Business owner

These posts are all missing the point that if OP's business booms, they'll start employing people. A coop is not "two buddies founding a business".

Under capitalism, your small business will end up getting destroyed by Wal Mart and other big business.

Under socialism, you could keep running your "business", although it would be a co-op and you would most likely have to fulfill some state quote depending on what work you are doing.

without any details on what the business is it's hard to say if he will get destroyed by bigger business or not. He says he works for less than minimum wage so I'm guessing whatever the work is he's doing it cheaper than a business that has normal employees would be able to.

Petty bourgeoisie is actually the most decadent class tbh it is breaking more and more into bourgeoisie and proletarians and considering how things are rn your business will end up either bankrupt or bought by some rich porky but petty-bourgeoisie itself isn't actual bourgeoisie so..no

I am well aware of it and in fact I wasn't talking of coops. A two people business is not even a small business, it's just two self employed proles sharing contracts.

If they do that it's because the competence is probably strong and there already are big business' in the game so they'll probably get reckt but anyways if they had enough capital to start it from scratch they'll probably survive this (unless it's a loan then they gonna be 2 very fucked up proles)

There's nothing wrong as long OP keeps splitting shares equally among new workers joining "his" business.

We support coops

What if those workers aren't equally productive?

We harbor no personal feelings towards bourgeois class, you seem to misunderstand socialism.
Anyways, it sounds like you and your partner are the only two employees? Am I understanding your situation correctly?

Then you don't hire them.

But you won't know their level of productivity until after you've worked with them. Besides that, what if their level of productivity is variable and at the beginning they're reasonably productive but later on their output flags. Can you unilaterally remove them from your cooperative? Let's say you hire two people and this happens, flagging productivity after 6 months or so. You put it to a vote, you and your co-founder vote to get rid of them and the other two vote to stay, stalemate. What happens?

It doesn't seem like there are any sound mechanisms for mediating these sorts of disputes if you insist on equal communal ownership.

It's not in their interest to not be productive enough because they would have less profits to share at the end.

No.

You would need a majority to get rid of them.

It's called communication and understanding. If they start to really not give a shit, you could also go on a "strike", if you don't produce anymore they would have nothing to share at the end like I said.

Mutually assured economic destruction, gotcha.

They just need to understand that.
If you don't trust workers then don't hire them at first or employ them and become a petit bourgeois, but don't expect us or your workers to like you.

And I'd say don't expect your economic system to work.

Do you have employees?

Most buying out doesnt happen at god prices, but to companies who are struggling due to competition of a more efficient, larger competitor who can use more underhand tactics to force them out, such as running a loss in a certain area to undercut the other companies and drive them out of bussiness, getting a full or more complete market share and allowing them to recoup the costs after the buyout by increased prices and a local monopoly.

If you make the right contract, yes.

slow down lad, youre not a tech startup who hypes and swells to sell out to google or facebook

Our "economic system" is not "capitalism but with coops".

Its completely different and removes the whole idea of putting the economic risk on one group of people and the pursuit of profit.

I understand that. The point I'm trying to make here is that you don't seem to have a viable alternative in place for determining who takes responsibility for points of failure. Communal responsibility for failure is all good and well, but what happens to the shared asset? If a group of people run a factory into the ground, do they sell it to another group and dump the liabilities? If not, by what means do they resume production?

There's this thing called 'trial period'.

So, what if he's a human being? If you think that OP and his buddy won't eventually do the same you are delusional buying into the Randian entrepreneur myth.

Otherwise, there's the incentive of democratic workplace control and equal pay. If people in a coop decide to work less a month, everybody earns less. In a workplace with a boss you could work off your ass for a chance at promotion ("notice me sempai") that might not actually happen in 10 years. How's that for motivation?

No. Democratically, yes.

Stop pretending that for 6 months nobody noticed this. Stop pretending that in a coop there's no regular sessions regarding work management. You are thinking like the typical porky-mandated manager who receives an angry letter from his higher ups that there's some firing to do so he then has to conduct an inquisition session.

Lel. You hired like an idiot. Stipulate clauses when hiring. Sign a contract.

Stop pretending that a coop system isn't still capitalism. A coop isn't communal ownership. It's collective private ownership. You can very well have a 2 years period until full membership, or equal pay.

You could've fooled me judging by the responses itt.

I don't think you understand. How would a factory be driven into the ground if it's existence isn't based on profitability but on need?

IF I DON'T EXPLOIT THE WORKERS THEY WILL BECOME LAZY

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Attached: image_35.jpeg (1536x2048, 408.41K)

You've ignored the 50/50 split scenario, which is the contentious one. I'm not saying you double your employees right off, but eventually (on your way to 5 employees) you'll find yourself with 4.

