome Hub Misha! :) I cant imagine living our world like the drug cartels :P yikes!
One of the problems of the laws of nature is that they don't always work out for the best - what ever the best is. One of the laws of nature is that there are predators and prey - good for the predators, bad for the prey.
One of the problems with capitalism, for example, is that capitalists always seeks more. Capitalists aren't satisfied with enough, they always want more. Stockholders don't want the same dividends they had last year. They want more or are disatisfied with management. If management doesn't make more profits, they are displaced.
Oh well, one has to live with what the laws of nature provide.
I still think 'natural laws' are not there to be discovered in respect of political or societal behaviour. You can find natural laws for ants or bees because of their simplicity and their lack of individualism. And also because our far greater intelligence allows us to understand and analyse insect behaviour. But human history has been influenced by the unpredictable emergence of pivotal figures. Newton could not have been predicted by a statistically derived law. Nor could the founding of the US. Marx couldn't have predicted Stalin. No-one predicted AIDS. Marxism is an example of Historicism - the retrospective demonstration of how everything was inevitable! Big deal. In this respect, there is little to choose between Marxism and Revelation as a method of predicting the future.
Ok, now trying to answer, probably will take a while and require several posts :)
Esahs, thanks toy :)
RV, I hoped I can promote some thinking :) And, yes, this is the problem, and even more problem that this partial understanding does not always even overlap, let alone match!
Sufi, of course not, you know I like talking to you :) Yet here you are talking to Ed, so just a quick remark. You are saying that health and education are two important things, hence we should delegate them to government. Yet I would argue that food is way more important to our survival, yet nobody even thinks about delegating it to government ;)
Tanechka, glad to see you here :) Thanks for your observations, they do make a lot of sense. Yugoslavia always was a bright spot in our labor camp, yet it still was a labor camp, just its show-off department ;)
Julaha, I am afraid you are trying to drag me back into this same swamp of isms I am trying to escape. Your definition of socialism seems to differ from everybody else's on this thread. Let's leave isms alone, and try to do some thinking in normal terms that everybody understands more or less uniformly. And, know, Marx did not invent the wheel IMO, if anything his wheel is square. :)
Ed, Thank you for b-day wishes and the same back at you :) I am afraid though with you we too are getting back into isms forest. Despite of your example I fail to see how you or me using no doubt capitalistic Hubpages are becoming capitalists ourselves. Yet I don't really want to argue over this, cause this was not the original intention of my hub to reach a common definition of those terms. Quite the opposite, I wanted to get away from them and try to operate in common terms like money, government, labor, taxes - that pretty much everybody understands uniformly. Not that I am saying we should not discuss that topic at all - yet right here it seems to distract us from the intended way. :)
Julaha, I don't see how you’re a and B example resembles specifically capitalism, and you still are trying to drug me into isms.
Hal, thanks for visiting, I feel honored :)
Sufi, I posted what I think about e-doomocracy (or any other form of democracy) for that matter on Hal's hub, go take a look :)
Marisue, thank you very much! I wholeheartedly agree admire your sentiment; I guess you should be a pretty evolved soul if we allow for reincarnation ;)
Julaha, I did not hand pick them, I just set it up on a keyword "wealth" :)
Raven, thanks a bunch from my wife for b-day wishes :) People definitely do enjoy fighting, me being no exception. Yet there are times for fight, and there are times for talks I think :)
Violet, thanks, this is what I am trying to promote here, let's hope it will get some following :)
Dame, thanks! And I don't see how drug cartels or mafia families are that different from our "normal" lives. There are sets of rules, more or less reasonable, that you have to obey or you would be prosecuted. Don't really see any material difference with any government. But state does demonize those because they compete with state...
JK, yes, I do agree. Yet good and bad are relative, and while predators at first seem to be bad for prey, they do a lot of good keeping prey populace healthy and ensuring evolution takes its course... ;)
Dave, you definitely could be right that there are no laws in this area, yet for the reasons I gave you already I doubt it. I think you do pinpoint why we still can't find them though - they are about our own behavior, and it is always hard to watch thyself objectively. :) However, there are patterns for sure. I don't agree with absolute unpredictability. Just in recent history, housing bubble burst was really easy to predict well in advance to take an appropriate action. Yet very few people did, and governments all over the world certainly did not take an appropriate action, be it intentionally or not. Also, I fail to see what you collection of random facts is designed to prove?
Wonderful hub, Misha and fascinating comment thread. Socialism? Capitalism? Natural Law?....lots going on here with a minimum of ranting--very nice to see:-) Anyway, seems to me the problem with a government contolled economy is you get a top heavy, corrupt beaurocracy. The problem with a total free market economy is that markets don't have morals-- greed takes over and you get a corrupt group of financial alpha dogs running the show. In both cases the house of cards eventually falls down.... as in the Soviet Union in 1989 and free market capitalism right now. I think any system of government can work given the right social contract between government and governed-- ditto any economic system. The problem is people.
To each according to his need and from each according to his ability sounds great on paper...the devil, as always, is in the details. Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door, sounds simple enough as does government of the people for the people and by the people........let me know when it all happens LOL
Until then I will just keep putting one foot in front of the other, till my own little patch of rocky earth and watch the flowers bloom.
Nice going, Misha. This was great:-)
Wow Robie, I just love your philosophy! We are pretty much on the same page on a lot of things :)
Wow Misha-- we must both be very sensible, intelligent people--dontchathink???? :-)
LOL No doubt we are - much more than others ;) :P
...and of course we are modest and unassuming too :P-)
Misha, I just want to say that I enjoyed reading your ideas in this hub. You've written this well and presented views that seem most logical to me. I'm sorry that I can't contribute further to the discussion, but, honestly, I don't have a firm view about one 'ism' or the other. ;) Well done.
Great hub Misha! So nice to see one of these hubs that doesn't get everybody shouting at each other! I do agree that when we get into the 'isms' wars it doesn't help. Now that spring is here (well actually here in MI we have a snowstorm warning tonight--but it will melt, it's too late to stay long)--now I have gardening to do and cleaning, so I will have no energy left for politics thank God. lol!
P.S. I agree that you and robie are very sensible intelligent people. :)
Yes, Robie, that was exactly I meant but forgot to add :D
Thanks for coming and your nice words Pam R, yes, the more I go into this the less sense I see in any ism :)
Hi Pam G, I was expecting you LOL! Since you happen to be yet another very sensible and intelligent person (and to be serious everybody on this thread seems too), we will eventually sort out our arguments no doubt. And yes, at this point garden seems like a more important task to me, too :)
Thanks for everyone's input.
I have learned that there are different believes of what capitalism is out in the world, and this has helped me a lot so I can understand where people are coming from. We need to get everyone one the some pages and a lot of the ism and differences will go away. I think this may be starting to come across. And I may try to it up a little
From your definition Misha, capitalism is when large corporation with large amount of capital that has a heavy roll in its the market. I see many very socialistic countries (i will only use socialistic to define many other types of countries, because I feel they are close to that definition that capitalism) practicing more capitalistic means.
As to date, a lot contries have these corporation in them. Take as an example, the parent company I work for is Heiderberg Cement from Germany. The own cement plants in a lot of the countries, including China, Russia, England and many highly socialistic and other types of countries. Heiderberg is a capitaliztic company. They were invited in by the government of China in partnerships to improve their cement making capabilites. China is building a lot of its infrastucture and their old obselete cement plants could not keep up with the demand. Several large cements plants have been built that not only produces large amount of cement, but do it a lot more energy efficient manner, and with a lot lower emissions and pollutants; thus a win-win=win situration for china, corporations, and the environment.
I agree as times develop, countries have to lay down laws by which the corporations can operate and do business. If the laws allow poor practices and these poor practices can only last for a while until "it hits the fan." Yes these are the natural laws you talk about Misha. You are totally right, you cannot break natural laws. There are natural laws that control everything. You must be in harmony to these.
So as the US appears may be looking at becoming more socialistics, several of the strong socialistic countries are embracing capitalism. We may end up meeting a lot in the middle. A lot of the US people do not want the change because this is not what they feel the US stands for and what made the US great.
As socialistic society that is sustaining itself, I can see where they are terrified of capitalistic pigs. Where the same applies for capitalistic societies, where they are terrified of socialistic changes.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me. This may need a hub on something about the changing of today socialistic and capitalistic governments. It may be appearing that these governents may be headed towards a common point between the two.
Keep on hubbing.
Deep Misha. Entertainingly - I live in a "socialist" country. I lived in the UK and US "capitalist" countries.
And they are all in the same boat. More government. Bigger banks. More government. LOL
It all makes me wonder what it could be like to live in country with one ism then move to another with a different ism government control, for example Russia in the 1970''s then USA in the 1990's and how this could effect a persons way of life
I do however see very little of the old ism in Bulgaria and find its people no different from old European countries, but to actually live the life in full swing of one then the other, but in saying tis I do see a changing world as BG does try and make a better change for its people to become one with the EU
Changing the natural laws is almost impossible but there is many who strive to beat them an it is those people who i worry about,
Much respect to you Misha
Good read, Misha - and good points; but I think many people, in the US, have it ingrained (at least those of who have the nation's origins principles ingrained in us since childhood) that they must put up their guard against all signs of socialism - lest American freedoms be taken away, little by little, until there are few or none left. Sometimes it isn't so much a wish to "sling mud", as it is to try to defend the original principles on which the nation was founded.
I live in Massachusetts, which is a shameful, shameful, example of creeping government regulation, medicrity, and disregard for individual potential; and I could write a book on the examples of lives destroyed by the government's corruption, medicrity, and incompetence. It's frightening - and that's enough to make people get very defensive when anyone suggests anything that even hints of socialism. I've lived long enough to recall the days before the government and oppressive thinking was as out-of-control as it is today, and I have to say that most people I know were a lot happy in their own little lives than most are today.
Misha -{{Also, I fail to see what you collection of random facts is designed to prove?}}
Some things are predictable. The housing bubble was predictable, as was the collapse of Dubai. But my 'random' facts were to demonstrate that while you can predict the conclusion of something that has already started, you can't predict the emergence of an influential genius, a new technology, a pandemic, etc. In other words, perhaps you can find short-term 'natural laws', but the longer-term direction of humankind is wholly unpredictable (thank goodness!)
Hi Misha,
I like the hub. This kind of reflects my own feeling, that extremes of any 'ism' are guaranteed to cause problems. Certainly this hub has provoked less mud-slinging than some of the others you and I have met on lately! Well done for initiating some civilised debate!
Very enriching so far, thanks! Oops, I almost forgot. Misha, belated Happy Birthday to your wife! :)
Misha- I know there is no ideal "ism". Actually it is funny recently myself and my husband when we went to a family dinner we had a discussion where the auto/financial industry bail outs was the focal point. One of my husband's friend said bailouts is ok but it should be given to those company who are doing well why should the government reward those companies which have inefficient/ineffective management instead of rewarding those companies which have managed to make profits even during this economy.
I agree in Ideal market economy the government has no business to get involved in bailing out those which are "too big" to fail or affecting "too many" if they were not run properly. But then there would be immediate large scale fallout but on second thoughts when the government itself doesn't have the funds and has to borrow money from countries like China/Japan then that is very dangerous for the sovereignty of a nation.
Thumbs up for a thought provoking hub. I hope we do get treated to more such gems from you from time to time. :D
Sorry guys, I was just shocked with the latest changes in google algo that effectively cut my earnings several times, and did not feel like responding here. Looks like I managed to get my cool back, so let's see what we have here :)
Ed, I think I was not clear enough. :) First I do not use a definition of capitalism we had back in USSR cause it is all propaganda, and I go by dictionary - American dictionary. Whatever it says, it says. I don't see it saying that it should be LARGE corporations or LARGE amount of capital, whichever way you define capital. But it should be some capital involved - what I fail to see in case of you and me using hubpages. :) Either way finding a definition of capitalism was not the purpose of this hub - may be you write one on this topic? :)
The problem I see that regardless of self-identification both socialist and capitalist countries are running fast towards total government control, and that scares me - because I think that in part this natural law we are talking about says - the more government you have, the worse you live...
Mark, I feel special to have you stopping by and commenting :P Yep, I too don't see much difference between seeming extremes - USSR and USA. All the same shit another day...
BG, thanks, I know that Bulgaria is doing its best to try to convert itself into a livable country. Good luck to you guys! :)
Lisa, yes, that is what I am trying to say too - that despite of all this seemingly free market and liberty rhetoric, America along with Europe are drowning in the in the swamp of oversized governments, and demand even more of it. Very sad...
