Maybe if you are a billionaire. The rest of us end up having to ask permission from the banks.
AKA “the scene that the CIA excised from the film version because it criticised capitalism”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/18/books/how-the-cia-played-dirty-tricks-with-culture.html
Many people remember reading George Orwell’s ‘‘Animal Farm’’ in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it ‘‘impossible to say which was which.’’
That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to ‘‘Animal Farm’’ from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
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The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of ‘‘1984,’’ disregarding Orwell’s specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, ‘‘He loved Big Brother.’’ In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: ‘‘Down with Big Brother!’’
Syndicalism scales up surprisingly well.
The ending of the 1999 version was just as bad
The film returns to the present, where Jessie returns to find Manor Farm unattended and in ruins. Napoleon, Squealer, and all the other animals have died, but Jessie finds some dogs who had survived and realizes they are her own puppies. In response, the puppies recognize her as their mother. Jessie sees Napoleon’s statue now collapsed, and remarks that she knew that one day, Napoleon’s evil, cruelty, and greed would bring about his ruin. A motorcar arrives with a farmer, his wife and children - the new owners of Manor Farm (although the whereabouts of Jones and his wife are unknown). Jessie remarks she will not let this family “make the same mistakes” of the neglect of Jones or the abuse of Napoleon, and is aware the small remnant of animals will now have to work along their new masters to restore the Farm.
It’s pretty much “we should welcome back the Tsars, but don’t worry, this time they are nice Tsars.”
Markets have another amazing property -to crash and seriously impact people’s lives when greed overtakes morality.
Not saying you made this point, but the choice here is not binary between unfettered capitalism or pure socialism/communism. Starting with the notion that we all do better when we all do better, we as citizens get to decide what is most important to us and there’s no reason why we can’t say we want health care for everyone, a life free from poverty and a clean and sustainable environment. No reason except that enough of those with wealth and power to buy lawmakers have spent considerable effort fooling voters into doing their bidding.
Liberals in general don’t want the government making bowling balls or providing car insurance or running a rib joint. But when a company or industry gets so much power that they can exploit us in small or large ways, we have the right to say no. We can prevent greed and power from messing things up, as we have in the past.
Often we hear from the right that regulations (laws that protect us) will restrain the magic of capitalism. That’s bullshit. Those who sadly find self worth in chasing riches and those good folks running responsible companies are not going to leave their mansions, buy double wides and drink themselves to death. They’ll always find a way to make money; lots of it -and more power to them. That incentive is what confers on all of us the benefits of capitalism including allocation of resources. All we are saying is that when your business or industry proves, as for example the health insurance companies have, that they are predatory and working against the common good, then we have every right to do it ourselves and pay for it with taxes. The economy won’t crash, billionaires will still be billionaires, things will be fine.
Cory, you and L. Phillips miss Mises’s point entirely. The problem of economic calculation in a socialist commonwealth is not about the costs of bureaucracy. Nor is it about the technical computational capabilities found in the world.
The point is that without prices and markets, the is literally no measure to tell weather a capital allocation could have had a better use. Both the U.S.S.R and Walmart survive because they had external price signals they could use to guide allocation. The party/board people could look at world markets and tell what capital good were roughly worth.
This is because human action consists precisely in picking one coerce and forgoing other uses. An ordinal scale of utility. The sort of math and calculation you can do the ordinal numbers is quite limited. Third plus Fifth has no answer, and the question doesn’t even make sense.
Such preferences have not been quantized, but even if neuro-biology were solved tomorrow and they wer quantized. We would have no way to describe or communicate than in an intuitive way other than to translate back to qualitative/ordinal terms.
Additionally such preferences are constantly in flux and only found anew with each action. Even if you solved the economy today conditions would change and the solution not valid for tomorrows conditions.
Also note that Walmart, and Amazon, don’t produce the majority of goods they sell. What they excel at is what corporations traditionally excel at, and that is reducing the coase cost of transactions.
Dear Cory,
the alternative presented in your review is between markets and planning, but there is a third alternative, i.e. mutual coordination or stygmergy, which is how open source collaboration works; and through accounting, i.e. signals from the material world of physical transactions, we can extend mutual coordination to physical production, and this would not entall the command and exploitation of Walmart etc…
I just wrote a report on it:
*** P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival: Towards a P2P Infrastructure for a Socially Just Circular Society. By Michel Bauwens and Alex Pazaitis. Foreword by Kate Raworth. P2P Foundation, 2019.**
How shared perma-circular supply chains, post-blockchain distributed ledgers, protocol cooperatives, and three new forms of post-capitalist accounting, could very well save the planet.
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