Another white-washed sanitized warrior for the dispossessed.
I was stunned when I first learned this about his guitar:
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Iāve read the book he co-authored with Rafael NuƱez on mathematical inquiry seen through Lakoffās lens of embodied cognition (Where Mathematics Comes From, for those who are curious). Havenāt read his other, earlier books, though Iāve been meaning to.
Say more, Iād like to hear your thoughts.
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IIRC (cuz Iām too lazy to src it) but wasnāt the top tax rate in the early 50ās at 90% and corporate around 50%? Didnāt we use some of that money to build highways, schools and hospitals and whatnot - Iāll remind them of that too.
No, it did that a long time ago - but just because something is useless doesnāt keep it from being foisted onto the populace by a powerful minority who benefit from it.
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I found Lakoffās work on categorization very illuminating, and Iād love to hear about the book youāre reading and how it relates to this.
Elon Musk has disproved the premise that capitalism has outlived its usefulness - heās demonstrated a valid use case. And guaranteed income (i.e. welfare) has not worked out very well in the USA; we donāt seem to be able to do it right. But that doesnāt detract from Dr. Kingās legacy at all, in my opinion; in fact I would not believe he was ever a real person if he was supposed to have been perfect in every way.
or the exception that proves the ruleā¦
Letās say you had some scales, with āCapitalism - expiration date has passed, toxicā on one side labeled D (dead), and āCapitalism - great futureā on the other labeled Y (yay). Then you add the Musk.
For the one side, thereās PayPal which puts a heavy weight on D.
Thereās the expensive electric luxury cars with free charging stations - rich people get free energy for their expensive cars. Not a ringing endorsement of capitalism.
Thereās Space-X - cool, a new vendor on a list that all do impressive things. They cut costs thanks to not being cronies in a crony-capitalist system but also cut corners and have a more dramatic string of failures than any of their more risk-averse competitors. Iād give them some extra Y because they do cool things and are not yet fully embedded into the crony-capitalist system the way most of aerospace is.
Paypal: 5,000,000 kg of Capitalist death
Tesla: 100 kg Capitalism yay
Space-X: 1,000,000 kg Capitalism yay
Elon Muskās net existence: 4,899,900 kg of Capitalist death
all results plus or minus 5,000,000 kg.
I love Space-X (despite Musk being loathsomeness embodied), but donāt really see Musk as grounds for making a grand pronouncement on whether capitalism has outlived its usefulness one way or another - heās done at least as much bad as good.
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Also, Mr. Musk may be demonstrating the benefits of a certain type capitalism, but not the same kind that the rest of the business\banking world is currently utilizing, or interested in switching over to.
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Macroeconomics is not one of my strong areas, but I always had the impression that modern societies benefited from a blend of socialist and capitalist solutions/systems, no?
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Last couple of sentences of your welfare trap link:
To eliminate the welfare trap entirely would require a policy which
permanently continues benefit payments regardless of any conditions, so
that no income from paid work would be withdrawn. One example of this
would be unconditional basic income.
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Welfare is not guaranteed income, it is income provided on the condition that a person can prove they are poor enough to need it. Much like income that is provided on the condition that a person goes to work, it can be taken away if the condition ceases and creates an incentive for the person to maintain that condition.
And, of course, we have no reason to think that capitalism even helped Elon Musk. Maybe if we worked under a different system weād have 10 times as many famous inventors/entrepreneurs because they wouldnāt have been shut down and kept out by existing moneyed interests. Saying that Musk is an argument for capitalism might be as valid as saying that Ginsberg is an argument for sexist selection of judges - if great women like her are getting to the supreme court then the system must be working, right?
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I view Elonās stance as retro future optimism. A lot of things were proposed about the future of the world in the mid 1900ās (moon colonies, flaying cars, jet packs, etc) and it seems like he wants to make good on those promises, he just happens to make money along the way because no one else wants to do it. (Of course this is a way over simplified view, it is much more complex than that)
Thatās how I feel about him - that he just happens to make a lot of money doing these things. But really, it seems like he basically made his fortune on PayPal. Being rich meant he could do things like build electric cars without being locked out of the market or bought out and shut down. And then you ask yourself whether there were a dozen PayPal competitors that werenāt quite in the right place a the right time, realize that PayPal was a fluke, and start to wonder whether there arenāt dozens more Musks out there, some of whom are homeless. Musk named his electric cars after a genius inventor who died alone and impoverished despite his incredible contributions to science. Musk presumably could have ended up the same way.
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Thatās what I really like about him. He didnāt squirrel his money away. He found something he wanted, and when times got tough literally spent his own money to keep those businesses afloat. To me, that shows he means what he says and plans to succeed come hell or high water. Most CEOās would cut and run, or take the golden parachute.
You guys are talking about capitalism plus a load of baggage that is somewhat related. Iām talking about the acumulation of resources (i.e. capital) by individuals (which is explicitly not permitted in non-capitalist systems) allowing advancement of research and individual projects that benefit humanity and would not be possible (due to public apathy, other group priorities, or a dozen other factors) under a truly representative government that did not allow capital accumulation through market participation. If you donāt want dictatorship, or oligarchy, or profit redistribution at gunpoint making everyone too poor to accomplish expensive things like getting rid of fossil fuels, you have to allow people to earn, save, and spend capital. And thatās capitalism. Your dislike of Elon Musk should not blind you to the advancement of the human race that Tesla Motors represents - electric cars do not poison the global atmosphere. Empirically, capitalist Teslas are better than collectivist Trabants.