Also, how on Earth do you deal with equalizing the investment of the founders with the arrival of new employees if you're simply splitting the profits equally? The founders of the business have already submitted [X] number of hours of their own labor to the enterprise, does that not count for something?

How do you deal with a failure of net productivity under communal ownership?

Because physical reality still exists, genius. You need raw materials to manufacture things. Let's say you're operating a factory that makes toilet paper - you need to consider what you'll need from other people in order to continue operation. You need to maintain your building and your machinery, you need to feed, house, and clothe your workforce, you need to buy the raw materials necessary for production, you need to dispose of waste products, you need to ship your goods. What if your process isn't sufficiently efficient to trade your output, voluntarily, for the inputs necessary for continued production? There's always going to be a baseline input/output which has to be met which isn't based on need but on material reality.

It's not about laziness or not, it's about productivity. Some people are simply more productive than others for whatever reason - natural gifts, intelligence, and sometimes industry. People also tend to get jealous and bitter, so you need some way of mediating these problems. Human beings aren't nice cooperative organisms who never have petty self-destructive squabbles.

I explicitly said that coops are not communal ownership. Are you responding to people without reading them?

Motivation. I've dealt with it in my response. You didn't read it.

Yeah, keep on dreaming about your superiority, brainlet.

And these people tend to have fantasies about their superiority.

These two statements are not connected. Humans could be "cooperative organisms" while having "destructive squabbles" or vica versa. Nature is much more complex than black or white, you fucking brainlet.
putlockerfree24.ws/watch-rise-of-the-warrior-apes-full-movie-online-7848

so you're purposefully cucking yourself?
what the fuck is your argument?

Yeah, OP, jew out your partner. That's the capitalist way!

No shit. You're still operating under the assumption that anarchic market imperatives are dictating production within an axiomatic framework of profit and trade. Whereas we suggest a deliberate economic system whose logic is dictated by use/need and distribution.

I'm asking you specifically, how you would deal with a failure of net productivity under communal ownership, whatever it is you mean by such a thing. I want to understand the mechanics of it.

I reject your premise, I don't believe in the blank slate, and motivation isn't the sole factor in productivity. This is obvious in any physically taxing discipline such as primary resource extraction, where an equally motivated man and woman will produce differential outcomes.

Intelligence isn't the only relevant natural gift, see strength above.

You can dismiss human emotion if you want but you're doomed to failure if you do it. You're not above it either, comrade.

The point about self-destructive squabbles is an economic one. Sometimes there will be a failure of net productivity because people can't agree on their dues and responsibilities and will scuttle the group in spite of the personal consequences.

A centrally controlled economy, then?

What even made you think that my premise is a "blank slate?" You come off as a genius who "studied out those darn commies" from youtube pseudo-intellectuals.

Read book related on a post-market economy. It's not long and well argued.

lolwut

So just like in your regular capitalist enterprise where the owner makes a stupid judgement in spite of what consequence it will have on his worker's?

You believe equal motivation leads to equal productivity, no? The underlying assumption there is equal potential, which is the blank slate. I reject the notion as self-evidently false, and I provide the example of things like logging, mining, construction, whatever. Disciplines where muscle mass and physical power will make a big difference in productivity, and these are characteristics which are not distributed equally among individuals.

You'll forgive me if I don't read 200 pages and then respond to you when I'm done because such a thing is prohibitive in this format. If you understand it well enough, give me a brief overview in layman's terms.

I agree that in capitalist enterprises there are points of failure and self-destructive people and that isn't going to change. The thing about that is there's a system for mediating those sorts of disputes. Private owners of capital will put up their capital as collateral against loans and investments, and they suffer the consequences of their failure in the loss of capital and their own salary. Of course the workers suffer also, but at least their own private property isn't at immediate risk. They don't take on the burden of responsibility for the failure of the enterprise.

Aside from that, once the enterprise fails the assets aren't necessarily lost, as financiers will bet on new ownership and management in the hope of turning a future profit. It's a fine and functional system which doesn't rely on coercive measures beyond the enforcement of private property.

Again, our economic model is not "capitalism with coops". Under socialism you get paid for those hours, you have been rewarded for your work. You don't need to invest personal funds into it, and you do not profit indefinitely for labour that you once did.

Now you may say "Why shouldn't I profit from labour once done"?
You get paid for the hours you worked. Spend 100 hours working, you get paid 100 hours. Investments are done on a society level, the means of production are bought using money taxed from work.

