1. Humans invented God (and HaShem and the Almighty). God has always been a human creation.
2. Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. […]
3. Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it.
4. People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. […]
5. Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. […]
6. Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.
Up to now, results have shown that private organizations allocate capital better than governments, at least in domains where parties to a deal are free to walk away from a deal - just to keep the discussion outside of contentious domains.
Let's stipulate that, like a lot of unoriginal "knowledge work" that AI is/becomes better at capital allocation than humans. If that turns out to be true, why then keep capital allocation in the hands of private organizations?
Private companies crash and burn far more than governments. Your statement is just one of survivorship bias without stakes. If 99 out of 100 companies fail its generally pretty low stakes. If one government fails, it commonly results in a lot of deaths.
Capitalist countries were only able to edge out socialist economies by banking on their extant head-start and behaving socialistically (copying socialism in a light way—redistribution, worker advocacy, etc.).
As soon as they were able to claw it all back in the direction of pure capitalism all hell was set loose.
Please note that the paragraph you are disagreeing with is heavy qualified. The coercive faux-markets where the consumer is held hostage are not part of my argument.
I'm talking about markets with low barriers to entry, little or no regulatory capture, that are discretionary purchases. A government bicycle factory, for example, makes no sense and would fail. Whereas, say, postal banking, which would be pilloried as capital-C Communism in the US would work fine because banks hate their small retail customers and it shows.
However unsatisfactorily stated, my question comes down to: Does it make sense for capital allocation to remain in private hands in a possibly immanent age of AI outperforming humans in capital allocation?
Oh, as narrowly as you pose it, not at all! Whoever manages capital best should manage it. If it's a three-way competition between workers, owners, and machines… may the best decision-maker win!
Having created a $BETTER_ALTERNATIVE, people then assign to it the powers of creation
Once the creative powers of $WHATEVER get misassigned to $BETTER_ALTERNATIVE, other people are made subordinate to it. A created $WHATEVER that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.
The real issue is that anything that is given power, will ultimately use that power to amass more power and prevent others from gaining power. This is natural - as it powers the evolutionary process on our planet
To break the cycle, we must break from our chains of mortal humanity. What price are we willing to pay to do so?
Or another question - is it really a bad thing? Some version of $BETTER_ALTERNATIVE will balance out the problems created by $PREVIOUS_BETTER_ALTERNATIVE, but will create new unforseen problems. Like capitalism for instance. We cannot predict the future
This sounds attractive at first reading, but it has a logical fault in that many things that are 'invented' are not just a creation of the inventor. Math is an obvious example. It is 100% a human 'invention.' Yet it's "real" enough that it will certainly be involved in the first dialogue with another intelligent species. It's a reality, even if it exists outside the material world.
Our economic system is dysfunctional and getting worse, but I don't think it's about capital so much as it is about endless interest requiring (and assuming) endless growth, as the article hits on. Another perverting issue is governments going infinitely into debt, the US in particular, really distorts economies, and consequently societies. Here [1] are a series of graphs across a practically endless series of data. It focuses on the inflection point of 1971, which is when the USD became a completely free floating currency, enabling infinite 'money printing.' It's not hard to see that things haven't really gone so well with that ability unlocked.
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As one interesting aside, as I was typing 'wtfhapp..' into Brave Search to grab the URL, I found it telling that one of the autocompletes (likely due to large numbers of searches for it) was 'wtf happened in 1971 debunked.' The inflections following 1971 are so extreme people clearly just can't even believe it. But there's no trickery there. One can read more about the Bretton Woods System (which is what we pulled out of in 1971), here. [2]
I am be curious to see the same exact breakdown but with number 1 starting as “God created humans” to see what the difference in the rest of the list would be, if anyone wants to take a stab at it.
"Socialists" are largely bitter unsuccessful upper-middle class or above and speak in academic babble that is completely offputting to the actual working class who they claim to represent. And this (to the great pleasure of capitalists like me) ruins any chance of them succeeding. It's just as true today as it was when Orwell pointed it out in Wigan Pier, and it's why you came with an ad hominem instead of saying he is incorrect.
Alternatively, palpably growing discontent with material conditions and depleting trust in America's ideological production considers the above account risible Whig history.