Oh no Dave, I am not talking about any kind of long term predictions for sure. All what I am saying here is a pretty basic stuff, using law of gravity analogy - if you release an object, it will fall straight down, providing there is no air flow to support its weight. :) That said, I don't thing that for example Newton's discovery was a random occurrence. I do think it would have happened anyway, if not him than somebody else, if not at that date - some short time before or after. This was a jump from the amount of knowledge collected to date to understanding this knowledge, as I see it :)
Amanda, thanks, but extremes themselves was not what I was talking here. I am rather talking about how similar those extremes are, and that middle ground between them is not going to solve anything :)
Bluewings, thank you from me and Nadia :)
Hi CW-girl, I am glad to see you here :) Yet I have to disagree both to your friend and yourself (at the same time taking a note that you are one of a very few who are trying to have a discussion on the topic).
My experience and thoughts tell me that no bailout can be beneficial overall. There is a very simple reason for this - government is the worst investor possible, because it invests money that it does not own without any accountability. This is a recipe for corruption and inefficiency - results of which we all will have a chance to see for ourselves, most likely within a year timeframe.
And it is not about ideal or real economy, it is about people's believe that government is smarter because it's bigger, like kids do believe in parents. It is not. Anything what government does it screws royally. The bigger the government, the more it screws. And fallouts will come inevitably, and they will be much harder and will take the whole country with them. Instead of opting for immediate but relatively mild ones government opted for postponed but terminal ones. RIP Western civilization...
Misha- Taking your own analogy of parents (some parents are really good) but a few "bad" parents shouldn't take away the importance of parenting completely. We can never ever realistically have no government hence we have to learn to think how to make the government's work for us instead of denying completely any sort of government. There was an Indian Businessman(Dhirubhai Ambani) who said "we can't change our rulers but we can certainly change how they rule us". :D
LOL you are super fast :) Well, was not really talking about parents, good or bad, I was talking about kids who think their parents are smart and powerful and such. This is the attitude I see here almost from everybody - government knows what to do, and it will take care of us. No, it does not, and it won't. :)
Yet I absolutely agree with you that having no government at all does not look like a realistic proposition. This does not mean though that we should strive to get more government - quite the opposite, I strongly believe that the less government we have, the better off overall we are :)
I guess you seem to support more of the "Republican" ideology. Well I just remember the Singapore experiment where the government role was of paramount importance for making it the country it is now. Besides that China which is a central market economy seems to be doing very well. I would like to know about countries (with governments) which have very little/no interference in business/economy/other affairs and are doing well? Btw I hope you understand that I am very ignorant about these things hence I am asking these questions just to expand my knowledge and not necessarily disagreeing with you. :D
I don't bother to label myself CW-girl, cause I don't fit anywhere. If you want it to be a republican, so be it :) And you have a right to disagree with me at any time for any reason :)
Talking about Singapore you are assuming that its current condition is somehow better than it was before. Given the relativity of good and bad, I would not be that straight forward about it. :) In other words, to bring the country somewhere is the task that requires a strong (not necessarily big!) government. The question is - is this forced move really beneficial on the great scale of things?
Now, coming to China. They are definitely doing very good, may be even better than anybody else currently. However, something like 20 years ago they were doing really really bad. What happened? To the best of my knowledge they opened up a small business niche. It was prohibited before, and government was striving to satisfy the demand for that kind of services, as usual screwing big time along the road. Now it is given to people and encouraged, and very few restrictions and regulations exist, and probably this is the closest thing to the free market that exists nowadays.
I am not really too knowledgeable about China, hope someone with better knowledge of local realities will chime in, but I think they still have heavy industries under government, they do have government controlled central bank, and no doubt they are still a totalitarian regime. Yet in economics they moved from more government to less government and succeeded big time :)
Great hub. I read the news each day and then review the comments from readers and shake my head. The labeling and mudslinging is rampant. Everyone believes that the other position is "stupid" or "evil" and yet it's clear they don't fully understand the words they're using. If people hope to open eyes, to educate, or to win someone over to their view point they'll never be successful but worse yet, they're closing themselves off to seeing the whole picture and perhaps those laws of nature you mention.
Hi Mulberry, thanks for coming :) Yes, this was exactly my point - all of us are tightly angry, yet we can't fix the problems if we don't know what we are talking about and try to push on others our own misconceptions and misunderstandings - yet this is what we mostly do...
Ahhh - a fellow fan of literalism. Therein lies a true key to eliminating the anger I believe. Assumptions are at the route of all miscommunications. Since our subconscious "genies" take everything literally, it makes sense to start with the absolute, or widely recognized definitions. Great hub - thanks!
Awww, thanks for visiting Sem, it is always good to know that there are sane people around :)
Another great hub misha.
"Wow Misha!"
"This is a great subject and an hub that holds a lot of thought on the subject socialism and capitalism!"
"Your view in this hub is widespread Misha but with reason!"
"Two thumbs up!"
CEO E.S.A.H.S. Association
What we really need, Misha, is not capitalism or socialism or any other ism. What we need is good people. People who are not out for themselves, people who aren't looking to accumulate more assets at the expense of others, people who care about the plight of other people no matter where they are, where they come from, what they look like or what they believe. Until the world is populated by people like these, no form of government will succeed.
Thanks for stopping by guys :)
William, yes, I do agree to you on this - rare moment of agreement :D
Yet you seem to miss your own point - if I understood you correctly. As far as I remember you generally is pro forcing rich to share their wealth with poor - isn't it pro poor accumulating more assets at the expense of rich? ;)
Misha, what an interesting hub and an equally interesting string of commentary. You could write several other hubs just based on that :)
I think that everyone agrees that government is necessary, so it is a discussion of more or less government. For that, I do not believe that there is a right answer for everyone.
For example, if Singapore did not have a strong government, it would have gotten swallowed up by Malaysia all those years ago. Even now, I think that Singapore is a much more successful country than many others because of its strong, but benevolent ruling party. Singapore is small, does not have any natural resources, and does not even have enough water; yet it is stable, relatively rich, and highly educated.
Would the same system of government work somewhere else? Probably not, because the people are different, the cultures are different, the expectations are different.
Like Sufi, I think that government is needed for education and healthcare. These are public goods, and regular markets are not very good at providing for them. Because government is necessary, taxes are also necessary. I support a graduated income tax because I think that the rich can afford to contribute more than the poor. Don't worry too much about them, they will still be rich after paying taxes :)
Finally a comment on natural laws. I think that Paraglider makes a good point in that there will always be unexpected singular events that you cannot predict. This actually reminds me a lot of Asimov's writings on "psychohistory". What Asimov proposes is that we can predict future human behavior by using the law of large numbers. In this way we can identify big problems and choose the best path early on to minimize their effects. However, sometimes, unpredictable singular events may happen that will throw the whole predictive model off course. Thus he proposes a benevolent "governing body" to oversee such disturbances and try to steer things back onto a happier trajectory. Asimov says it much better than I do :)
Hope this makes sense.
Hi Misha great read ,took me ages but was well worth it, thumbs up.
AWESOME post! THANKS so much. I know this subject is on the top of everyones minds right now, getting some excellent comments too. I would like to share this on a friends web site. It would fit so well there. Would that be OK?
Bo
Hi gals, thanks for stopping by and taking time to read :)
Bo, sure, that's even flattering, thank you :)
Deb, you'd be laughing, but took me a while to read too :P
Sweet Aya, you touched on so many points... I just don't have time now to properly respond, give me a few days and I'll get back to you on this :)
Feeling that. Great points have gotten acroess I'm sure. keep it hubbing...1
I'm delighted that we have some level of agreement on this issue, Misha. I am not, however, in favor of "forcing rich to share their wealth with poor." Rather, I am in favor of the rich paying taxes in accordance with their ability to pay. My opinions on this are more detailed on this hub:
http://hubpages.com/hub/A-Flat-Tax-Yes--But-on-Net
At the same time, I believe no business executive, computer genius, ballplayer or entertainer, et al, should be compensated by tens of millions of dollars a year -- or more -- when others, such as school teachers and policemen receive a pittance for much more important work.
Very thought provoking. If only we were more capitalistic in America still..it'd be a nice change. ;)
G|M
I don't think Americans who've only ever lived in America can really understand what socialism is, even in it's most modern forms. 90% of them don't even realize that universal healthcare is a form of socialism and it's already implemented in many EU countries which Americans would never think socialist. Socialism, and even communism aren't bad things, they're just always badly implemented throughout history. The biggest problem is so few people think for themselves and get their opinions directly from Fox News or worse.
it is interesting like isabella brings out that Americans who do not really understand socialism or communism can easily be mislead by inaccurate information, most do not know anything about history or how the media can distort and only report one side of the issue in order to create a certain perception whether it be real or imagined.
Ah, Misha, coming here is like coming home. It is a good idea to get rid of the names. There's so much confusion about what the terms mean and how they actually work in the real world vs the theory of the economic systems. The only definition we should use is that people should be entitled to do what they want, where they want, with whom they want. If more pepople lived by those rules, the world would be a much different place.
I've heard many Russians and Eastern Europeans have become very libertarian in their thinking since the fall of Communism. One thing you may wish to point out is that no nation or state or city-state practices free market economics. The spectrum runs the gamut from Communist->Socialist->Fascist. Communists claim to serve the workers and vest all power in the state. Socialists claim to serve everyone by taxing the rich and giving to the poor. Fascist economies are much like Communist countries in that the state groups industries together and limits competition and erects barriers to entry.
A true free market economy would have no intervention at all from anyone not involved in the market.
I'm not even so sure that we need government, people seem to be able to organize themselves and not need any authority to tell them how to live. Besides once you give that power to someone, you've just joined the slippery slope and where does it end.
Incidentally, that's why so many people in the US are against socialism in any form here. Misha, you probably know this, but isn't it true that under the Tsars the Ukraine was a grain exporting nation and under the Communists the Ukraine, indeed the entire Soviet Union, had to import grain? That doesn't make me feel any more comfortable about allowing government control over banking, healthcare or education.
Based on Misha's posts and comments he sounds like a libertarian to me. If hippies want to live on their own in a commune, let them. As for socialized health care what about the National Institute of Clinical Excellence and their penchant for denying critical medical care due to the cost. That's nice, your treatment is too expensive so now you have to die for the greater good.
Misha lives in the USA. I live in Eastern Europe. And you know nothing of socialism beyond what you've read or heard in the media. I am a full on libertarian, and have been since long before such things were cool. I left America, my home country, because I detest fascism. But above all, I am able to think for myself and I recognize that philosophies such as socialism and communism are not inherently bad. It's people who screw things up, not the other way round. Simple as. I prefer a free market economy. But that doesn't mean everything I disagree with is bad or evil.
Communism and Fascism are both inherently evil. Both philosophies have murdered tens of millions of pepole in the last century. It's beyone me how you can not consider tht evil.
"'Pure communism' in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life."
Yes... an oppression-free society where everyone in it determines policy democratically sounds pretty evil to me. Just because the people who enforced communism were evil, or didn't follow through on the promised ideal, doesn't mean that communism itself is evil. If you really don't see that, there's no point in further debating the obvious.
Sweet Aya, it took me a while, I am sorry. Too many personal events and issues combined kept me from coming back to this hub and answering your post. Finally I managed :)
Lets' go point by point.
Is government necessary? No, not exactly, I don't think government is necessary. Well, it is not exactly that. Let me put it this way - I think that in terms of quality of life not having a government is much superior to having it - but I don't see the way to avoid government, mainly for external reason. It seems to me if there is no government on some territory, neighbor governments will soon occupy this territory. So far I don't see how to solve this, but I hope that there is a solution, and other than that I personally don't see any role for government whatsoever.
So I am on the side of less government by your classification, much less I would say. To have it only for this very specific problem I mentioned - country defense. Yet there is a problem with that approach - as soon as you have a government, it naturally wants to grow. And if we have it created for defense, by definition we create it militarily stronger than the rest of the country, giving it enough power to force on us any decision it wants. American founding fathers understood this very good, and they tried to build into the system a whole lot of measures to prevent such an outcome - yet all of these measures eventually failed, and now we have here one of the most monstrous governments in the World, if not the most.