Furthermore, as the proportion of capital vs labour changes over time to have more capital, the reward for the labour done by people working later would be lower. This would mean that under the ruse of "i did initial work", older people would disproportionately gain more and more over time, despite already having been paid and not working any more or harder than youngsters.

I dont give a fuck about your "me and my buddy made a company in capitalism, you cant make it a coop". I dont want to make the economy consist of coops, i want to remove capitalism entirely and run all production collectively.

I like market socialism and co-ops because under a co-op the new employee and OP's business partner can get together and give him the boot for spending his entire work day shitposting on an obscure communist splinter board of an obscure nazi splinter board of an obscure anime fandom splinter board of an obscure stolen jokes forum.
I joke, but why should the new hire be subject to termination for failing to produce but the employers are shielded by law from termination because they were first to own the MoP?

>I believe that you believe X, which is obviously, self-evidently, false. This obviously false belief, that you didn't state you have, but which I think you do have, based on what I heard about you spread by media and educational facilities controlled by people who have the most to fear if you ever become popular. I do not believe that media people are honest, I do believe that people in general are rather tactical with the truth, but for some inexplicable reason I believe what they say about you and it hasn't even occured to me to check on that.
I can't help you with your mental condition if you remain passive about it. You have to try to find an actual quote by Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin in support of totally equalized income and see what happens yourself. If you don't want to learn anything, you won't learn anything.

So? Why should society be roped into supporting the coercive enforcement of rather arbitrary decrees of so-called property rights?

I'm serious. Why should anyone expect and be entitled to the efforts/labour/resources of others to enforce their right to possess property to the exclusion of anyone else?

...

So it's a controlled economy.

I've asked you to explain it to me in plain language, and you've failed to do so. If you really understood your economic system well enough, you'd at least be able to give me a decent outline of the mechanics of such a thing while defining your terms (what does collective ownership entail?). As far as I understand it from other posters, you support a controlled economy.

Because it's a system which allows for productive economic activity with minimal government intervention and ultimately enriches everyone. We're pretty materially wealthy in an absolute sense. I think the tendency of capital to accrue to the top is a problem though. That doesn't mean your system makes any sense though, I still haven't received a basic overview of its function.

Yes. Its controlled by society, instead of market anarchy with pockets of control by a tiny minority of the population.

What does controlled by society mean? How does that work?

That varies from person to person, but I follow the model Cockshott proposes. Its a fuckton to write down and I really dont have time, so if you are curious, see this book.

But very simplified summary:

Please do not post "gotcha" responses, I will probably refer you to the book. But feel free to ask not-too-large questions. Things like "how does [x you wrote] work" such as the maths stuff is in the book, i am not going to rewrite the entire book. The book has been written for you to read, not for me to have to rewrite. Not meant snarkily, a lot of people just respond like that, demanding to be spoonfed a complex, complicated and big topic in a replies on a board on a russian matroska carving website.

Forgot to turn off my shitposting flag.

Having twenty-five different food preparation locations, each of which has its own set of MoP for food production and most also employing a class of marketers and advertisers who don't produce anything tangible seems awfully prone to redundancies and inefficient to me.
But again - why does ostensibly guaranteeing a goal as abstract as "productive economic activity" justify forcing all of society into protecting the arbitrary restrictions that property rights puts up?
About a click from where I live there's field after fallow field of farmland. It's owned by some shithead property developer who tried to speculate on it and is sitting on it because the local housing market tanked.
It's good farmland. It could be producing potatoes, turnip, whatever. If I were to go there with hoe and seed, guaranteed within a month I'd be hauled to court for trespass, destruction of property, and so on. If I resist these judgements, society will send people employed solely to enforce them. If I resist those people they have licence to coerce me to obey. If I resist that coercion I will likely be killed, injured and kidnapped, restrained and put in a concrete box for several years.
But yes, go on about your """"""""minimal intervention""""""""
*googles relative wage growth post WWII*
Pretty simple: property is not owned but possessed by those able to possess it. If you can't possess it then you didn't deserve to possess it. Now hand over those toothbrushes sassenach.

Why doesn't leftypol have an egoist flag?

Sure, I get it. It's the same as linking the book and expecting an immediate response, obviously that won't happen. I appreciate that you've taken the time to attempt a plain language explanation, because very few of your cohort seem to do so.

None of this really helps me understand what happens in the event of a failure of production though. I think we can all agree that there's a material constraint on input/output in any given enterprise, that is there are certain inputs required to meet certain outputs and the two aren't independent of material reality. Materials need to be extracted, moved, reformed, and moved again.