@anon50609448, if we did welfare the way we supposedly intended, the only people not receiving income would be those who refused to do any work whatsover under any circumstances - sociopathic intentional parasites. And even these would be minimally fed and sheltered. Did Kingās guaranteed income promise to provide more? Freud said humans require work, love and play and nobodyās disproved it yet. Paying people who canāt get a job is profoundly different from rewarding lazy sociopaths for refusing to do the dirty but essential work of waste stream management and the like. How would this moral hazard be managed? The soviets never managed to find a solution.
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You could give me a million dollars, but if I feel that my daily activities arenāt contributing to my family or otherwise benefiting society-at-large then Iāll feel just as worthless and depressed as when I was poor.
Iām not a finance or economics geek, but I really enjoyed Jack Weatherfordās The History of Money. Weatherford asserts that immaterial mediums of exchange such as currency are implicit social contracts. Maybe this definition is common knowledge among economists but it was news to me, and made me appreciate currency as a social invention, first and foremost above it being an economic one.
Threads like this would benefit from talking in more concrete terms and eschewing āismsā altogether, especially given the floating definition of ācapitalā in economic theory.
And the way we do it now those sociopathic parasites become CEOs and use their billions to buy off politicians to create laws that make them even richer. Iād rather have my sociopathic parasites staying home playing video games than manipulating the stock market and ruining other peopleās lives. And donāt tell me they arenāt parasites. Creative financial instruments are piracy, not work.
Our desire to punish the undeserving is one of the things that holds us back more than anything else right now. We can float a huge number of hangers on. And who knows, maybe some of them are going to turn out to be great once they find they live in a world that cares rather than a world that doesnāt.
As for the soviets, if you compare how the soviet union faired to how capitalist murderous dictatorships faired, they didnāt actually do that badly. Their problem was never finding ways to stop people from leeching off the system. Their problem was having killer megalomaniacs micromanaging everything. You donāt create a society based on the idea of caring for one another by relentlessly murdering everyone who doesnāt make quota. Iām not saying that communism is the way of the future, but that was not why it failed. As you said (via Freud) people need work, love and play. If you give everyone the freedom to live without requiring them to subjugate themselves to an employer, people will still do lots of work because people want to do work.
If it werenāt for the large salary I get to uselessly push paper around, I think Iād prefer to be a janitor.
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Anything. Hell, if I could keep my salary & benefits Iād go back to retail in heart beat. /sigh
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Donāt make the mistake of thinking everyone else feels that way. I do, but I have met several people who were not socialized to feel that way - people with the opposite of a work ethic, they feel pride when they obtain wealth by exploiting and misleading others, and are angered by the mere thought of exerting themselves in any way. Those people did crap work when forced to do it - and would use any excuse to avoid work. Having one of them for a co"worker" is an illuminating experience, especially if they trust you enough to share their inmost thoughts and ideals.
My boss* and one of my cow-orkers, who grew up in the old Soviet union and came here as adults, strongly disagree with you. They both say that entire instrumentalities of leeches (such as the internal KGB) grew from the USSRās failure to solve the (intimately interrelated) free rider and hoarder problems, and that the worst excesses of the Party were enabled by the perceived need to deal with it through aggressive punishment of those seen to be betraying collectivist ideals.
But really, this whole thread is based on condemning one or another ideal based on known bad implementations. AFAIK, there are no examples of successful, functional collectivism on a large scale - the Soviet Union failed and collapsed, and the Party still exists in China (Marxism posits that when Communism is achieved, the Party āwithers awayā because there is no longer a need for a privileged oligarchy). It remains to be seen whether capitalism (which is arguably the state of nature - since those with more resources aka capital can accomplish more even when states and laws do not exist) will fare better in the long run, but right now it is the way things get done. Musk and his family made sacrifices to put him in a position to get lucky, and when he did (Paypal) he leveraged that luck-granted capital to accomplish social goods that our representative government refuses to perform.
And thus, in a single masterful stroke, Snowlark lays waste to the arguments of myself, Dr. King, Corey, and Humbabella! I submit to your insight.
* child of two anointed Heroes of the Soviet Union, both of whom were Jewish.
Emphasis mine. This is the point I am trying to make regarding āleeches.ā It is our efforts to not let anyone leech off welfare that create the welfare trap that keeps people who would like to be working out of work. Making people demean themselves time and time again to get help in the name of keeping out a few cheaters is costing us more than the cheaters would. It makes the system adversarial instead of helpful, it makes people feel like the system isnāt really there to help them, and it makes people want to cheat. Itās not that different than how bombing terrorists makes more terrorists. You canāt brutalize (masses of) people into good behaviour.
If there is enough to go around (and arguably there wasnāt when the Soviet Union was formed, weāve had some substantial advances since then) then you ought to work from the premise that there is enough to go around. And remember that many āfree loadersā may be people with various mental illnesses and neurodiversity issues who would actually be able to participate if they were given the chance to, but canāt fit in with the existing system.
Capitalism isnāt exactly a state of nature, since, as discussed above, it is a revolutionary idea from the middle ages. Weāve had a few revolutionary ideas since then, and capitalism needs to take a back seat to several. I think treating people like adults who can make their own decisions is usually a good idea (this is more attributable to human rights than capitalism), and it seems like these days grocery stores are a pretty good way to distribute food (though this is more because we have an abundance of food thanks to science, if there was a shortage of food then this would be a dismal way to distribute it). Capitalism as an ideology - the idea that we ought to have things run privately as a good unto itself - is a menace that somehow (as an example) leads the US government to spend more on health care than any other developed country while not providing health care to the majority of its people.
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