Now, coming to Singapore. I really can't say if it would have been better for it to get swallowed by Malaysia many years ago (whatever definition of better we may use). You can't tell either, and nobody can - because there is no alternative history that we can observe. This is probably the root of our difficulties with discovering natural laws in this area - every case seems to be unique, and direct comparison almost always is not possible - and you mentioned it yourself. Another facet of Singapore example is relativity of good and bad. Here you assumed for example that being highly educated and relatively rich is good, but it may not necessarily be the case on the great scale of things. Having roots in a culture different from the Western you probably may better appreciate this relativity, but it is really hard to grasp for the Westerners (myself included). It took me a big while to train myself to avoid such kinds of assumption traps. :)
Now about public goods. Here I disagree completely. I have an experience of government providing public goods, and it is terrible. Sufi and other European hubbers have completely different experience with that, and it really puzzles me. This goes against all my personal experience. I don't really have a definite answer why, my best guess would be they don't know any better - like we too thought we have the best healthcare system back in USSR - until iron curtain finally fell down and we could see for ourselves and compare. Yet there is no iron curtain here, and it makes this particular explanation pretty fragile. Probably to get to some common ground over there we need to start talking about tiny details, cause devil tend to hide there :)
And as I mentioned already (not remember here or elsewhere) food is a public good too, much more essential for survival then healthcare - yet nobody except for communists insist it should be produces by government, so I don’t really buy this argument. In fact government by its very nature is less efficient and more wasteful than a private business, and this is the root problem of all government economics that cannot be fixed even theoretically. So whatever service/production you give to government, expect lower quality and higher costs. For me this really looks like a law of nature...
Now about Dave (paraglider). Actually thanks for making me better understand his point. :) Asimov, you, and likely Dave look at society as a body in a state of unstable equilibrium (using physical analogy), so any random event can change it's path to something completely different. I look at it as being in a state of stable equilibrium, so whatever random event happens, it just causes a series of fading fluctuations without throwing everything off the path for good. Hope I did not make it impossible to understand :)
Isabella, you can talk about "pure" Communism all you like, but the only thing that matters is results. Communism's result in the real world has been terrible. Fascism's result in the real world has been terrible. It's only obvious to you because you live in a world that can't exist.
Misha, we can in fact live in a society without government. You bring up the common defense argument, but let me ask you this. If there are no centers of power or monuments to power, no capital city or anything like that, where would you strike to overthrow people in charge? That's how you win wars. Without a target to hit, you have nowhere to send your armies. The following article puts for a compelling argument for the private production of defense: http://mises.org/journals/jls/14_1/14_1_2.pdf. When I first read it the implications literally rocked my world.
Thanks for coming guys, I like it :)
DRG, sure you don't need any reply, but thanks anyway :)
William, I must have misinterpreted you then, sorry. :) And for me ANY tax seems unfair by its nature, so I don’t think one can find a fair way to tax :)
Thanks GM, but it is still about isms :P
Isa, I am excited! I don't see you too often nowadays, and enjoy every moment of it :) Yet I disagree about communism being good thing - on the grounds of EVERY attempted implementation turning into a terrible tyranny - there should be something wrong with the idea itself, no matter how attractive it looks on the surface. :) Yet we are coming back to isms again - the very thing I am trying to avoid :)
RA, yes, Americans currently seem to be one of the most brainwashed nations on the planet, probably losing only to North Koreans :D
LDT, welcome to my hubs and to hubpages in general, we definitely seem to share many opinions - based on what I saw on forums and other hubs so far. :) I am trying to avoid labeling myself, but if libertarian sounds right for you - so be it :) Yes, I do agree that currently we don't have any real free market economy in the World, and frankly we never had, yet American economy of 19th century probably was the closest we ever got. I too think the difference between Fascism and Communism is minimal and mostly ideological - but economically they are the same. But this sorta pushes us back into isms - lets try to avoid them... Yes, you are right about Ukraine (and not only Ukraine), and I think you are have all reasons to feel uncomfortable about government control - I feel the same. And frankly "uncomfortable" is a big understatement :)
Isa and LDT, you are arguing about isms again my friends, this will not bring us anywhere close to solution I think...
LOL, LDT again - thanks for the link, I will check it out tomorrow, tonight I am done already. And no, you don;t have to overthrow people in charge when nobody is in charge. You just send your troops to collect taxes...
Misha,
Great Hub!! I agree with you 100 percent. Whatever happened to the days where we discuss ideas rather than bashing former or current administrations. I think that more people should call their elected officials about ideas they think are important. This will give the people more input into the way representatives make decisions. Unfortunately, you know that most of them care more about being re-elected, so they will be open to ideas from the people who voted for them.
Misha, I don't argue with people who can't see the whole picture, nor those who continuously alter their statements to suit their present attempts to be right. No, communism has never worked as a proper political structure. I don't think anyone is stupid enough to really argue that it has. And I wouldn't have been keen to have lived under a Soviet regime, nor a Cuban or Chinese, for that matter. Nevertheless, the core of a true communist philosophy is perfectly decent, if not greatly naive, as the human species does seem quite incapable of evolving en masse. But no argument is a good argument if it doesn't openly consider both sides.
My apologies, Misha, old habits are hard to break. Once I thought as you did about sending in the troops, but after seeing our boys in Iraq and the troubles they had, it's not so cut and dried is it? The only reason we were able to salvage anything from that is because we cut deals with certain groups of people, that and the ruthlessness of the opposition towards the people they were supposedly trying to "liberate". The Soviets fled Afghanistan and we fled Southeast Asia, so there is a lesson there somewhere, don't you think?
Instead of using isms, perhaps we can say that any society in which the fruits of one's labor can be confiscated and given to another for whatever reason will always breed resentment and, in the end, not be sustainable as a society without revolution and/or rebellion?
Wow, Misha, I admire you for tackling this topic (this is the male Curious Traveller writing.) It is something which used to be a big part of my life during times of Cold War when I was extremely politically active.
I was very right wing then, an ardent Thatcherite here in the UK and equally a great admirer of the late US President, Ronald Reagan. I still am, make no mistake, but age has brought with it certain..."wisdoms," or, "tolerances," I am not sure myself which.
What I believed then and continue to believe is that capitalism can succeed where socialism never can simply because capitalism is founded upon human nature. The desire to better ourselves, to achieve more, to earn more, is inherent within almost each and every one of us. Socialism at its grass roots level may be admirable enough but the reality is that it finds itself in perpetual conflict with those basic instincts which make us who and what we are.
I hope this does not attract criticism as being "overly simplistic" - it is the exact opposite, in fact, in that it is as simplistic and predictable as human nature and the essence of the beings we are.
Wonderful analogy Misha, with the house being built to the center to adhere to the law of gravity and keep all our belongings from rolling this way or that. But I believe that you have to stand for something, even if you want to stay as close to the center as possible. Like Curious Traveller stated on the preceding blog, capitalism is, in essence, natures way of taking care of our economics. It is human nature for mankind to be competitive. Good or bad, like it or not, that's the way thing are. Men and women must have an incentive to better themselves and ultimately society.
You remember the old line in the movie "Wall Street" where Michael Douglas said, "greed is good". Well , as politically incorrect as that sounds, it is dead on, so long as greed is not injurious to others and society at large. Economies must be built from the top down, "trickle down", as my favorite president of the twentieth century, Ronald Reagan stated.
Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and is failing miserably in Europe and Canada at this very moment. The "cradle to the grave" mentality that has been indoctrinated, and ingrained into the minds of most Europeans is hard to stop once it has started. Although it eventually has to stop, because what we are seeing is there are more retired people on the government dole, than workers tax money to support them much longer. It is estimated that by 2050 public pension expenditures are expected to be16.9 percent of GDP in Germany, 17.3 percent in Spain and a whopping 24.8 percent in Greece. Compare that with an estimated 6.5 percent of the GDP in the United States in 2050, which in my opinion is still to high, but at least sustainable. There is no way with the declining birth rates in these countries that the math can work.
Anytime the federal government gets involved in business, other than certain regulatory practices that have to be enforced, it is a disaster. The government is way, way, way... too big and has way too much control over economic and even social policies that would be far better left to individuals and the private sector. You cannot legislate wealth or morality, but they think they know better than you what is best for you and your family, even though they don't know you from Adam's house cat. Thomas Jefferson said it best, and this quote may not be word for word, but in essence says, "when the people fear government, you have tyranny, when the government fears the people, you have liberty".... and who do you think fears who at this juncture.
What an interesting hub, with so many thoughtful and respectful responses across the political and economic spectrum, and from different life contexts and experiences.Maybe it’s the focus on ideas instead of isms that’s kept this rancour-free. But I think ideas need to include some reality check, if they’re not to stray into ideology.
Some people have expressed a fear of governments with absolute power, which is certainly valid, but there is the same danger of power in the private sector - for example, the companies that have become too big to be allowed to fail, because they would bring the economy down with them, and so have escaped the need to be accountable. There has to be a balance in both public and private sectors.
The free market has an important place, but there are forces in our world that are way beyond the power of individuals interacting freely to handle. I’m thinking, for example, of social unrest caused by poverty, disease, natural and environmental disasters and unchecked power. Saying that all governments are corrupt won’t help. It will only discourage good people from trying to do something. And when that statement is made, I’d like to see it accompanied with an example of a place we’d be happy to live that has no central government. I don’t think Albania or Somalia would appeal to us.
Barbara, the "too big to fail" argument is a false one. Would these companies do damage if they fell? Sure. But the reason they got so big was because they engaged in deceptive business practices. It's the old "if it's not illegal, it's OK" argument. Many people who study business and the markets knew the banks were in trouble years ago, but the common person had no clue. They believed nonsense like "houses never lose their value" and "the Dow will git 65,000", without taking the time to really understand what was going on.
Here's the thing. Even if Citi and AIG and all those other banks and insurance companies fail they still have assets that are worth something. These are things that have real value, that pay real cash. They're not "paper profits" or "investment vehicles" or nonsense like that. Any businessperson will tell you that you don't count your money until it is in the bank.
Now don't mistake me, people will get hurt when these fail. But let's look at what's going on right now. We basically saved the people who made the bad decisions that got us into this mess. We're giving them tax dollars, but they're not really even ours to give. There is no money in the Treasury. They can only raise money in three ways. Raise taxes, sell debt, print more money and make more credit. The first can't happen on a mass scale. The second, well foreigners aren't as willing as they once were to buy our debt, they're afraid we'll default. So we're left with the third. This will have the effect of raising all prices in the future. This is key. To get their stuff done now, they have to mortgage our future. Our kids and grandkids will pay the price.
Here's the worst part. Since we gave money to people who got us into this mess, they're going to use that money to prop up their failed "investments". The market has already passed judgment on CDO's and their ilk. They're worthless. So nobody is going to buy them, no matter how much government money is used to prop them up, at least not people who know what's really valuable and what isn't. Joe Sixpack might be tempted. "So in essence we're throwing good money after bad and we're going to make our descendants suffer for it.
Absence of government doesn't mean that you have to have an absencs of personal protection or even community protection. Please take the time to read the following, it won't take much time at all, and will change the way you look at security services: http://mises.org/journals/jls/14_1/14_1_2.pdf
We can debate whether or not AIG and Citi were too big to fail. We’ll never know how bad things would have got if they had been allowed to. My point is they had the power to avoid accountability. The US financial sector represents 25% of the country’s GDP, compared to manufacturing (which actually produces something instead of shifting it around) at 12%. Fear was a big factor too, one the economic models don’t take into account. People feared, rightly or wrongly, that if the big financial institutions crashed the recession would turn into a depression. That’s my point. In Canada, where banks are smaller and the government and financial regulators did their job, there have been no bank bail-outs.
As for absence of central government, show me a place where it works.
Of course banking grew to 25% of the US economy. That's what happens when you drive industry out of your country by making labor too expensive. They used to have a saying to describe it which was very arrogant and disgusting "They sweat, we think", guess those bankers didn't think hard enough.
So far as I know, Canada's central bank didn't release all sorts of credit into the Canadian economy, that's why you don't have any bank failures. As for regulators, they will always be behind the times. Regulators here were still high-fiving each other over regulations imposed after Enron (another time they were asleep behind the wheel) and didn't see the CDO mess coming, even though guys like Peter Schiff were talking about it in 2005 and guys like Ron Paul back in 2003.
Had Joe Sixpack been paying attention instead of listening to the current Britney breakdown or who got kicked off Amreican idol, there would have been no surprise. In the end that's why democracies always turn into tyrannies.
Show me a place where central government doesn't precipitate enconomic crisis like the US. I really do think that highly industrialized nations, especially in the West are the best candidates for an experiment with no central government. We have had, until recently, a strong commitment to liberty and personal responsibility which are key when you're talking about a society ruled by tradition, not law.