It seems like the patch, more or less, is a centrally managed economy directed (at least broadly) in its goals by democratic vote. To be sure, I don't see how this system provides people with more freedom or even ensures their ability to profit fairly from their labor. You're basically creating an unnecessary bottleneck on economic activity in order to free people from the constraints of private property, but the end result for the worker is that he still doesn't really "own" anything and has no personal control over his own conditions of employment.

So whatever you can defend physically is yours? How then do you deal with conflicts? What stops people from doing violence to one another and simply saying "he was weak and didn't deserve to possess this farmland."

Your farming example only requires the enforcement of private property. You might think the speculator is a dickhead but there's no intervention by the state beyond the enforcement of property rights. Besides, if people are reasonable in the way you seem to believe why not simply inquire with the owner? He may be perfectly willing to allow you to farm the land if you like, so long as he doesn't incur any liability.

Well what happens in the event of a failure of production under capitalism?
Shit cant get made, production stops. Just like in this system. You got to have stockpiles for critical goods, which are easier to maintain and justify in a centralized economy, to be ready for production failures such as crop failure.

If you work, you get paid. I dont see how more fairly you want to see people profit from their labour. You put in an hour of work, you get paid an hour of work, the stuff you made in your hour of work is, due to this system, also worth an hour of work. Its the same as paying a construction company to build your house, you pay for their time (and material costs) and then the deal is done. They dont get eternal money from the house just because they once made it.

How is it a bottleneck? Keep in mind that the tax money can also be spend on startup funding, and that companies that make stuff people want but there isnt enough off, automatically get investment. So doing usefull work is expanded and unusefull work is deduced.

Except he does. He owns, just like everyone else, all means of production in society, which he does not own under capitalism in any way, shape or form. And he has control over his conditions of employment, because he manages his own workplace democratically, so he can instate new safety measures, replace dangerous machines, get new safety gear and set his work hours. These are not hard-set by society as a whole. These choices are choices and power he cant make and doesnt have right now.
Its a net gain for the worker. And in my eyes, its the optimal "people own their work" there can be. If you want to make a worker own their company, it is at the expense of other. Making a worker own only his factory or shop means he has no power to stop things like the expansion of a new factory next to their neighbourhood or stopping companies from dumping chemicals. Furthermore, if you own only your workplace, the big companies become larger political entities. A company with 2k people can easily sway the local politics of an area with 6k people, if those other 4k all work in smaller companies, because of its size and divide and conquer. And when you make people own only their own factories, that means that bussinesses that have to shrink due to not fault of their own will either have to fire workers, which create unemployment, or pay them less, leading to inequality between companies. These unemployed people could very easily be exploited by bigger, richer companies through legal loopholes such as internships of subcontracting. This then recreates the workings of normal capitalism. The richer these richer companies get, the more power they have to change laws to allow them to exploit more. By having all means of production owned in common by all of society, you ensure that work is done for the satisfying of needs, not for profit. Sectors that shrink due to technological or cultural change can just simply shrink, and their workers can be employed in other sectors without payment increases or economic inequality arising.

Me again, forgot something I wanted to add:
You can do all kinds of stuff. You could have some kind of "fundme" website where each citizen is allocated a set amount of credits of money to spend on funding stuff. They cannot get it themselves, they can give it to startups. And citizens that pick the right ones, such as people who do research or only invest in shit they know will work due to their expertise, could get an increased amount to invest, and vice versa. The top scorers could be recruited to be advisors for policy makers or even do startup coaching and funding as a full time job. People who score badly can have their funding decreased, either to zero or to a specified minimum, so they could re-gain points or spend their credits on stuff and projects that they think are interesting, even if they have no clue about the viability of the product.
The possibilities are endless, this is just one idea.

Under capitalism production stops but there's a mechanism in place for transfer of ownership and liabilities. Because the property itself has value, an individual can decide to take on the responsibility of management and investors can take on the risk of financing the venture. It's more or less the same calculus you might make with a centrally controlled system (regardless of your value system you still need to invest resources in production based on an expected output) but more efficient because it doesn't require compiling disparate information, centralizing it, having persons unrelated to the transaction parse the data, and then make a decision.

The problem with the "you work you get paid" model is that you're assuming all work is equally valuable - unless I'm wrong on that count. But if different work is valued differently, then how is this system going to be any less exploitative than capitalism? You're still going to have to deal with material constraints in the end and that means acknowledging that certain forms of labor are more productive than others.

The centralized system is a bottleneck because you're trying to collect a tremendous amount of information about economic activity, parse it all as a whole system, and then make decisions based on that data which are sent back to the points where the data was collected. It's far less efficient than simply letting two people, say someone selling lumber and someone purchasing lumber, determine the relative value of items to be traded themselves and to simply perform the transaction. Capitalism (or more accurately free enterprise) is an efficient distributed system of computation. To control a modern economy centrally is foolish in my view and fails to fully realize the resources at the disposal of the economic body, which is to say the brains of consumers/producers at the point of production and purchase.

