Why is the Umair Haque article pay-walled?
Kaka felota! Du ferí da Belte!
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An asteroid colony would be inside the asteroid, not on the surface. (Of course, you could in theory go whole hog with paraterraforming, and wrap the whole asteroid in a bubble: http://terraforming.wikia.com/wiki/Paraterraforming )
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Right you are, which is why different types of goods and commodities can either be taxed, tax-exempt, or somewhere in the middle, as far as a net wealth tax would go.
The thing the rich people don’t want us to realize is — it’s actuallly quite easy to push and pull the levers of a market-based system, in a way that makes it a productive system for everyone.
And again, the Big Lie is that there isn’t enough to go around. The Big Truth is that there absolutely IS, it’s just that the past few hundred years saw most of humanity’s progress go to a very few. We CAN turn things around, using an intelligent blend of market and social welfare-based approaches.
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Yes, they were. Pretty much the whole history of the Middle Ages is kings and emperors frantically trying to escape feudalism and establish nice absolute monarchies.
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Capitalism and markets are not the same thing. Capitalism is an economic system, whereas markets are an abstract idealization of certain kinds of economic activity.
I use this analogy: “Economies” are like electrical circuits. “Capitalism” is a particular circuit design. “Markets” are (common, useful) circuit components.
“Capitalism” is an economy where the means of production are owned and controlled by the wealthy. “State socialism” is an economy where the means of production are owned and controlled by the government, ostensibly on behalf of the people. There’s nothing stopping a state socialist economy from using markets to set prices. And even in capitalist economies, we don’t only rely on markets to set prices – e.g. the EPA is a non-market entity that is used to incorporate information about externalities into the price signals at work in the market. Arguably, the market would be a less efficient allocator of resources if not for the information derived from that non-market source.
History has been fairly kind to syndicalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#U.S.,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives#United_States) and various limited kinds of state socialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_companies).
ETA: Also, consider the term “red menace”. The Soviet Union really did achieve absurd rates of growth through a command-and-control economy. At certain scales, command-and-control works fine. And as @doctorow’s examples show, that scale is actually larger now than it was during the cold war as a result of logistics technologies.
Capitalism is the only possible system when you ignore all the existing successful alternatives/complements to capitalism.
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No, that’s the moon!
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Managers aren’t making purchases on an open market, though, they’re ordering from a centralized institution.
You can imagine a situation where a manager of a Walmart near a lake was willing to pay more to Walmart Corp. for fishing gear than the manager of a Walmart in a desert. That’s what it might look like if Walmart’s internal economy was market-driven. But I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.
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Why shouldn’t he be willing to pay more? Doesn’t necessarily mean that he would have to. The desert Walmart manager would not accept fishing gear unless he got a serious discount on it, knowing that it would take space in his store and sell poorly. If the fishing gear manufacturers have a problem and are not able to supply what the stores normally need, then the market forces kick in. Are the coastal stores willing to pay more for their gear knowing that they can pass on the cost to their customers?
The essence of the market is that the decision making is pushed down to the people closest to the problem. This is what makes them efficient, the people closest to the problem know best what they need to solve it. It is also why the system scales efficiently, there are no information bottlenecks at the top like you get with command economies because the decision making doesn’t happen at the top.
I never said he shouldn’t be willing to pay more!
I’m not saying Walmart’s internal economy couldn’t possibly operate through markets. I’m saying that it almost certainly does not do so right now.
Yes, i agree this is what is wonderful about markets (which, again, are not the same thing as capitalism). But there are other ways to transmit this kind of information, and I’m pretty sure Walmart uses non-market means to distribute resources internally.
If you have any definite info on how they do so, it might be interesting to see.
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I guess the real tell would be what happens when a supplier has a shortfall and they can’t normally restock the stores. Do all of the goods get evenly distributed at the same ratios? Does someone in Bentonville step in and start making decisions about who gets first dibs on the limited supply? Do the managers get a say? This is the kind of situation where an ad-hoc market could easily form.
‘Minimally managed’ leads to multiple tragedies of the commons and loophole-discovery incentives, and an inability of the individual to meet all of his/her needs from his/her own purse. When modest taxation for public pump-primer investment and/or regulation of capitalism is given the right rules and incentives to provide social goods, then the individual’s ability to spend their money in the market is vastly improved. Social goods like water, sewage removal, roads, and other civil infrastructure.
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Looking at your objection the other way around, the fact that Walmart doesn’t get to control its outputs doesn’t really seem relevant. The Soviet Union couldn’t arbitrarily decide its outputs either. It was trying to satisfy the non-arbitrary needs of human beings.
Maybe it wasn’t as good at it as Walmart is, but that’s besides the point. If being good at satisfying consumer demand automatically and by definition makes a system “capitalist” then saying capitalist systems are the only ones good at satisfying consumer demand is a tautology.
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It was tried half a century or so ago by the UK’s Labour government. 93% marginal tax rates, IIRC.
I’m no economist, but it seems to me that “inefficiencies” don’t necessarily equal corruption. A system where many workers have a 40 hour week, and weekends off is less efficient than one where everyone is working as much as humanly possible, right? Sometimes “inefficiencies” are simply space for humanity. Conflating efficiency with maximum benefit feels like rigging the argument. There are other values, and other choices, and you don’t have to go full communism to see that security and humanity can flourish outside of a market.
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The system being used in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is working well. Here’s a comment on Libcom by David Graeber giving a basic explaination.
https://libcom.org/forums/news/no-genuine-revolution-interview-graeber-evrensel-newspaper-29122014#comment-549599
I would supply other in depth sources, but I have IRL problems happening right now.
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Unless it was a wealth tax (versus an income tax) it doesn’t count, in my book – it’s still taxing the wrong thing.
However, in American history, many major growth periods existed during high-tax eras. Something tells me same may have been the case in the UK.
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Except humans are not machines and our performance drops off a cliff when we’re overworked (generally.)
The greatest source of inefficiency in capitalism is the demand for profit. It is the source of Jevon’s Paradox, and why a capitalist economy has no hope of coping with AGW.
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Qapla’!
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The Moon is better and oddly enough making an O’Neill cylinder in an asteroid or just at L5 would be much easier. Mars has too many problems to solve, the big one being closing distance if/when rescue is needed.
@doctorow Also, I think the big thing we can take away here is that Marx is getting the last laugh. Capitalists aren’t simply mustache twirling villains but rather folks who can’t see beyond the current mode of production much like how feudal lords couldn’t see past living off the fruits of agrarian peasantry. When a capitalist sees past capitalism that’s when they stop being a capitalist. I’m not sure any of them are capable of having such creative vision. They either imagine a world with basic income or charity but never a world where income isn’t necessary and work as we know doesn’t exist (and consequentially that self-worth/value isn’t based on what you can do for others as labor). This is like waiting for the Second Coming, so it’s not going to happen. Unfortunately, I think a bloody revolution or set of revolutions will be necessary again to get them to give up this nonsense of saving capitalism.
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