Quote (cambovenzi @ Apr 13 2017 05:48am)
Yes people often use government coercion for personal gain.
I recognize this and its a reason I dont like governments.
Somehow this puts the blame on free market libertarian advocates?
If there is no government, or a small government with very limited powers and good mechanisms to keep it that way, it is much harder to manipulate for your own unlibertarian ends as it does not wield that power or play that role.
Meanwhile im arguing against hyperstatists and socialists that want government to be more interventionist and have more power...
The Dutch East India Company was one of the major organizations that implemented slavery and caused wide-spread famines. They were a private company operating without government restrictions.
Furthermore, the genocide of various indigenous populations across the world were carried out by capitalist nations and so-called democracies. It's easy to have a successful "free market" when that market is being propped up by the exploitation and extermination of native peoples.
In either case, of slavery or ethnic cleansing, they were carried out in the name of better profits. The "free market" is a myth...one that has allowed organizations to operate with impunity. The bottom line is that corporations exist to make their shareholders profits. They don't have any moral obligations to citizens or workers.
A socialist government is one where workers own the means of production. That can be achieved in various ways. You're also assuming this can only be achieved through Stalinist methods and all socialists are supportive of this method. It's a total strawman in the same way of saying all capitalist societies degenerate into fascism and can only be sustained if we mimic Mussolini, Tojo, and Hitler.
You really need to take into consideration what the phrase "owning the means of production" means. It's when a person who converts one set of goods into another, more useful set of goods profits directly from their labor while owning whatever tools used to convert that good. In a capitalist, free market system, the person who uses their labor to make goods useful is only allowed to borrow their tools and must give their profits to the person in charge above them. We have a system where items go through the process of:
Raw material is harvested -> Person who harvested it doesn't own the tools used to harvest raw materials -> "Manager" takes the harvested goods and sells it to another manager -> 2nd. manager gives harvested goods to worker -> worker makes raw materials into something useful, then gives it back to the manager -> manager sells the new useful thing at a markup.
Notice in this chain, the "managers" who don't actually do anything. They're middle men who lowball the harvester and the worker so they can turn a profit from the material. Marx argues the chain should look like this instead:
Harvester harvests raw material -> they sell it to the worker -> worker makes it into something useful -> worker sells directly to the person who needs the new product
There's no need for executives and CEOs to profit from the harvester and worker's labor. They're still needed to some extent for things like marketing, organizing transport, etc. but these are all other forms of labor attributed to the bourgeois disproportionately.
The pie example is the best way of explaining this:
3 people get together and decide to make a pie. Bob will go pick the fruit to go into the pie, Bill will make the crust and cook the pie, and Jim will purchase the flour for Bill from a third party. The price of the pie is $2 worth of fruit and $2 worth of crust. Jim is purchasing the pie crust from the store, with Bob and Bill offering their labor. Once finished, the total value, compared to other pies, is $5.50.
Bob has contributed $1 worth of labor picking the fruit that went into the pie.
Jim has contributed $2 worth of funding to get the indgredients.
Bill is a trained baker, and gave one hour of his labor creating the pie from the raw ingredients.
In a socialist society, the team would give Bob $1 of the final sale price, since he contributed that much in unskilled labor. Jim helped fund the pie for $2 and should get his investment back, plus the cost of his labor of going to the store to buy pie crust. He would divide the rest of the profits ($4.50) with Bill. Jim's $2 plus his time means he would get $2.50 of the final profit. Bill gets the $2 for his hour of labor baking the pie, which also includes his expertise in baking.
In a capitalist society, Jim funded the operation with $2 and wants to double his investment. So, he needs at least $4 of the price of the pie, leaving $1.50 for Bill and Bob. Since Bob picked $1 in fruit, he's given 75 cents and Bill gets the leftover 75 cents. They both try to object to this disproportionate distribution of the profits, especially since Bob picked $1 worth of fruit. Bill spent an hour of his labor to only earn 75 cents, when he could have just gone and picked $1 worth of fruit. Bob could have directly sold his fruit to someone else for $1 instead of taking the 75 cents to help Jim turn a profit. With this second scenario, Bob and Bill are lowballed on the pie. They could both refuse to help Jim make a pie and just go pick fruit. In that case, the pie doesn't get made. Bill could go pick fruit as well, but that wastes his skills as a baker.
So that second scenario sounds like I'm exaggerating or isn't how things happen in the real world. Oh but that's
exactly how it works in a capitalist society. A Harvard MBA is worth around $160,000 in tuition and living expenses for the duration of earning that degree. If you include a public education for K through 12, that adds $6,000 to $19,000 per year, with a national average of $10,000 per year in the U.S. That brings the total to $290,000 to have a student go through an average public school, then get their MBA at Harvard. It also means it costs $130,000 for a student from that same K-12 school district to get a high school diploma.
In other words, the cost of teaching a person through high school, then giving them more training to manage a large company, costs about 2.5 times as much as just training someone to have a high school education. So let's be even more generous and assume the MBA graduate from fucking Harvard also got some good intern experience and goes to work for a company where they're knowledgeable in what that company produces. How much more is that person expertise worth? 2.5 times as much just going from raw value of education and training? 5 times as much because they graduated from Harvard? 10 times as much because they're competent in how the product works and is sold? Maybe even 20 times as much since they are good at their job?
Hahahaahaha nope...try earning 300 times as much as a person who had the same pre-college education they did. Executives make on average of $578,525 to $940,284 each year, with CEOs making an average of $16,300,000. Workers at these companies earn an average of $53,000.
For even more hilarity, look at how much other professions with their master's make in comparison. Teachers, who have some of the highest returns on investment in society, earn an average of $64,883 if they have a master's.
Goddamn doctors, with their medical doctorate, earn an average of $156,000 to $315,000 per year. Far more education, training, and expertise is required of them than an MBA, yet aren't earning some of the bottom of the barrel salaries for mid-level executive positions. And it's not like the demand for doctors and teachers isn't there...at least there definitely isn't twice as much demand for mid-level executives.
That's not to say that doctors or teachers should be paid more. Rather, it's the problem of executives making more than they actually produce for their companies just because they're management. This is the fault of capitalism. It doesn't actually distribute resources according to supply and demand. It only distributes resources to those who are in possession of the most capital.
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No. There are numerous books and lectures explaining how this might work and has worked in the absence of government. (governments which btw regularly infringe on property rights)
You mean like the Communist Manifesto? Most of those books and lectures are left wing socialists and anarchists, who absolutely detest capitalism and free market economics.