My problem with a statement such as "owns all means of production in society" is that in practice it doesn't mean much. His choices concerning his working conditions will still be dictated by material concerns (quotas must be met in the system you describe, and sometimes that will mean sacrificing safety for expediency). The other issue I have is that in practice ownership of all means of production is meaningless - whoever enforces the quotas, decides where supplies are delivered, who gets to live where, and so on, will still end up enforcing these things by coercion and justify that coercion on the basis of the common interest. It may even be a democratic decision that a number of people, say lumber workers or miners, are coerced to meet quotas which require them to work significantly harder per hour than in another discipline, say hospice care, and exposes them to significant danger simply because the majority has decided that this is what's necessary. Ultimately that worker could say "no, I refuse!" but what of the consequences? Is everyone permitted to strike without consequence and in the end their demands are met? What happens when a supply chain requires, desperately, that unfair conditions be imposed on a particular class of worker or there will be a mass failure of the whole enterprise (let's say in a time of war, natural disaster, etc.)?

To me this just seems like a different method of organizing economic activity without fundamentally freeing the working man in any practical sense. There will still be a hierarchy of power, some people will work harder than others, and some will sit like an effendi and eat.

You sound like somebody who learned "Computer Science" by watching CSI. You forgot that all these non-synchronized actions have all sorts of non-considered spill-over effects, which can only be considered by synchronizing activity via centralized data processing.

It's more or less the same calculus you might make with a centrally controlled system […] but more efficient because it doesn't require compiling disparate information, centralizing it, having persons unrelated to the transaction parse the data, and then make a decision.
How is it any different though? Under your system, data would have to be compiled, people who want to use the assets to create a company would have to make himself know and set up a plan on how he is going to use it, and present said plan to investors who, more often than not, are banks with no affiliation to the company or products. Under my system, data would also have to be collective, people would have to set up a plan to create a new company and present it to investors (the appropriate institution that handles investing) who also do not have an affiliation with the company or products. It doesnt really matter if you go to a bank or another place with money, they both know hardly anything about it, and they both are involved in the transaction, because both their job is to invest in the right things.

All labour is worth the same. I dont see the problem. The fact that we value different kinds of work differently today is due to supply and demand, and the ease of replacement. A janitor is easily replaced by someone else, but the work of a janitor is just as important to the company as the work of an engineer, even though an engineer cannot be so easily replaced. Without a janitor, nothing can be done, you cannot remove them from the equation. This is a whole other topic that we can delve into, as this is one of the core concepts that defines lots of leftism. But the rest of your argument goes off on the assumption that I do not agree with the first notion, so let me know if you want to talk about this although not too long, i am tired af, you might want to make a seperate thread on the topic of "is all labour worth the same" so you can get more perspectives.

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2/3

This view is false, the idea that a trade is just two people making up a price on their own is a misunderstanding of capitalism. No trade happens in isolation. When I want to buy lumber, I dont go up to one lumber yard and then make up a price, I have to research every lumber yard, get all their prices, the cost of transport and then make a decision. The same goes for the other party. This is inefficient. These relations, the costs of goods, their transport costs, can easily be collected digitally. Large companies such as amazon already do exactly this, they centrally plan their internal distribution, transport, allocation, etc. They use the same techniques as I am proposing to use. Centralization is more efficient, because all these dicisions are based on price or labour time (quasi-money) so they are numerical, and have an objective answer. In capitalism, you by default have a massive information asymmetry, because this is advantageous to one of the parties, and every party has to employ people to collect data and build their own model. In a centralized system with no internal competition, information asymmetry is a downside to everyone, and all data can be compiled in a single database, and calculated by computers pretty much automatically. Better information gives better dicisions, one databank means no people doing the same work over and over and over again, you dont have people trying to fuck the other party over, and one big databank also means you can never miss the best option. It is more efficient to centralize than to decentralize. Human brains are horrible at working with numbers, we made computers to do calculations with numbers, that is what they are for. And cockshott shows you can calculate an economy like the USSR in the 80's on what today is equivalent to a slightly beefy gaming computer.
The argument against centralization has always been that, even though a centrally planned economy would be more efficient, it is impossible to calculate it due to the nature of calculation back in the day, where everything was done by hand. Computers and advances in mathematics make it possible, which is why larger and larger companies are possible, and big companies are stopping with sub-sectioning their company and keeping internal money records. Having humans do all the work is simply not neccecary anymore. If anything, it is foolish to not utilize the resources at the disposal of the economic body, which is to say the data about production that all companies already keep in their private databases, and the computers that have been developed and are so cheap that 14 year olds have them in their room.