As for no central government working, you know no place like that exists on the planet today. It could and it would have to be in a Western nation. We have a tradition of liberty and freedom that are essential to people standing up for themselves absent the government's monopoly on force. In the absence of government police, private security companies would fill the void. They'd be beholden to their customers and would provide better service at less cost than government agencies. The reason you don't see this elsewhere in the world is that places like Somalia and Afghanistan are so poor and people would rather take the seeming easier path of becoming bandits rather than defenders of their people.
LDT, thanks a bunch for the link. Austrian school is awesome, you always learn something interesting from these guys.
Interestingly enough, I was going to use the same analogy of protection racket. I watched the collapse of Soviet Union, and the birth of semi-free market on its ruins. Back then in 90s racket was a common place in Moscow, and all those groups were fighting among themselves so basically there were no day without somebody got shoot. Most newborn business owners paid the "tax", few of them didn't, and suffered consequences. It was back in those times when I first thought that government in essence is a protection racket, and my opinion did not change since.
The article you linked to is excellent, yet there are few things that are not satisfactory covered there, or I did not understand them. First, I have a big problem with insurance companies. I love them as much as governments, may be even more. Granted, this may be because of idiotic regulations, but right now all what they are doing is to trying to charge more and pay less. In fact I do avoid all insurance unless the law forces me to use it, and then I do the minimum requirement. I do not see how this is addressed in the article. Also, given their size I would expect them to be pretty inefficient, as any firm of that size. And - I don't see what prevents them from forming a cartel to drive the prices up, and essentially organizing the World Government. This is on macro level.
Now, coming to the micro level. It is not clear to me how exactly criminals going to be prosecuted, other than just being killed or send to exile to the North Pole. Who is deciding what has to be done in every particular case and how? What mechanism prevents erroneous accusations, especially in the case of preventive measures? All those questions are pretty important and they are not covered in any satisfactory detail.
The immigration control case also left me wondering. First, what immigration are we talking about if there are no countries? Then how you are going to prevent certain persons from entering certain territories? Gated communities all over the place? Does not look like a paradise to me...
So, in a nutshell - I am not happy with governments too - but this article did not convince me insurance companies can do any better :)
Hglick, I think elected officials do what they are designed to do, and until we keep denying that their only interest is to get re-elected and steal more, we keep having problems :)
Isa, I think communism is yet another Utopia. As LDT mentioned, it does not take into account the nature of humans, and this is the reason it invariable fails with any implementation attempt. Also, take a look at the transition plan from the Communist Manifesto, and try to think how exactly some thing from it can be implemented, especially numbers 1, 3, 4, and 8 - and try to ask yourself - is this really possible without a civil war and ensuing state terror, exactly as it happened in every country that tried to adopt this utopia?
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Hi Misha - this Hub keeps rolling on - the sign of a good article.
I am not going to go into too much detail (avoiding the -isms!). The only thing to pick up is that I find it slightly offensive when people start saying that 'Europeans don't know any better,' or such things. At the end of the day, the vast majority of us are perfectly happy with the system - trying to accuse a Greek of not being able to think for themselves is a lesson in futility. I have not met one single Greek who disagrees with a health service, an attitude arrived at through thought and debate rather than indoctrination.
People have a lot of personal freedom in this part of the world - liberty mixed with a touch of socialism. It works well for us - probably a cultural thing, as the US was forged from different beginnings, so maybe the two cannot be compared.
Remember, the Greeks suffered under a particularly nasty fascist regime, and also shy away from government control. In that respect, they are no different from folks who lived behind the Iron Curtain, but found a different solution :)
LDT, your examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and such are really interesting, I never thought about it from this angle. Thank you for that, I will definitely ponder about it for a while. :) And yes, your notion about confiscating fruits of labor being an unsustainable model sounds about right for me.
Curious Traveller, I see where are you coming from, and I agree with you for the most part, yet it is still in terms of same old isms that every one of us understands differently. Let's try to get rid of them and think in more definable terms :)
Real Estate, long gone the times I believed I had to stand for something. Nowadays I am just trying to comfortably survive :) I too am watching Europe with interest, especially Scandinavian countries - because so far they were the only good argument in favor of socialism. If they fail too, this will mean they too mortgaged their future to sustain the today socialist model, and finally prove to me socialism is a dead end. And yes, I don't think I can trust government on anything, let alone my well being :)
I'm all for dropping the "isms". Why do people find it so hard to just let others live the way they want to as long as they aren't hurting anybody? Freedom of choice should allow us to build our houses on that slope if we want to. Whether it's smart or not, it would be our conscious choice.
I look forward to the day when any legal/government regulations are guidelines only and everyone just relaxes and lives their lives as happily as possible without feeling the need to control others.
Okay, maybe that's Utopian thinking but I would still love to see the 'live and let live' mentality at work a little more. I am definitely not saying that people should go out and murder and pillage, not at all! I'm just saying that if we all take responsibilites for our own wellbeing and leave others to care for theirs, maybe some folks wouldn't feel the need to control others.
Love my rose-colored glasses!
Barbara, thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately based on my thoughts and experience I have to disagree to most of what you said. I don't fear the government, I know how to live with abusive one, I did it for quite some time. Yet I do think that the less government we have, the more enjoyable our life is. And I do think that whatever government we have, its first and most important goal is to grow. So, government goal is in contradiction with my goal of enjoying my life. Hence me being an enemy of it :)
LDT answered you, and I mostly agree to his answers. Just want to re-iterate that I think firms of the size "too big too fail" are not possible without government support, so all those monsters that we as taxpayers are trying to save now at the expense of our kids and grandkids - they all were created by stupid government regulations, and in that sense they are the product of having government.
There are many forces in our world, and I don't see why one wants to talk about say social unrest being something that interferes with free markets. Even at the time of unrest people have to eat and such, and unrest is usually directed against some kind of government action or inaction, so if you don't have a government, you don't have an unrest :) Somalia is an interesting example, and in fact I am watching with interest to see what outcome their current situation will bring. As for Albania - last time I checked this country had a government.
Hi Sufi my friend, glad to see you stopping by yet again, and thanks for your good word :) Yes, I know your Greek argument, we were discussing it several times already. Greeks definitely have deeper roots than say Americans, but does this make them any smarter on average? May be, but likely not a lot - or would not have allowed the fascist regime to emerge in the country. Now they have even more experience, yet again it does not guarantee from mistakes. I don't pretend to be smarter than your average Greek, and I can be of course wrong in my thoughts as I many times was, but right now I tend to think that they are mistaken abut government run healthcare. Based on my experience in several countries, and my quite a few thoughts on the matter, I strongly believe that whatever government does could be done way cheaper and efficient privately :)
Hi Herald, yes, I too would love to see more of us letting others live as they want :)
Misha, I hear you about the insurance companies, but at least here in the States, insurance is one of the most heavily regulated industries. I took my life insurance provider test several years ago and you don't have to look far to see how the laws are written to benefit the insurance company over the customer. That article, however, supposes that insurance companies are forced to compete in a free market, with all the benefits a free market provides (better service for lest cost). While those companies would have to set some kind of ground rules, without the power of government, how could they force people to pay for their services, if people felt they were getting a raw deal?
Don't forget that since they are competing, if one or a group tries to corner the market, the rest of the players will move to block them. After all why ruin a good thing?
As for prosecution of criminals, we'll the security companies would rely on custom and reputation in order to convince people to be civil towards one another. That and the fact that any fines assessed would go to the grieved party rather than the State will make a significant difference. And that article doesn't cover all the bases, how could it? I myself am not sure how it will all work out, but some smart businessperson will and will do very well for themselves marketing that service. It's the framework that allows market forces to have their effect that is important.
Sufi, Fredrich Bastait, a noted free market economist of the early 19th century wrote that economics is not only the analysis of what is seen, but also that which is not seen. For example, you have socialist programs in Greece. Have you ever asked yourself what could have been had those programs not been started? Could there have been a better way to meet those needs? Is the efficency of those programs greater using governmental methods or free market methods and why? What happens when a government employee makes a mistake? Is it investigated or swept under the rug? Most people for bigger government never give satisfactory answers to those questions.
Well, yes LDT, theoretically, taken in isolation from other factors, this insurance model may seem to work. However practically, I am having a hard time trying to imagine AIG, GE, and State Farm competeing to satisfy me as a protection customer. LOL
How are we going to move from from a government state to stateless territories, even assuming for a sake of simplicity that there is no opposition to this and say the territory of USA unilateraly decided to do so?
Hi Guys - another fascinating debate
Again, the system evolved just how the Greeks want it - if they wanted a free market, they would have it. I guess it comes back to the point from the last comment - it is cultural. The Greek culture suits the system, built around socialist (cultural, not political) principles.
The US was built around a 'frontier mentality,' so I am beginning to understand why you guys have a different outlook. Maybe the free market might work there, but we are happy with the way that things are, and no wondering about 'what might have beens' will change that.
Interestingly, Misha, about the fascism - Greece fought a long and bitter civil war after WWII. If that had gone the other way, Greece would have joined you behind the iron curtain. We could be having a completely different conversation, now.
One point that I just came across on one of Ivan's hubs, a comment made by urimidden. The key is that the Greek government is still accountable to the people - it knows that if it begins infringing upon liberties or freedom, the people will burn parliament down. Would an insurance, health or retail giant be the same - no, there is no accountability and no control by the people. I think that whatever -ism, if the people have no control, we are screwed.
"Would an insurance, health or retail giant be the same - no, there is no accountability and no control by the people. I think that whatever -ism, if the people have no control, we are screwed."
Sure there's a remedy. You stop buying what that company sells. Every company in a free market, no matter what they sell has to be mindful of customer satisfaction. Look at the US auto industry. They're trying so hard to emphasize everything but customer satisfaction, that the day is not far off where they will fail.
"I am having a hard time trying to imagine AIG, GE, and State Farm competing to satisfy me as a protection customer."
That's because in return for regulating the industry, the government erects barriers to entry, stifling competition. That's why you can't trust them now. Without those barriers to entry, AIG, State Farm and others would either have to do business very differently or they wouldn't be in business.
Hi ledefensetech,
Again - no interest in a free market, as far as health and education goes (we have debated this to death on HP!). I fail to see how the free market system will improve life in any way. It may be different in the US - I have never been - but the last thing that anybody wants to see over here is corporations running hospitals. I can't see how customer satisfaction applies to a hospital - if I break my leg, I am not going to shop around for the best deal. I want it fixed - simple :)
Free market theories are all well and good but, again, we are perfectly happy with the system that we have here. Why change it?
Yes Sufi, I have no doubt the system is the way Greeks want it to be. I would even dare to say that Americans or Brits on average are satisfied with their respective systems too - or there would have been angry mobs on the streets already. People in their core are more or less the same all over the World, there are quantative differences like in the anger threshold, but qualitatively we all are very similar in that regard.
So yes, Greeks are happy with that, and government is doing what it is told to do by people. Does it guarantee this setup is the most efficient? No way. Those same Greeks, just a few thousand years back, did explain very clear to the whole world that democracy is always about voting to the office the one who promises the least work and the most pay. And that democracy invariably leads to tyranny. Sending you to Plato and Socrates... :)
This was not my point though. What I was trying to say is that I think using private companies to cover their medical needs would have served them with higher quality healthcare at lower cost.
And no, I do not buy into cultural differences argument. Well, not exactly. Cultural differences do exist, and they may to some extent change the attitude toward one or another solution - but they don't change the core laws of human nature actions, and therefore private entrepreneurship is likely to be more successful than government, because the former is efficient, and the later is wasteful.
Talking about fascism - I told this several times already - I do not see a big difference between fascism and communism. In fact I do not see any difference between fascist and communist economy, the only difference is a type of a scapegoat to channel populace anger. Rich in case of communism, and some kind of foreigner in case of fascism. So it does not really matter what side of curtain they were, our conversation would have been more or less the same. :)
And it does not really matter that government is accountable to people or not - read Plato :) As for insurance giant - I think LDT's answer covers this pretty good :)
LDT, yes, I do understand that under free market those monsters would reform themselves and likely to break themselves down significantly, cause the size they are now is not manageable. Yet this was not the question exactly, sorry I probably was not too clear. What I really meant is a transition period, when we really have AIG and such, how we are going to handle this?
Sufi, again to your second post. You seem to equate free market to corporations. I disagree. Corporations are a product of government regulations, and as such they can't be a part of a free market...
good
Misha, I'm glad to see you making this point about corporations.