The competing account is exactly opposite: the hitherto antiquated idea of a benevolent liberal "end of history" is torn to shreds, as research made widely available even in English variously showcases that the CIA was involved in various genocides (such as Indonesia's) in order to preserve its geopolitical and economic supremacy, to say nothing of exposes about how the FBI tried to goad MLK Jr. into suicide, and other stuff of that sort.
Books such as Vincent Bevins's "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World" (2020) and Vijay Prashad's "Washington Bullets" (2020) are part of this budding understanding, whose foothold is firm both academically and in terms of popularity.
But I think in the end it's always better to hear it from the perpetrators themselves, such as in the words of the so-called "Wise Man" of American Foreign Policy George Kennan, who reported, from the U.S.'s own declassified archives:
>We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
As pertains to Chile in particular, far from a hands-off relationship that approved of Pinochet and sent a few economists, the CIA was deeply involved in _causing_ the economic crisis that the Chilean right attributed to Allende, as reported by the New York Times in 1974:
C.I.A. Is Linked to Strikes In Chile That Beset Allende
>The Central Intelligence Agency secretly financed striking labor unions and trade groups in Chile for more than 18 months before President Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown, intelligence sources revealed today.
They said that the majority of more than $8‐million authorized for clandestine C.I.A. activities in Chile was used in 1972 and 1973 to provide strike benefits and other means of support for anti‐Allende strikers and workers.
My point is that the historical path was not imposed on them. People of south America are not blind children incapable of making decisions for themselves. Allende was a bad politician who ran his country into the ground and discovered the consequences of that
I provide reporting about how the CIA manipulated the Chilean economy to create the perception that Allende was a bad politician.
In response you simply assert that Allende was a bad politician.
Do you see the problem?
I think the Americanized world will not survive America's decline, and this will soon become indisputable proof that it was America forcing its model onto others rather than anything organic.
If the CIA helped labor unions, they didn't cause the problem. Bad socialist economics did, and the US exacerbated the political crisis. Allende would've crashed and burned (deservedly) without US intervention. I'm not sure I see the merit in the argument that the US broke the leftist Chilean economy by supporting the workers ability to strike... if anything that aligns us closer with the left than Allende.
>the stock market is exactly the opposite of real estate investing. Land is finite, capital is not.
This is where you go wrong.
Unlike posters defending real estate "investment," I'll criticize you from the opposite end: capital markets are a disguised form of the same old rentierism.
>Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.
>13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.
>[Kennan] envisions all of humanity destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass,” with only the Chinese, Jews, and blacks remaining apart. “Could this mean that these three minorities are destined to subjugate and dominate all as an uneasy but unavoidable triumvirate the rest of society — the Chinese by their combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, and ant-like industriousness; the Jews by their sheer determination to survive as a culture; the Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the whites?”
That's a much better article than you make it seem with that quote, and that its headline writer made it seem with that title. I read it and quite enjoyed it. Thanks!
Marketers take a lot of credit for achievements that don't belong to them.
Take, for example, Hayek's rather more honest commentary on vacations and human rights generally:
>[The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is admittedly an attempt to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the altogether different concept deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution. It adds to the list of the classical civil rights enumerated in its first twenty-one articles seven further guarantees intended to express the new ‘social and economic rights’. (…) The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (…) What are the consequences of the requirement that every one should have the right ‘freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits’. (…) It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.
The decay we witness today is simply the rollback of concessions copied from socialist states and artificially bolted onto capitalism to reduce socialist ferment. The consequences are predictable.
I see. So this is about “the right” to take a vacation? What are you talking about and what am I? we seem to live in different realities. I can’t even imagine somehow I would have a government “right” to take a vacation. Who is paying for it? I don’t get it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_leave#Leave "Most countries have labour laws that mandate employers give a certain number of paid time-off days per year to workers." (it goes on to point out that the USA - with the exception of Maine and Nevada - is the outlier in western industrial nations in not having this)
Ironically, a lot of this dates back to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in May 1886 (over the eight-hour-day movement), which led to May Day being a worker's holiday in much of the world...but US politics meant they got an alternative holiday in September.
As RedCondor points out, "who pays for it" has it backwards, companies gain value from the work of their employees, so effectively it is just giving back some of what they "pay" the company in labour.
Do you think you have a right to take breaks at work? To go to the bathroom? To a safe work environment?
People aren’t machines. We have a complicated social contract that says companies may employ labor so long as they meet certain requirements for safety, health, and treatment.