This is true of every economic system. In a market with cooperatives the working conditions will be dictated by the market, in regular capitalism the market dictates to the boss, who dictates to the workers. It is idealistic to want a system where people need not pay attention to the needs of society, and is an unrealistic and frankly retarded demand to ask from a replacement economic system that replaces a system that also doesn't have self determination. What matters is that workers will have more control, the most control they can get within the current technological state of the world.

Which is a better justification than having quotas, deliveries and living places enforced and coerced by a tiny minority of society with the justification of "profit at all costs". Again, it is unrealistic and unfair to demand something from another economic system that the current economic system offers even less off than the other one.

Same as above, its unfair to demand utopia where everybody can do what they want if under the current economic system the people have even less freedom and agency than under the other system.
If people consistently refuse, they can strike. If their demands cannot be met, they will be penalized by being fired or have some other penalty inflicted on them. Politics and power struggles, on whatever scale in society, don't just stop occurring, its not the end of history. People will want better working conditions and more benefits, so they will try to get them. They might strike, but so might the rest. And if one particular group in society is unfairly blocking the functioning of society at the detriment of everybody else, then actions will be taken. Just like in any war, in war, if you sabotage the effort, you might get jailed or worse. The social norm for what is acceptable inconvenience will change depending on what the state of society is in. If everything is going fine, it might be fine for some branch of workers to strike for a week or two, because everybody else also will if they were in that situation. But if society is at war, they might force them go to back to work under threat of being executed if they hold up the production of vital tank parts.
But the fact that the workers have the power in their hands means that it is less likely that they unfairly treat a subsection of society, less likely than if all the political and economic power is in the hand of a smaller group.

But I showed you several ways wherein the working man is freed.
Again, you are demanding a utopia as a replacement for a dystopia. I have shown you ways wherein this system is a clear step up from the current system, with less inequality, less hierarchies of power, no economic system that inherently creates these inequalities and less leeches. Just like self driving cars, it doesn't have to be perfect and have all the answers to everything, it just has to be better.

I see this reasoning a lot, people dismissing this idea because it isnt perfect, even though it is better than the current one. Maybe its some kind of human thing, wherein we would rather stick with the familiar, even though the other thing is better. It reminds me a bit of those hardline christians that demand answers to questions like "what happened before the big bang", and when science says "we don't know", they dismiss all of science and say "see, thats why creationism is true and better". Just because it isn't perfect doesnt mean it isnt better or more right. If anything, you should be taking that idea, and try to figure out ways to make it better, more perfect. But perfection does not exist, we can only approach it, never reach it.

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forgot to quote

Yes. Or convince others to defend for you - the means isn't really that important.
By defeating the threat.
That's literally what I just said.
Which means it requires state coercion.
No, quite the opposite. I believe people to be shortsighted, selfish, rather petty and uninformed in their decision-making. I certainly believe people to act in this manner on average without severe societal constraints threatening stigmatization, exile from civil society, consignment after death to eternal torment and the threat of retaliatory violence.
Again so what? He isn't there using it, I'm here and willing to use it, but if I use it and he doesn't then society has been trained to view this as a crime worth punishing. Why? Why can't the speculator just come on down and boot me off his land if it's so valuable to him. Why do I need his conditional permission to use the land, which he can revoke at any time with a few keystrokes?

And the 'reactionary of the day' award goes to…user!! Congratulations fam now please read a fucking book

And yet the real-world outcome of free enterprise is increased productivity relative to feudalism, communism (attempted socialism, whatever you want to call it) and the like.

The only point of contention here might concern values, which is to say, what exactly is the goal of your economic system? If it's to maximize efficiency in the service of the production of consumer goods, free enterprise is your beast. If you have a different set of values, then you might be able to make some comparisons on that basis.

I don't think all labor is equally valuable, so we'll simply disagree there. Some work requires more bodily sacrifice and risk, and to fail to provide compensation for it is to do a disservice to the laborer who's required to put his life and health at risk in the service of his work. There's also differences in productivity among people and that's a whole other problem.

The advantage to a decentralized system isn't that you don't have to do as much computation (you do) but you spread that computation across a network of people and each person determines what computation is most valuable to him. The free enterprise system is the most economical in determining what computation is done by whom and in providing the most rapid possible recalculations in the event of price fluctuations. Now if you want to get into "efficiency" in the sense of what goods are produced, where, and why then you're going to have to provide a value system. Free enterprise is a value-free method of organizing an economy based simply on supply and demand, so if you think it's best to make four million rifles or twenty tractors or what have you and that's your primary metric, then you may well reach that goal more quickly with a controlled economy. But if your goal is to maximize economic activity and production of goods, regardless of their function (though because of demand they will tend toward the utilitarian) you're going to be better off with free enterprise.