Got another link for ya, Misha: http://mises.org/books/aswegomarching.pdf. That book is what really opened my eyes to the similarities and differences between centrally controlled economies (Communism, Fascisim) and free markets. Sufi, I'd really recommend that you take a look.
It's not that any type of market is immoral or evil by nature, what makes it so is the ways in which an economic model allows or denies people to pursue their wishes. So sorry, but any controlled or planned economy (better than using -isms, good idea Misha) limits what people can acheive.
Sufi you may be happy with what you currently have, but that may be because you have no concept of the alternative. That's not unusual with the mass of humanity. The one elemental truth is that everyone does things in their own self-interest, whatever that may be. Should't we structure society in such a way that people may satisfy that self-interest?
It all boils down to this ... when government oversteps the boundaries set up to restrain it (i.e., the Constitution), it matters not which way it steps. Whether is steps to heighten security by subjugating individual liberty ("Those who would sacrifice liberty for security are entitled to neither," Ben Franklin), or it is to improve the living conditions of one part of society by taking money from another, party designation matters not. Our government was a response to the distant tyranny of an absolute ruler/monarch who used the colonies as a means to finance the motherland ... and our ancestors sacrificed to break those bonds. Now we place them on ourselves, and institutionalize them for our children. We are to blame for how our parties behave. We are to blame for how our liberty has been suppressed. We are to blame for continually electing men and women whose sole expression of leadership is the accrual and maintenance of political power (e.g., Arlen Spector, who will do anything to stay in power ... even change parties after nearly 3 decades of purporting his steadfast resolve for his Republicanism). We are to blame for the media, and the one-sidedness of all networks, be it CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. We are to blame for not fixing it. Our recent history provides a great example of the personal sacrifice one generation was willing to make for all that would follow. How about we make the same sacrifice to fix the system we have for those that follow us?
If I may quote issues veritas, "there has to be some reference points that are constants." The reference points that are constants are in the U.S. Constitution. The problem I think the conservatives have is how far away from this constant that we are getting.
Hi folks - a little busy at the moment, so I will try to be swift (maybe only half a hub worth of comments!).
Misha - I will get back to you on the accountability of government. I know Plato and Socrates well. In a nutshell, I pretty much believe that any pure system leads to the same end, whether libertarianism or socialistic, hence my support for a genuine multi-party system. Just to make clear to ledefense, because we have not had the pleasure of a discussion before - whilst I believe in universal healthcare and education, I am not a 'tax the crap out of the rich' type of person and believe in a flat rate tax.
I am not completely against the free market, but I stand by the corporations arguement. Chile is one of the few examples that we have of a free market system, started during the time of Pinochet. It failed - money became concentrated in the hands of a few and the country declined.The number of people in extreme poverty doubled, from 20% to 40%, the national debt tripled, the infrastructure crumbled and the environment was devastated in the drive for profit. Not the greatest advert for deregulation and free markets.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oT0Sz
Secondly, this assumption that health care would be better served by private enterprise is incorrect. Again, Chile tried this and the system failed, leaving many people unable to afford coverage. No coverage meant no treatment for many sectors of society, and an increase in severe epidemics. A Harvard study showed that insurance companies tailor their coverage to low risk categories, leaving high risk groups uninsured. Not a world that I wish to live in, I am afraid.
http://hsphsun3.harvard.edu/phcf/Papers/Abnormal%2
Concenrating upon profit ultimately means that the quality of health care is affected - add to that the fact that drugs companies and health insurance companies are renowned for operating cartels and monopolies, and the ideal is bleak. The free market relies upon reasoned choice and the opportunity to shop around for the best deal. Neither of these conditions is satisfied by health-care - it is different from buying tomatoes in the market. The UK government attempted to bring privately run hospitals into the healthcare network, and they were a complete shambles, expensive and inefficient.
No system is perfect but, again, the one that we have works. We spend much less than the US, per capita. If you guys think that it is the best system for the US, go ahead. For the rest of us, we will continue to pay for a nationalised service, quite happily.
le - I understand many things and I do have a concept of the alternative - it is not an ideology that I have any time for. Again, why change a lifestyle that we enjoy - we manage to satisfy our self-interests by having a healthy and well educated society, although the sunshine and fine wine helps, too. We have a great deal of personal freedom here, thanks, and have no intention of letting multi-national corporate interests destroy that :)
EDIT - will take a look at the book, although it may be a few days. I have to start the next assignment :)
LOL Guys, I will reply to everybody later, just wanted to quickly address a couple of points while I have a moment :)
Sufi, please, I just told you that corporations are not a free market, quite the contrary, it is government regulations creation. And neither me, nor Aya, nor LDT ever said we are pro corporations - we are definitely against :)
Similar thing about healthcare - you keep addressing us as if we are pro current USA system. We are not! But we don't think government operated centralized healthcare is a better solution. And no, there are no free market on healthcare in USA, it is heavily regulated by government already.
I have to look at what is going on in Chili currently before I could possibly answer your comments about them.
No worries Misha - I just realized how long that last comment was - sorry about that!
Please do Sufi, I think you will find that a lot of the things you blame capitalism for is in reality the fault of syndicates and cartels. I would like to make the point, much as Misha has tried to do, that cartels and syndicates cannot exist without government approval.
Your discussion of Pinochet is right on about the effects of his "reforms", but his reforms were anything but free market. As for health care not being something you choose like food or clothing or anything else; you're incorrect. Much of economic thought is, or should be, about people making decisions. For example, people can choose to live life in a healthful manner. Or they can choose not to. No amount of helathcare spending in the world is going to change that.
Even with people who have some sort of genetic disorder, that rule still stands. Their decisions will have to be different than other people, but what's wrong about that?
I look at something like the UK's board that decides whether or not they will pay for treatment as an evil. They claim that it is cost effective, but try telling someone who has a terminal illness that. Should they die because someone has decided it's too expensive to keep them alive? That should be an individual decision and something an individual should be responsible for.
K, I am back.
Gpetrou85, thanks for stopping by :)
Aya, yes, I think it is critical mislabeling :)
LDT, thanks again for the link, will go there, but it will take a while. Personally I don't remember any particular book that opened my eyes in that regard, just the sum of my life experience, reading, and thinking.
I mostly agree to what you are saying here to Sufi, with one small but important correction. I tend to think that everyone does things in their own PERCEIVED self-interest, which may be quite different from their real interest...
Also, wanted to tell you for while, but kept forgetting. You might enjoy checking out the hubs of Tom Mullen http://hubpages.com/profile/tom+mullen
GavainM, I feel your pain. Every thinking person in this country feels it. Very few have courage to blame themselves, kudos to you, and I think it is the only attitude that leads to real solution. Yet I disagree on the solution itself - looks like any government is not a solution. Even with all the checks and balances built into American system we managed to screw it up. It is not fixable. Time to think of a different design...
Estopher, thanks for stopping by :)
Sufi, now I got to your long comment - and come on, its length is not a problem at all, I enjoy conversing to you :) I did not look at Chili yet, it may take a while, but I definitely will.
You sort of lost me on jump from libertarianism (ism again!) to multi-party system, and I hope you will elaborate on that paragraph, which you seemed to promise :)
I mentioned already corporations and current state of USA healthcare, so I hope we are clear on this. Now, I fail to see how health care is different from buying tomatoes economically. I personally always try to get the best healthcare available around whenever I have a need in it, even if it costs more. And yes, I do shop around for that. And I urge you to do the same - health is not something to play silly games with.
I am not saying that I know how exactly healthcare should be reformed. But I am saying that under government healthcare system I did not have a choice of the best available healthcare, and I want to have one. Others might opt out for the cheapest one, that is their problem not mine.
Now, there is one aspect of healthcare that does not fit here - emergency. Obviously you can't shop around when you are bleeding to death. I can think about some kind of emergency squad paid for by voluntarily donations, could be other solutions too. I have no doubt eventually market will figure out the best way to do this.
And sorry, your argument "don't fix what is not broken" may be valid in Greece, but looks pretty ignorant from here. The system IS broken and is in the process of falling apart as we speak, and we are trying to figure out how to rebuild it better. Which is likely to be a futile exercise, but still entertaining :)
Hi Folks - Thanks for the reply, Misha - that has certainly cleared a few things up!
Going to try and find a couple of hours to read Le's paper over the weekend. Should be interesting. I have not had excessive coffee, so will keep the comment a little shorter today!
Le - your last point - my mother is one of those with a genetic disorder, so I will end that part of the conversation here, if you don't mind. :)
Misha - I think we talked about the two party thing before - personally, I don't think that any pure -ism works. Put it this way - I would not want to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same as me - that would be too much like Plato's flawed Republic.
Personally, I believe that a pendulum swinging between two or more parties seems to keep a better balance. Sadly, even this model has proved to have faults - democrats/republicans and conservatives/labour all state pretty much the same thing. There is no voter choice any more.
I am unsure if we can ever return to that system now, or if the damage is too deep - it is now too expensive for another politcal party to evolve and challenge the established ones. I am open to suggestions on that particular issue!
Misha - The last paragraph - I think that that is the sort of thing that you could only understand if you visited here (and vice versa). This area of rural Greece is, believe it or not, very libertarian. A large percentage of everything that we do is kept within the area - a little like TMG's agrarian socialism, which may be where libertarianism and socialism actually overlap - on the small scale.
Certainly agree with you about the system - it is failing but, at the end of the day, we could survive here if civilization falls - we can grow our own food. A city-dweller may have a completely different outlook - I remember Aya's father saying something about that.
Any of you are more than welcome over here for a visit - it may act as a good model for your rebuilding plans!
Hi Sufi,
Glad we got at least some of those miscommunications out of the way :)
I too was thinking about ideal state model for quite some time - one or many parties, republic, monarchy, etc. - all sorts of variations. For the most of my life really. And only recently, a year ago or so, all my thoughts started to point in one direction - there is no such thing as efficient and effective government. No matter what form of it you take, all of them are flawed by design, because the core interest of governing and governed are different.
This really puts us at a mercy of the person that rules the state, and currently fashionable democracy model effectively makes sure we invariably pick the worst possible person for that role. Why? I send you to Plato again. According to this same Plato it leads to tyranny eventually, and I think I do agree to him. :)
The only possibility that state would work properly at least time to time lies in the monarchy, were ruler is chosen not for reasons having nothing to do with their talking abilities and don't have to promise anything in advance - this ensures that time to time a random worthwhile person comes to rule the country.
But the rest of the time it is no better than democracy, and lately I am starting to look in the anarchy direction with some hope. This model does promise some improvement, if we only have the guts to implement it. I do have to iron out a lot of details about it, yet currently it is the model I consider being a solution to our problems.
We definitely can survive civilization crash in rural areas should it come, be it Greece or USA or Russia for that matter. But we will lose centralized health insurance though ;)
Sufi, sorry to hear about your mother, but I would like to make a couple of points if I may. I'll use myself as an example because I suffer from a chronic disease, diabetes. The good news is that if I act in a healthful way, I can stop or reverse the damage I've already done to my body. The bad news is that it takes discipline and I have to forego many of the little pleasures that I used to indulge in.
I've been out of insurance for several months now and the biggest thing I've noticed in my behavior is that I am much more likely to act in a healthful manner, i.e. diet, exercise, etc. Because I am responsible for the costs associated with my condition, I am much more likely to act in a way that minimizes costs associated with diabetes. Thus, I'm not only assured less costly medical bills, but also a longer life as I keep my condition under control. Under insurance or universal health care, for what is universal health care but insurance writ large?, the costs associated with making healthful or unhealthful decisions are spread across a population making is more difficult to assess the true costs of decisions regarding personal health. In effect, since someone else is paying most or all of the cost, I don't have as much concern over my behavior. I will be more likely to act in an unhealthful manner, raising costs for everyone, but only by a little. Unfortunately when you socialize costs over an entire population, everyone soon begins to act in an unhealthful manner raising the costs for everyone almost exponentially.
Now in regards to genetic disorders, a free market may not seem like the way to go. After all, with some disorders, the population is so small that economies of scale will not come into play. I would, however, like to introduce you to St. Jude Children's Hospital: http://www.stjude.org/stjude/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid This hospital has a foundation that actively solicits donations from anyone and everyone to fund research in the hospital. They are so successful that nobody is turned away because of inability to pay. I suggest that in a free market healthcare system, these sorts of hospitals would explode, not only for oncology but for every conceivable illness. There would probably also be centers that specialized in your mother's condition as well. Not only that, but because the hospital needs to trumpet their successes, they will be more likely to engage in treatments that will prove successful so they can ensure the constant flow of funds into the hospital. In effect the hospital has in incentive to do the best job that it can.