It’s not unreasonable to see time off as part of the deal. Who’s paying for your bathroom breaks? Same answer.
All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced by working people, and therefore people get to democratically decide what they do with them, through whatever decision-making forms they politically choose and consent to organize themselves under.
Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and capitalism.
Except history shows us that in 100% of the cases that working people seize the production and allocate the gains they do a unbelievable bad job. Socialism is the single most failed idea in human history, yet we refuse to properly teach that in our education system. I suspect in the future it will be view a bit like refusing to teach other scientific subjects, like evolution.
In reality a mob of people end up producing nothing without capitalists and markets. There is a joke that the IQ of a mob is roughly the highest IQ in the mob divided by the size of the mob.
>There is a joke that the IQ of a mob is roughly the highest IQ in the mob divided by the size of the mob.
How can you possibly be saying this and "the wisdom of the crowd in markets is all-knowing" in the same thread?? Did you forget to say "and multiplied by the wealth of the mob"? :)
Do you mean Communism instead of socialism above? Socialism has nothing to do with "seizing the means of production". For socialism it is sufficient to regulate private industries to achieve social good.
And flavors of socialism are very successful so far. Most first-world countries (particularly in Western Europe) have adopted aspects of it and significantly improved individual quality of life compared to those countries who haven't.
> Socialism is the single most failed idea in human history, yet we refuse to properly teach that in our education system.
Well... let's see until we have the capitalist end game before we draw that conclusion, there is a fair chance that it will make the failures of socialism look like a picnic.
> I suspect in the future it will be view a bit like refusing to teach other scientific subjects, like evolution.
Economic systems aren't science, they are just means of organizing large numbers of people in ways that are hopefully sensible. A system that maximizes for growth can work, for a while, but isn't long term sustainable. So depending on your horizon you may think it is a great idea or a terrible one. Markets aren't bad per-se, but they have the potential to lead to catastrophe and if you don't acknowledge that potential and deal with the risk then the chances of it happening increase.
The problem is that every economic system ever proposes is predicated on a bunch of assumptions that do not necessarily hold true over time. So you end up with a model that may work for a while but that's not how science works. Science extracts facts from observations using the scientific method. Social constructs - and social sciences of which economy is a branch - effectively model people and people are emphatically not as predictable as lab equipment and substances.
So you will always end up with fiction dressed up in a scientific coat. It looks and talks like science but it really isn't. There are no testable hypothesis, there is a ton of politics and there will never be consensus.
dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable.
The education system, controlled by their masters, has no interest in education the people to blame their masters, so of course most are uneducated in this regard.
No, the fact is that somehow for decades German authorities think they have a right / a budget (that is build up by taxes paid for by natural Germans and also documented, naturalized, legally working people now living in Germany) to spend on things here and there over half of the world, be it illegal migrants, approved migrants, EU-internal subsidies or subsidies and projects for other nations across the globe. Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria come lately to mind.
That this insane behavior doesn't bode well regardless of 'polictical education' should come to no ones' surprise. Especially if you, as a so-so earner, pay almost 40% in taxes and social security / healthcare.
And if you happen to already have experienced socialism before, you have an even less chilled opinion. Thank you.
Socialists will once again get to explain how the capitalist welfare state was an unsustainable scam paid for by neocolonialism. Demonized socialist projects will come to be seen in a more authentic, positive light, and the fight for worker and human emancipation from capitalism will resume.
Both socialist and capitalist liberal states are bad, liberation requires overcoming the power structures of both state and capital. We all stand to gain from it, it's not like a new tax system.
Socialist states are just elitist authoritarian capitalism. Both kinds of states trap their populaces in endless all consuming work. Please, let's move on, we have automation and industrialized processes now to not need constant work at the behest of rulers commanding us or gatekeeping and bean countnig access to reproducible technology and information
(It's incidentally also the same fight as the ecological problem.)
How is that compared to 20 years ago? Did it get better or worse?
I in no way support the chinese political system, but the one we have in the west (EU for me), made average rent higher than an average pension while buying is impossible for a huge percent of people due to overinflated prices. I used to live in a communist country (still live here, just the country doesn't exist anymore), and out of all the bad things they did, atleast they knew how to build affordable housing.
2. Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. […]
3. Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it.
4. People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. […]
5. Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. […]
6. Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.