For the worker's condition, I'm not trying to argue that he has full freedom under capitalism. In fact, I think under any economic system you're only going to have freedom for a minority of people. I don't think the means by which economic decisions are made will change that because at base you're going t run into material reality. Somebody has to do the dirty, dangerous, and unpleasant jobs and they most likely will be compelled to do so in any system, regardless of the means used to compel them. Be it democratic vote or circumstance (the requirement of purchasing shelter, food, etc.) you're not going to eliminate the necessity to make some people do that work.

I agree with you generally that there's a problem of value inherent in capitalism (and here I mean a state managed entirely for the purpose of maximizing profit) but that strikes me as a philosophical problem and not an economic one. I'd rather have free enterprise supported by a state whose purpose is the betterment of its people, which includes a social safety net, concern for public health, and so on.

I don't demand Utopia, I just want to make you aware that there's no such thing as a non-coercive state. I don't think it can be done. I don't dismiss it because it's imperfect, I just think it's inferior to a system of free enterprise with a state that's aligned with the interests of the people rather than a pure functionary whose purpose is exclusively the support of big capital.

I know it requires state coercion. I'm fine with having a state. So basically you're an anarchist or an anarcho-communist?

You can't just take the speculator's land because you don't know what he's doing with it, what liabilities you might visit on him, how it's zoned, what concerns the municipality might have, neighbors, etc.

I'd rather not live under circumstances where I've gotta kick bums off my land all the time just because they don't think I'm doing anything with it. And, even if I'm not, I work and spend the proceeds of that labor on the purchase of land rather than fancy clothes or restaurant trips or any silly things of that nature. Why shouldn't I enjoy the fruits of my labor in the way I choose?

Thats funny, because my system has a state aligned to the interests of the people, and current society has a state whose purpose is exclusively the support of big capital

The avarage of all labour is equally valuable. Thats what I mean. Obviously a man with no arms and one leg cant work as hard as a man with 4 limbs, but societal avarage are equal.

This requires more computation and produces an inferior result due to lack of data.

No it fucking is not hahaha. Price changes take fucking ages to propogate in a market economy, because prices are changed as a response to a change to a change to a change, etc, instead of as a direct adjustment which is done in the system I proposed. See the book for more info. Free enterprise is simply not more efficient, its a botched solution for the lack of computer power, computing power that we now have.

1/2

There is. You use labour time.
No, youre better off with the system in the book. Apart from all the double work I mentioned, you also have bullshit meaningless stuff like advertisement, corporate lawyers and other jobs whole sole work it is to either fuck over the competition, protect from getting fucked over by competition, or making the consumers buy your product even though utalitarianly they wouldnt have chosen yours if you hadn't bombarded them with phychological tricks.

Doing dirty work is not un-freedom. You paint a false choice, either "forced labour of dirty work" or "threaten people with starvation". Freedom is having political power equal to everybody else, not if you work in an office or drive trucks.
Using the reasoning "people have to clean toilets" to justify a minority owning and controlling everything, having absolute power over where other people have to live, if they will eat or not, is intellectually dishonest.

The states interest is not the betterment of all people. Their interest is that of those that control and fund them, the tiny minority bourgoiesie, the profit makers. The only reason we have healthcare is because the workers organised and threathened with violence and revolution if their demands were not heard. It is not the states job to better the people, and if you had read any history book about how modern states formed you would know. First there were kings, lone rulers. When the bourgoiesie rose in power, they demanded a say in politics, eventually completely eclipsing the power the king had and parlementary monarchies, wherein only the rich could vote. Only those with land could vote, and the more land you had, the more votes you had. It was only after the workers did strikes and threathened with overthrow and general disorder, when they posed a thread to those in power, did they give in. Just like how the king had to give in some of his power to a powerfull group, so too do the rich give a tiny bit of power to the workers. But in the end they still hold the true power, and the power the workers hold only exists so long as they keep organizing and fighting back to the bourgeoisie scrapping those programs.
The state does not even protect free enterprise by the way, they protect the powerfull, the people who pay them. They will force "free enterprise" on some people and meanwhile give monopolies to companies or overthrow other governments to give the land to their companies. They dont give a fuck about your ideals such as free enterprise or betterment of people, they care about those with the power, who fund them and own them. If its the multinationals, they will do whatever helps the multinationals, no matter if it goes against free trade.