In the end that's what it comes down to regarding healthcare. Who has the incentive to do the responsible thing? Is it individuals? Is it providers? Is it both? If you can find a system that encourages both individuals and providers to be more mindful of health, then is that not the best of both worlds? I suggest that the best way to do that is through free market enterprise.
In regards to government, I recently came across the "rule of two" that states it takes government twice as much money, resources and time to do something it takes the private sector to do. The reason? Profit and loss is the only way to accurately choose between an infinity of choices. This was the mechanism that Ludwig von Mises used to prove that socialism or communism couldn't work. See:http://mises.org/story/3428, for an analysis as to why this is, especially in healthcare.
On a personal note, I'd love to visit Greece and see how you live out in the rural areas. I've been planning to set up a homestead of my own in Wyoming, hopefully if I do well enough at Hubpages, I can make that dream a reality. The only problem I see with a homestead is that it will take me away from the things I do really, really well. That's the problem with the "local" movement. It destroys the division of labor so essential to well functioning markets.
Hi Guys
Misha - looks like we are on a similar wavelength again. I agree fully about the tyranny thing. I was always a supporter of the two-party system because I always thought that it was the 'least bad' of all the options. At least there was some chance of changing things at the balance box. Sadly, all of the political parties are now in thrall to corporate interests, so it looks like your analysis is playing out as you feared.
Le - Sorry to hear about your diabetes - that requires a lot of lifestyle changes, so glad to hear that you are taking positive action.
As you have probably noticed, healthcare is a little passion of mine! I could not get the link to open, but did a little research about Mises. I am afraid that I am still not convinced.
Put it this way, I do a lot of medical writing for a living, about everything from nursing practices to national strategies. I have read literally hundreds of papers, and have yet to find one that even comes close to questioning my views.
Private healthcare always ends up in two places -
1) The hospital becomes run by incompetents with little knowledge of medical reality. Patient care suffers - I cannot accept a system where a doctor has to make a decision upon finance rather than need.
2) Profit comes before patient care - at best you have a two-tier system, more usually, patients are treated as commodities to be passed through the system quickly, with little aftercare. Value added services are added at every level, and patients are invariably given treatments that they do not need. This squeezes extra money from people who cannot afford it. This is before drug companies and insurance become involved.
We have reached part of my ethical paradigm - I believe that patient care comes first, always, and have seen no empirical evidence that a free market system will match with that paradigm. The Mises treatise is an interesting theory, but I have seen nothing to suggest that it will work. I hold to the firm belief that profit and patients are mutually exclusive, and care will suffer. A view not built upon stubborness, but research.
As for people taking care of themselves, there is some merit in that, although that does not help people in many situations. In addition, much of the blame for poor health lies with a stressful lifestyle and advertisers - they use a lot of subtle psychological tricks to promote their harmful products. If you want suggest ways of putting a stop to that, I will happily subscribe. :)
In a nutshell, I strongly believe that healthcare provision is a right, and have no evidence that the free market will match with that view. You may have a different view of rights, but ethics usually ends up in an extremely long and protracted discussion that ultimately leads to no overall change in view.
In other areas, I am a little more open to suggestion :)
The homestead thing sounds wonderful - the small scale economics is more a response to what happens if this economic crisis goes really badly! You are welcome in Greece anytime - life is good here. Misha is a good man to know for how to use Hubpages!
LOL I feel as a bystander, cause can't really add anything to your discussion guys - but am watching it with interest.
May be I just can confirm that you last links do not work for me either LDT, you need to fix that please :)
Hmmmm. Strange. The link wont work for me either, try www.mises.org/story/3428.
I worked in a state run mental hospital and that's why I cannot in good conscience agree with your first statement. It's been my experience that people rise to the level of their incompetence when you're talking about a governmental or big business type structure.
The main reason we disagree, Sufi, is because you see profit as something bad, nasty or, in some cases like healthcare, evil. On the contrary, I feel that profit and loss is the only way to ensure that you are doing the right thing.
Free markets are, in essense, the only fully participatory democracy we will ever see. People exhange labor for money, that money is then used to purchase goods and services by people, for their own wants and needs. Each person every day makes those decisions, based on their own value system. What could be more fair?
Also the main problem we have, especially in the research you've done, is that health care has never really been allowed to be free. I'm not sure about other countries, but at the beginning of the 20th century, allopathic (symptom curing docs, for lack of a better term) petitioned state governments to 1. outlaw all other doctors, 2. create state medical boards that would license all hospitals and doctors and 3. appoint members of the American Medical Association to those same boards, all of whom would be allopathic doctors. One of the first things these boards did was to license all existing medical schools and they have never licensed a new medical school since. The second thing they did was to limit the number of licenses that would be granted to doctors in the states.
Now in 1900 we had about 500,000 doctors, as of the beginning of 2007, we had about 600,000 praticing doctors in this country. Over the same length of time our population has tripled, massive migrations have taken place within the States and there are many more specialties today than there were in 1900, which has further diminished the pool of doctors who go into general practice.
All of these restrictions have had the effect of limiting the supply of medical care. This isn't free market, it's a market comprised of cartels, syndicates and monopolies. If virtually any other group tried to get themselves appointed as guardians of whatever field they were in, we'd rightly claim a conflict of interest.
To take on universal health care, you may be correct in saying that in Greece, at this time, things are going fine. Sooner or later, however, that is going to change. When Social Security was started here in the 30's it was great when it was new. People who didn't have to pay into it got benefits and the cost was pushed to the next generation. And so it went until today, when we can no longer push the costs to the next generation, my generation will be the ones to pay for all of this. So it is when any collectivist scheme to spread the costs among society. Sooner or later you run out of other people's money to spend and everyone is poorer as a result.
Misha, would you say this described the Soviet Union during the 70's and especially the 80's? The Politburo had run out of ways to fleece the people and became bankrupt due to it?
Sufi, about the homestead, it's a last resort kind of thing. Since I believe collectivists of any stripe are going to be calling the shots for a while, I feel it's best to look towards hard commodities, land, gold, etc. for safety. It's not what I'd like to do, but a prudent man plans for the future. During our last major economic crisis in the 1970's there was a huge back to the land movement. I expect to see something similar to that happening here soon.
Hi LDT
Looks like we are getting to the best part of the conversation, where we find that we agree on a lot of things. Your first statement, about incompetence is a good one - I worked in the corporate world for many years, and met some of the worst elements of humanity.
I am going to throw healthcare aside for a moment - on a lot of the other things, we broadly agree. Believe it or not, I do not actually see profit as evil, or even bad. Writing online is pretty much as free market as it gets - I sell a product and am paid according to quality and demand. Therefore, I am trying to make a profit, so have no problem with that. I agree with you a lot more than you think in that respect. I am a flat tax proponent, and do not agree with taxing the crap out of the rich - I do share your views on rewards for failure, as with the bailouts!
Bringing healthcare back in, for me, there has been absolutely no viable study into the merits of free market healthcare. There are many theories, but no evidence that they will work - I am not convinced. As discussed above, patient care is first and foremost to my personal 'code,' and I believe that profit conflicts with this. Stating that the markets will sort out the wheat from the chaff is one thing, but a large amount of people will suffer from inadequate healthcare whilst this happens. This is assuming that it works, and I suspect that a lot of people will be given procedures that they do not actually need - this happens in many hospitals internationally. To me, doctors treat according to need, not ability to pay, rendering the argument unacceptable to me.
Personally, I prefer to stick with the tried and tested, what I have seen with the evidence of my own eyes and research. My partner worked in the National Health Service for many years, and it is generally very good.Very few people fall through the cracks, and nobody is turned away, despite the tiny amount of cases reported in the press.
I understand what you say about an increasingly aging population, but that is going to place a strain on any system, which is the next problem faced if we escape this economic crisis. I do not believe that free-market is the answer - there will be a system of those who can afford care and those who cannot. Healthcare is the one part that I will not compromise upon, until I see some real evidence that your approach will work.
With you on the investing in land - you can always do something with it to add value, even if just planting a few vegetables. Certainly a wise investment.
Of course we agree on a lot of things when we get down to brass tacks. We both are, after all, human beings and I would also add compassionate human beings. Your example of corporate society also makes my point for me. Such a culture would never be able to exist without massive government intervention.
Let me use the pornography industry as an example. For cultural reasons it's one of the least regulated industries out there. If you set aside the content and look at it as an industry you see several interesting trends. The first major trend is that they have been at the head of every innovation in digital entertainment for the last 30 years, from adopting VCR tech to DVD and the Internet. They've had to, for to do otherwise would doom them to extinction. Look at how many companies that started the industry and how many are in business today. Yet the market itself has never been bigger.
During the last round of bailouts, two of the largest pornographers, Larry Flint and Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame asked to be bailed out because they can no longer innovate and compete with new firms in the industry! They've in effect become too large to survive. If they can't restructure and innovate, then they should go out of business.
How many big corporations in America could stand to compete in a free market, how many of them would be taken apart by younger, more agile competitors? Who would win? The customers of the industry, in lower costs and better service. Free markets serve as a crucible that forces firms to become better and charge less.
There isn't anything about health care that makes it any different. Regulations have the effect of strangling competition, thus causing prices to rise and service to suffer. Since we don't have any societies in which health care is under a free market, I can only use several examples to prove my point.
In my last post I mentioned the fact that the number of doctors have not increased with our population here in the US. One of the major effects of this has been to change the patient-doctor realtionship. In the early part of the 20th century, doctors made housecalls. They had to, because there were too many options for people to take if the doctor didn't get on a horse and visit his patients. In fact, automobiles should have decreased the costs of travel and made it more likely that doctors would visit their patients, yet over time, patients were forced to visit doctors in their offices. What happened? Well since the number of doctors was limited, soon the economics favored doctors over patients. Rather than being forced to travel to work, doctors now had the clout, due to less competition, to force people to come to them. Do you think that people could get better care at home, surrounded by family and friends, rather than at a remote location, by strangers? In this case customers of the medical industry suffer with lost time, thus raising the costs of illness.
What you don't get about the free market is that everyone is served according to what they are able to afford. It only makes sense. That's not to say that the poor are left to their own devices. Philanthropists have always donated to worthy causes, thus the poor would get better care than you would think, for they are never really thrown back only on their own resources. Unless taxes are high. Then the rich don't have as much money to devote to philanthropy.
The biggest problem I have with social anything, is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money. Then where are you? You can no longer gouge the rich because you don't have any. Since you've spent so much time telling people that their unlimited desires could be met, people are not willing to face reality. Faced with the rationing of services, they will act with violence. The aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans makes my point, I believe.
As to the land argument, yes, land ownership is one of the only ways to guarantee freedom. God, guns and gold have been the triumvirate of the US in years past and only by accepting that fact can we stop the erosion of libery we have in our country today. Stil it's a last resort. You're a writer. Would you agree that anything that takes you away from getting better at your craft is a detriment to you? Would it not be better to take some of the fruits of your labor and pay others for what you need so that you can get better at your chosen craft? Do we not all benefit when you can become a better writer? That's the magic of division of labor and that is the key ingredient of a free market. I'm going to get a homestead because I don't underestimate the enemies of liberty and assume things will get much worse before they get any better.
Sorry guys, I was off for the weekend, now I am back - sort of :)
OK LDT, this link works, will give it a read. I am more or less on the same page with you on the health care, experiencing first hand soviet healthcare and now comparing it to American one. With all the obvious shortcomings American healthcare has, its quality is still way better than Soviet was. Yet people will argue this is because Soviets were stupid commies and could not make it working. Until they get their own centralized health care LOL
And yes, I think you can depict the collapse of Soviet Union in these terms. There was really nothing left to live off. Of course it did not relate only to healthcare, in fact it probably was one of the least worries at the time. :)
Sufi, turning to aging population, one way or another I am sure all governments will fail on elder care obligations, like Soviet government did. It's just too much a burden to carry with coming demographics figures. It will be harsh. It will be a harsh lesson on never delegating care tasks to government, cause it invariably fails when you need it most. Americans (and westerners alike) will change their lifestyle from small family to extended family as a result of this, cause this is the only way to provide elder care without ruining the economy.
Hi Guys,
I have a lot of articles to write, so will try to keep it short (every time I say that, it still ends up as a Hub!). I think that we are at the point where we have to agree to disagree about the healthcare - it is starting to become circular. Basically, my position is that there has not been enough research into free-market healthcare to convince me that patient care will not suffer.
However, if somebody produces good quality research, I will be open minded enough to analyse it fairly - that is as far as I will go, but I think that is a positive outcome.
LDT - God, guns and gold - here it is philosophy, debate and olives! Your last comment is very US-centric, so I have no opinion on that one - only that I hope that it works out for you. We have a lot of liberty here, and the writing is coming along nicely, thanks :)
Misha - Certainly, the extended family argument applies here - the Greeks still have extended families, so are hopefully ahead of the curve.
Anyway, Thanks for starting this Hub, Misha - it has been enlightening. Personally, I agree with you about the -isms. This thing that is happening now is not socialism, fascism or capitalism. It is a new thing, and I do not like it very much. I used to watch all the cyberpunk films, like Bladerunner, and fear that life is about to start imitating art.
I have a sneaking feeling that you were ahead of us all on that one!
Sufi, I've heard that about Greeks, it was especially evident in ancient Byzantium. Still our position is a good one when you realize just who settled the US. Expatriates, failed revolutionaries, simpe people who just wanted a shot at the good life.
I'm glad to hear that the Greeks still have extended families. Here, because of the boom after WW II and the rise of freeways, those bonds have weakened. That's something we're going to regret over the next few years. I'm sure that will stand you in good stead whatever comes.
Still, it's not all doom and gloom here. It seems there is a nascent libertarian organization going on here in response to some of the unprecedented actions being taken by our government. I would like to visit Greece one day, just for the historical value alone, although that would not be my only reason. It must be interesting to live near such ancient examples of human civilization. Although I have been to Teotihuacan in Mexico, some structures in Greece predate that by centuries.
Understood - the US is a young country and is still making its own way in the world. That is not a 'snobby' European attitude, because I respect immensely the American drive, sense of justice and fierce independence. Most Europeans sort of see the US as a 'younger brother' who has gone on to achieve great things.
I hope to visit one day - maybe that is the only way to fully understand your and Misha's point of view. That may be a while though - a historical tour of Iran, the Middle East and India awaits, once we have the money.
You are welcome in Greece anytime - apart from the history, you will see how Greek society works. I suspect that you may enjoy the fierce political debates that go on in every taverna across the land!
This hub is as interesting as it is daunting to read in one sitting. For now I will only say that it is OUTSTANDING. Once I have had a chance to read all of the responses, I will write something worth while. This is one of the best debates I have seen on these very important issues anywhere.
LOL You managed to be very brief here Sufi :) Well, it is not the first time we agree to disagree - but looks like every time we get a bit closer to mutual understanding, which I definitely like. Yes, there are no research of a free market healthcare, cause there are no free markets, and all we can do so far is to use our brains, common sense and life experience to arrive at prediction of how it will or will not work. :)
Yes, most of "under-developed" countries do have extended family culture, and other traditional things that will definitely help a lot with the coming global crisis. Which makes me questioning the validity of modern western values btw, and putting in quotes words under-developed, cause they may as well prove to be properly developed as compared to unproportionally inflated "developed" countries...
And thanks for your good words, they mean a lot for me coming from you, and you know you are always welcome on my hubs, and if you happen to travel to DC while I am still here - be my guest :)
Trooper, thanks for stopping by, and for your good words. Hope you enjoyed reading the comments as I did :)
I'm an anti-ismist!
Hi kephrira, I can totally relate :)
Wow, Misha, I have been reading this all morning with all the comments. This subject has really stirred up the contrasting points of view.
Going back to my grandparents and great-grandparents days when there was far less government regulations and taxes, things seemed to work better for everyone. As you have pointed out, families, churches and charity minded folks helped those who may have been down on their luck for some reason or another. Doctors made house calls and goods and services were bartered in many cases. Even the doctors took things other than money if they knew the family was hard up for money.
Doctors knew their patients and family circumstances. They did not make the disproportionately larger salaries of today and went into medicine because they truly wanted to help people which was their prime focus. (Not to say that family practitioners make all that much money.........but as you or others have pointed out.......there are fewer family practitioners today. Most MD's go into specialties with higher pay as the reward).
During both world wars, the folks at home pitched in and worked together to help both our soldiers and also to help the war scarred countries get back on their feet.
One factor that probably played a big part (besides LESS government regulations) was the fact that our society had fewer people and it was more agrarian in nature. More self sufficient.
Almost everyone who could planted gardens. During the hard times city parks had dedicated areas for gardens. Food is one prime necessity!
Remember the days in history when anti-trust laws were in place? This was primarily to break monopolies which serve to destroy competition. What happened to that idea???
Now companies gobble up other companies (often in hostile takeovers) and competition is destroyed so that the remaining companies can charge whatever they wish for their goods and services, and the customers have less choice. The general outcome is that people lose jobs.
Companies that have inept leadership or are mismanaged should be allowed to fail. Others will take their place. Why reward them with a seemingly limitless supply of tax dollars that future generations will have to at some point repay? Of course, the supply is not limitless...our government is spending it as though it is.
I agree that the "ism's" are not helpful.
One would think that we could all learn from one another and pick the best models from everywhere to pattern a recovery from what is affecting this global downturn in economies.
One last point.........everyone's economies (no matter the ism) are all so interconnected today that it should be greater incentive than ever to work together.
Thanks for this great thought provoking hub.
Hi Peggy, thank you for coming, and even more thanks for taking time to read and put down you thoughts on the matter. I, too, often think of how it was done in previous times - well, in Russia this was before revolution, but still - it was pretty much what you just described here.
Doctors that heal, rich people that share, and poor people who appreciate the care... Now it is pretty much the opposite, and nobody have any idea where to start to bring it back to reason. What really scares me about current situation in America is the number of people who think that robbing rich is the solution. Russia went through this, and it cost us dozens of millions of lives and brought us nowhere. Yet Americans want to repeat this...
They fail to see that rich people still do share, and they probably would have shared much more if they were not forced to pay exorbitant taxes, both as individuals and companies. No appreciation, just hate, hate, hate... They scream about rich greed on every corner, yet don't realize that it is their own greed - demanding that their alms be guaranteed by government - that brought the country to its current pity state...
And yes, corporations are wasteful and inefficient - but who created them? Government! The regulations that were designed to do god knows what in reality created the form of company ownership that frees its owners from any personal liability, and we reap the rewards now...
We are on the same page, Misha, with regard to what has caused much of this current economic hardship. In America corporations are taxed at a much higher rate than what most other countries levy. Therefore is it any wonder they decide to close the doors in America and have their products made elsewhere? Can't blame them.
The rich always pay more proportionate taxes than the poor and there is also a limit before it affects what they give to charities or move their money out of the country into other more friendly and tax sheltered ways.
Those that have become dependent upon Government for their sole means of support when there are no mitigating circumstances (like illness or disability or loss of job).....shame on them! The work ethic has somehow gone astray and unless they are forced to once again become independent, they are a drag on society as a whole.
I am NOT taking about displaced workers who want to work but have lost jobs due to the current economy. They should receive unemployment benefits and schooling to be trained for other fields (especially in hard hit areas where one industry pretty much was the primary employer for most of the people) and if that means of employment has ended.
Private charities used to do the work that government welfare now attempts to tackle but the private charities worked more efficiently. There were not generations of people living on welfare back then. It was not made so easy for young girls to be having babies out of wedlock (and getting money from the government to help support those babies).
I am not in the mindset of punishing babies. Don't misunderstand. But BEFORE government aide, the girls did not CONTINUE having babies with no means of support. They were shunned, dishonored and made to feel shame. Now they are almost rewarded. Schools have daycares and they get money, foodstamps and WIC to help support them and their babies.
After primary things like getting enough food to eat, clothing and a safe abode..........education is the key to remedying most of society's ills.
Yep Peggy, we are definitely mostly on the same page, including education :)
misha you sure did a great dance for Cindy's birthday, I am happy to be your producer LMAO http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/14999?page=5#post1
ROFLMAO Deb, you got a talent for that stuff :)
Fun hub, I loved that you delved into the house / gravity thing, common sense. There is a right way, but we are so filled with political ideology that we don't see that the house needs to be built straight up! That's why I find my self in the middle, politically conservative and right leaning, yet supporting socialized medicine, (wrote about that on hp). Too many people pick up the flag and scream and shout in defense of it yet do not take the time to think about it. Great hub!
Hi Alexander, thanks for visiting :)
So, you are choosing the middle ground and building with a backwards slope, right? ;)
I am afraid you get the same old result...
oof, I get the implication, I'll bow to your humor :-)
LOL it's enjoyable to converse with people who have a sense of humor :)
Great points, Misha. We'll never get anywhere if we don't stop the name calling.
Thanks for visiting Dolores :)
Yeah, we don't need any conspiracy theories, we do all that stuff to ourselves with our own hands or rather heads :)
heya misha, you and I have been here before.
Now THAT is a great surprise, quite plesant at that :) I saw him posting recently and thought of you :)
Welcome back! - and I mean it :)
I know. I missed ya, you know. I don't know how many times I almost IMed you. I shall have to now. You are a great delight to converse with and quite the exercise in intelligent debate.
I try not to see him posting. Unhelpful. :p Still miss him too though. Good to see YOU again. :)
Missed ya too. :) Yet did not have enough time for your another site, sorry. But really definitely I wouldn't mind if you IM'd me, and yes - I like to converse to you too :) Come to forums, I already opened a thread in your honor ;)
I'll come say 'hi' there but I don't see a future in me haunting the forums. That was in fact the main cause of my departure. :P
LOL your choice of course. Then we will converse in comments :)
Wonderfully said. I have a few people to forward this to!!!
I adore that pic of you Misha makes me want to kiss ya, see I am a poet and I didn't know it (hugs)
Hello my dear ladies!
RGraf, please do, I appreciate it :)
Deb, we are getting into a dangerous territory here, what if I move to Australia? ;)
Many different names and isms have been used through the ages to identify the cause of such catastrophic occurrences as we are experiencing today. They are always caused by a very few individuals and bring great suffering and much death to very many. Monarchy, feudalism, theocracy, despotism, nazism, communism, etc, etc, etc. In case you don't understand this aspect of discussion, there must be descriptors, words that codify the meaning of concepts or condense large amounts of information into a single word or short phrase, in order for people to communicate information regarding the subject. If I wanted to talk about an activity in which several people threw, hit and caught a small, hard sphere with a large stick and ran from one designated point to another to score points, it would be much easier if I just said baseball.In this age, the name "capitalism" just happens to be the one that is applicable to the cause of the ongoing disaster. It’s just the current manifestation of the supremacist lust for domination. It embodies all the characteristics of greed, sloth, gluttony, deceit, venality, decadence, narrow-mindedness, shortsightedness, lack of conscience and compassion, arrogance, hubris, conceit, malevolence, degeneracy and downright hatefulness that have brought this kind of ruin on society throughout history. In order to avoid the necessity of listing all these adjectives in front of the word “people”, I am simply able to say capitalists in order to convey the same information in one word. I’m sure there are people out there who think of themselves as capitalists who aren’t all that bad. They’re not really capitalists. If you can't see the connection between what's going on and unregulated, free market capitalism then you are either incredibly imperceptive or in a state of complete denial.Would you prefer is I stopped calling it capitalism and made up a new name for it? I can't help it if capitalism is the ism that currently embodies the supremacist agenda. I didn’t make it so and you can’t make it not so.
Richard, as LDT pointed out on your hub already, your definition of capitalism is different from a generally accepted one, so there is no way most people (including me) can have a meaningful discussion with you on those issues. More, the very purpose of this hub is to try to get rid of those unclear definitions and discuss the topic in more transparent and unversally accepted terms :)
Then please define for me, with very specific and verifiable sources, what exactly you believe is the cause for "those issues". If capitalism and the greed and avarice it promotes is not the CURRENT source of the problem, what is?
cap·i·tal·ism
n.
An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
capitalism
Noun
an economic system based on the private ownership of industry
Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006
As for greed, you are at least as greedy as any rich person, if not more. You are the one who wants to rob rich people of their money. You are the one who wants to force them to share their money with you. You are the one who wants to control how they spend their money.
Doctor, heal yourself first, then look at others. Remove a log from your eye, it does not let you see clearly. :)
Um Misha, maybe he's the annointed one. Oh wait, you've actually known annointed ones before so you should be able to tell the fakes, sorry. :D
He definitely is. He would make for a good Dzerzhinsky :)
Misha, take it easy on poor Dzerzhinsky. I hear he was a pious man!