That is an absolutely retarded definition of capitalism. Free enterprise is capitalism too.

You're obviously very smart and a credit to your compatriots.

I just realized I actually have an example from my own experience of something similar. I own a one-acre piece of land on which I'm building myself a house (I'm a self-employed carpenter and happy to dictate the conditions of my own labor) and I've got a hill running down one side of the property. One day I hear a chainsaw going down my hill and I'm thinking "hmm, sounds awfully close." I go down the hill and see my neighbor halfway down, cutting away at dead material on the ground (without having asked beforehand). Naturally, I informed him that he was on my land removing my material and, being a civilized man, he accepted this fact and returned to his own land. Now you might say "but if it's dead material, what of it?" and indeed my neighbor seemed to think it wasn't serving any purpose; however, this was material which I'd arranged in such a way that it would rot down and create swales to help the hill absorb water and retain soil. This problem is easily avoided by making clear the demarcation of my land and his, which I did forthwith and haven't experienced any issue since.

I don't think our current system is at all serving the people, there we agree. I just don't think it's worth doing away with free enterprise because I don't think your alternative will lead to more individual freedom. My preference is for a limited (insofar as possible) government whose purpose is explicitly the protection and betterment of its people.

Look, I've come in here without insulting you guys and I'm making a good-faith effort to have a dialogue with you. I have different opinions, but that's no reason to assume I haven't read books. I'm presenting you with my idealized version, and not the means. I understand that a populace must be in a position to control its government through violence if need be, and I don't believe that because you say something that makes it the case (i.e. if you say the government is for the people, the government is for the people).

Whether you think the definition is retarded or not isn't really important, I'm simply trying to clarify what I mean to minimize confusion. That's a normal part of the process of dialogue. I think I've been fair to you here and it doesn't do you credit to insult me without cause.

Which is impossible

Idealism brings you nowhere in life.

Well I haven't talked about how this would work in great detail but to sum it up

As opposed to your ideal world

It is because the definition "capitalism is when the state owns everything and runs it for profit" is literally not used by anyone on this planet, except you. Redefining words like that is not normal part of dialogue, it is an intentionally confusing derailing technique.

So then what makes your favoured coercion any different than the coercion of the mob demanding redistribution of material wealth?
Yes I can.
So what? I don't care, his personal interests or the interests of the state do not align with my selfish interests.
Why do I have to sideline my selfish interests so that you can have your selfish interests satisfied?
Because I do honestly respect the chad homeless person who invested his $200 in bottle deposits in an SKS over the virgin IT programmer or whatever who invested his $80k a year in a patch of land he expects all of society to start calling his property and come to his defense if someone starts using his property.

And youre right I shouldn't have insulted you. Sorry for that.

You're still being a bit insulting here, no sense putting words in my mouth. My ideal world doesn't involve magic, rich people controlling everything, or any such permutation. I think there's plenty we can agree on in terms of outcomes, we just have different opinions concerning means. I operate in one sphere of information, you in another. We also clearly have different ethics, which we could discuss another time.

Look, I think we've reached the end of what we can achieve productively for the moment. I'm gonna go get some food in me. I appreciate the apology and I hope you lads have a good evening.

No we don't. You want a free market economic system. I think free market economic systems cause immeasurable human suffering, inequality, the destruction of this planet and our species as a whole.

oh shit it's the return of groverhaus!

Hey I have a story for you as well. Where I live wood-burning stoves are still fairly common and so selling wood by the cord is a viable home business. If you're a good boy and want good boy points (or you're a """"small""""" business with 12 employees) you get a licence from the government and cut on crown land. If you're an actual person, you do what most people do and go into all of this speculator-held land (or crown land) and cut at night. Sometimes the cops try and crack down on it with hidden cameras but no one cares because fuck speculators and fuck the government. I've heard them at night a couple of times and am quite happy to look the other way.

More to your point I don't really care. You assume that property rights are these natural things that have existed since time immemorial. They haven't, they're artificial abstractions and they only work if enough people with a community is willing to acknowledge that they exist within the specific legal regime of capitalism that has existed for a sliver of time relative to most of human history.

And this society has never actually uniformly enforced these rights for all. Maybe a healthy majority of property owners, but those with power have always been able to grease the palms of a judge or bury a defendant in paperwork and legal fees to bend the system in his favour. Always. The people who win the most under capitalism are often those with zero respect for the systems that you so prefer. The system more importantly is one with no conceivable solution to climate change, something which is going to make maintaining and owning private property much more difficult by the time we're all old.

Why should I cuck myself and play along with said system, knowing this?

And just dig a french drain, dude.

rare pic of OP, taking a break from fighting statists on obscure internet forums

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