This did not stop him from killing quite a few for their money...
Just kidding, Misha.
You can't respond to my question so you resort to name-calling and slurs.
Very well.
I wish you well in whatever endeavors you choose.
I have all I require in my small home with my wife and grandson.
Best of luck to you.
I know Aya :)
Good luck with your log Richard :)
Yeah and Dughashvili was at one point a student in the seminary. Still it's a toss up who was worse.
Capitalism works well as long we can keep GREED out of it.
How do we control greed? Obama wants to control earnings of the wealthy.
Isn't that the start of socialism?
Greed has nothing to do with it. Captiatlism actually punishes greed if it gets so bad that the owner of a company tries to scam his customers. Reltaionships are built on trust. If you violate that trust, you no longer have a relationship. In order to have a sucessful business you have to build relationships with people. So in order to be successful you have to keep greed in check. What we really need to keep in check is envy. It's envy that allows people like Obama to get elected and for people to go along with his plan to wrech the economy. "It's ok, because it's just those people" has been the reasoning behind every atrocity in the history of humanity.
Misha, you illustrated so many frustrations that I (and many others) share that I don't even feel the need to write. I'll just reflect. Brilliant hub. Thanks for posting it.
Thanks for coming guys :)
Bernie, greed is universal human trait IMO, and does not really depend on capitalism for existence. Linking them is a cliche, and I am trying to get away from cliches and staff here. :)
And yes, controlling earnings is a characteristic of socialism, but you guys got so many signs of socialism here in US one more does not really make much difference. :)
LDT, envy is a good shot, but I tend to think that more fundamental emotion (that both greed and envy can be linked to) is fear. If you think of greed as a fear of not getting enough of something, and of envy as a fear of not getting enough because your neighbor got it, you'll see what I mean :)
BP9, thanks, I appreciate this :)
I'm not so sure envy is fear, Misha. It is generally one of the most despicable emotions we have. Envy is the wish that you have what someone else has, but are not willing to work for it. Instead you just want to appropriate it. Envy is the dark sister of admiration. Admiring someone for what they've achieved is natural. In fact, admiration can lead someone to emulate those they admire and can assist in success.
Envy is more akin to anger, I think. You don't envy someone becasue you fear that they have what you do not, you're angry that somene has what you do not. Fear is often a motivator for anger, but not, I think, in cases of envy.
You do, however, have a point about envy and fear as it relates to fear of not having enough. I imagine people who see the world as a zero-sum game have that fear. It's not the way I view the world, so I suppose that's why I never saw it that way. Interesting vewpoint, Misha, I'll have to think on it some.
I am still thinking of it myself, so this post above is something of a "work in progress".
But I came to realization that most if not all "negative" emotions can be tracked back to fear, hence the attempt (not too good, admitting to it) to do the same with envy. :)
It still bears thinking upon, you may be on to something. Although I try to adhere to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, I mistrust simplistic answers. Still some of the best advice I ever got was to challenge the assumptions that I'm faced with. Some days I do it better than others, but I try to challenge all assumptions, both my own and those of others. The results have often times been surprising. Especially when I think about *cringe* some ideas I held as gospel in the past.
LOL I definitely believe I am on to something with fear. It does explain a lot of things :)
As for challenging assumptions, it is something I am up to for the last 10 years or so, and I managed to fully revamp my worldview as a result. So yes, I do understand this :)
I'd love to see you put this approach into action on the political scene, Misha - genuine observation and analysis, for the good of society at-large. I suspect that some well-meaning politicians and philosophers have tried that and got confused, turned around, and then lost in the shuffle of political (and economic) dancing! As someone who grew up in the GDR, though, I would have to say (with same bias, naturally) that today's market-force driven policies have me wondering when we will be returning to the Stone Age! Thanks ... great read, truly innovative thoughts.
Excellent hub!
I posted on another blogsite that I don't care if a solution to a socio/economic problem is socialist or capitalist...as long as it works.
Too often, conservatives label anything they don't agree with as "socialist" in order to frighten people and sabotage reasoned discussion.
There are inequalities in both systems, as no system is perfect.
Our leaders should focus on solutions, not labels, but, too often, they are more concerned with what category a solution falls into rather than whether or not it'll work.
Hi, Misha! I promised a long time ago to follow up on the spirit of this hub of yours and write a hub entitled "The Evolution of Selfishness" which explains the place of socialism in the natural world, using examples from other organisms. It took me a long time, because it turned out that many of the things I believed were wrong. Anwyay, it's finally done, and I thought I would let you know.
Hi guys, thanks for visiting :)
Zollstock, after the USSR collapse I watched quite a few bright and honest people coming to political arena with the best of intentions. There were only two outcomes - some of them left the scene, others became crooked politicians. Unfortunately it looks like the nature of this job for me. And no, I don't think that today's policies are driven by market forces, in fact I think market does not have any policies :)
Charles, I think our leaders don't really care of anything you speak about. They care of their own and their family welfare most, and I don't blame them for this. And you can label me a conservative or republican, but I too am against many if not all things that Obama is doing, because he is increasing government presence in economics, and I strongly believe this leads to failure, not success. :)
Aya, i will definitely go there and read it shortly, thanks for letting me know :)
Misha,
Love the discussion. Your answers to ColdWar were spot on. I have observed the same thing with politicians. Many, I believe get into politics with the best of intentions.
I believe that term limits on every office, including the Supreme Court, would go a long way to help. The problem is simple. Even the few politicians that support it usually don't, once in office.
Using you analogy of the house on the hill; What we have now in the U.S.A. are the persons in charge of building our buildings are in the pocket of the ones who produce the studs, nails, doors, etc.
They take turns convincing voters that houses built with left leaning studs are much better, or that the only nails we can use are right hammered nails. In the mean time the house that was once level and firm is ready to fall.
IMHO
I enjoyed reading such a well thought out and fair handed hub page and was going to try to comment in the same fashion. Man have a lot of people posted! I barely even made it to the bottom of the page! :D I ended up getting here and thinking more about the popularity of the subject matter then the matter itself! Now thats something.
Hi Tom, thanks for coming. :)
Yeah, Coldwarbaby is a dangerous type, people of his ilk made the Russian Communist Revolution.
As for the limited term politicians, I don't think it is going to solve anything. In fact it is likely to make things worse, cause fresh newcomers will steal with fresh energy, while old veterans at some point get enough of stealing and actually start trying to do something. :)
Thanks for reading Kirsten, I am glad you enjoyed it :)
This is quite a discussion. My husband lived in Communist Yugoslavia before his family finally escaped first to Austria, then to Canada, and then to the United States. I also took Russian history in college from a Russian professor. What I learned from my husband and his family and my professor put me on the alert when Obama started using some of the same tactics in his campaign as the Marxists did when trying to get into power. Now that he has power that is almost unchecked, I do fear for our country. During the Bush administration, the leftists in this country equated patriotism with criticizing the administration, and any attack on Bush was considered very good. Riots caused by left-leaning demonstrators were condoned and justified. Voter fraud during the last election was not investigated very seriously and in some places voters were harassed. Now we are being told that those speaking up in town hall meetings are extremists or terrorists -- not people exercising their right of free speech. I see attempts to violate the Constitution coming down the pike. Obama even said when he was campaigning that the Constitution might interfere with his being able to carry out his agenda. I never believed I would see him be able to do so much damage so fast. Now citizens are being asked to snitch on other citizens. I don't like where this is going. This goes way beyond economics. This is a curb on liberty as we have thus far known it in this country.
Another great hub Misha! it makes a lot of sense too, if everyone could think like you this would be a wonderful world, just live and let live.
Nice points there! And still there is no answer to the problems humanity has at the moment.
And environment pollution being the biggest of them.
Hi ladies, I am happy to see you coming here. :)
WannaB, I am afraid it's a bit too late to start worrying about your country. It's time to start worrying about your own survival already.
Magnoliazz, yeah, I too think it would be great, and I am sure you would live in the same world. Yet it never happens, so we have to adapt to the world as it is, if we want to live. :)
Michele, problems will solve themselves one way or another, whether we try to solve them or not. An easiest solution for environmental problems is the new world war. If we manage to reduce the world population three-four times, our environmental impact will decrease accordingly. :)
"I do not hate socialism and love only capitalism. It is what ever it takes for the society to thrive."
These are very strong words which EVERY politician should frame and put on his desk!
Loved your hub!
Wow so many fans.It took me thirty minutes to get to the end to post a comment.You must be a good hearted person to have so many fans responding to your hubs.I enjoyed reading the comments too.What's your secret?Thank you for responding.Enjoyed your work.Please continue to inspire others.WOW.>PEACE 2 U.
Hi Angela, thanks for coming and nice words. Your agreement is a bonus, too. :)
Hi Tamari, thank you. No secret at all, I am just being myself and dare to display it :)
Misha, this was a well written and well thught out hub. I have to say too, that at first I couldn't figure out why you never said very much in the hubs, just something funny here and there, then I realized that it is a good thing and you help to defuse things and keep things in perspective. Thank-you!!! You are a very good writer!!
Misha, this is a great Hub. I confess to having read only a portion of the many Comments, so if I'm covering ground already plowed, I apologize, but:
Most of humanity, these days at least, tend to see a "law abiding society" with many laws as a "great" society, not realizing that many laws are in truth a signal of degradation. Self governing people, those who instinctively understand and abide by the natural laws to which you refer, do not require gangs of legislators to pass rule after rule after rule to keep them from stepping out of line.
I did note a challenge or two in the previous Comments, viewpoints that natural laws do not even exist. To those individuals, I would only point out that in nature, just as downtown in Chicago or elsewhere, ignorance of the law is no excuse. They exist, all right.
Hi guys, thanks for coming :)
Thanks BJC, I am trying to do my best to bring some humor to this place, and I'm not the only one who does it. :)
Ghost, this has not been mentioned, and I soooooo agree to you! Really appreciate you posting this. :)
Hi Misha:
Life is short.
You speak of "nature."
I am one who understands "adaptation" and "selfishness."
I also understand that my value is only meaningful to me.
I am here for a short time and gone for eternity. Understanding that, FULLY, I will live my life under the control of whatever "ism" happens to be in power.
Life is a singular proposition. The "intelligent" will "live" a rich life, gain knowledge and use that "knowledge" logically to exist for as long as their genetic programming will allow.
Natures demands must be adhered to if one desires to survive. I will do whatever is required of me by "Gaia," to attain that goal. To me, it's as simple as that.
Qwark
I think we are in full agreement Qwark, I am trying to do the same, more or less. :)
Hi Misha: I have only one response to that....:-)
I wish ya "luck."
Qwark
Back at ya, Qwark, back at ya :)
Finally someone who makes sense! :)
Thanks Star, I was trying to do my best. :)
But, flinging mud is so fun! Haha, in all seriousness. Great hub, good points. I wish everyone could take this sort of standpoint when discussing politics. I tend to lean left, but I do think the best country is run from the center.
Hey, thanks for stopping by young man. :)
So, what is your preferred slope then - forward or backward? ;)
I have to get out more, I missed this Hub and all the wonderful comments until now. None of the isms work for everyone all the time. We will eventually settle with one, and live with it.
You are always welcome on my hubs Jib, come more often. ;)
And I don't think we'll ever settle, we seem to be unsatisfied with anything settled :)
Good post and comments, this battle will never end like the good vs bad. One thing that disturbs me is in American the top 5 percent own 95 percent of assets and the remaining 95 percent of the population own the rest.
Hi Seagull. :) I think it's about the same all over the place, give or take. Life is not fair of those terms. We better get used to it, and see that money don't buy everything. :)
Wow, Misha. Great hub. I often think about those 'isms' too. Thanks.
Well, coming from the same ism as myself, this does not surprise me a tiny bit. Thanks for coming. :)
Great hub Misha - Communication (or lack thereof) is an amazing thing, isn't it?!?
blogging2 says:
8 months ago
Misha- Great points! I see the only thing missing is the governing parties in our "ism" society. Unfortunately the "laws" have progressed to a point that we have "elected" officials that speak for the different large groups. These "elected" officials further subdivide themselves and in turn our "isms" to the point of no one can understand what is going on around us. Hopefully one day soon we can get out of the "slinging match" you described and we have all seen and get to findind solutions that fit all no matter what we call it... Common Sense comes to mind for me personally :)
As always love reading your posts!