Poirot
I asked you, in proving that capitalism is exploitative, to take account of the corresponding costs of the government interventions. You haven’t done so.

Therefore you have lost the argument.

It’s easy sport to look at something terrible, and pretend to find net benefits *by ignoring the costs*, and that is all your intellectual method amounts to.

Your argument is no more than “If there was no scarcity, wouldn’t life be wonderful?” No doubt it would, but you haven’t shown how government interventions caused less unemployment, poverty and hardship, than more. You simply look at the benefits, and pretend the costs don’t exist, or assume they were automatically worth while. How do you know that the other uses to which society would have put the resources that were withdrawn by the interventions weren’t more highly valued by society? And how do you know that the destruction or diversion of resources did not cause greater poverty or hardship than the interventions saved?

So far as the original problem was public goods, such as pollution of streams or wastage of forests, you’re only making my argument for me.

All you’ve done is use a double standard. But you have made no attempt to show reason or evidence for your assumption that with government we enter an economic wonderland, nor even apparently cognized the quintessential problem.

If your basal assumption were correct, then we would make the Australian public richer by raising the minimum wage to $200 an hour. A moment’s reflection will show that your theory is wrong.

Merely pointing to bad things doesn’t prove your case. Thus you have not been able to establish that capitalism was exploitative in the Industrial Revolution.

And therefore your entire critique of capitalism collapses.

Also you and Molly are agreed that the income to IR workers was not “decent”. But if I ask you each to define decent, I guarantee both your answers would be different or vague; same for the other 6 billion people on the planet. It’s arbitrary.

Your income in *real* terms is greater ...

... than that of the richest capitalists in the IR. They gained no more benefit from the workers above the market rate than you do.

Therefore it is pious hypocrisy that you accuse IR capitalists of greed and frivolous consumption. Why don’t you practise what you preach?

In its deep structure, your argument is only this:
“Capitalism is exploitative.”
“Why?”
“Because it is.”

Or
“Capitalism is exploitative.”
“Why?”
“Because conditions weren’t ‘decent’ as (not) defined by me.”

Flaky.

If I were to use your approach, I would simply say that government education is not “decent”, and then smugly assume that that disposes of all issues. That’s the intellectual level of your argument.

But I don’t just illogically and circularly assume what is in issue like you do. Instead I have shown:
a) that voluntary transactions are mutually advantageous and therefore ethically better than coerced ones which are zero-sum
b) that voluntary transactions also benefit society at large more than coerced interventions
c) that state interventions necessarily involve greater and worse costs than benefits
d) that the reason you haven’t identified that is because you either haven’t understood or considered the issue
e) when shown reason and evidence which you are *completely unable* to refute, you simply ignore it
f) your methodology consists of circularly repeating “exploitative” without ever having proved it or cognized what is in issue
g) your arguments are all logically fallacious: self-contradictory; double standards; circularity; personality; and misrepresentation.

The state interventions you support have caused more human suffering than they relieved. Your moral argument is phony and self-contradictory, and your economic argument is flatly incorrectd and refuted.

Mollydukes
Obviously the reason you haven’t answered whether Pythagoras’s theorem can be proved, is because it can be. This disproves your statement “that nothing can be 'proved'.”

But if it’s true that nothing can be proved, then you cannot meet your own standard of proof in the argument, and your argument fails for that reason.

“What’s your point?”
My point is that voluntary relations are preferable as a basis of social co-operation than coerced relations ...

… as a basis of social co-operation than coerced relations, both ethically, and in terms of economic benefit to society as a whole.

The advocates of social co-operation based on coercion, such as you,
a) cannot rationally prove their argument
b) cannot disprove my refutation of them, and
c) rely *entirely* on logically fallacious arguments.

Whether an argument is “same old” is irrelevant. The question you should be concerned about is whether it’s true.

Psychology
You have treated as self-evident - but not explained how or what - “psychology” supposedly invalidates voluntary relations as a basis for social co-operation.

“…one common scenario in which a job seeker has less power and consequently a lower possibiity of making a choice that advantages them.”

Less and lower … than whom? Your argument doesn’t make sense without saying whom.

How does the fact that a job seeker has a lower possibility of making an advantageous choice (than some other unspecified person) prove that voluntary relations are unethical and unworkable, or that legalized aggression and government bureaucracies are better, as a basis for social co-operation?

If I go for a job as a plumber, or an engineer, I have a lower possibility of making a choice that advantages me than a a plumber, or an engineer.

So? What’s your point?

“Where to start is for you to explain why those mill owners choose not to provide decent conditions for their workers when they were free to do so?”

Firstly define “decent”.

Now justify it in terms of the subjective evaluations of the consumers of flour, most of whom were themselves working class.

Secondly, no doubt the reason the mill owners chose not to pay more than the market rate for labour, is for exactly the same reason you also choose not to. You have a higher standard of living, in real terms, than the mill owners. Yet you’re amusing yourself on the internet, instead of providing a “decent” difference to poor workers of China – or Australia. Why?

The mill owners derived no more benefit from the mill workers above the market rate for their labour, than you do from those contemporary poor, so what’s your explanation?

Thirdly, your query is about the *motivation* of the capitalists. That’s irrelevant. The relevant question is as to the *effect*, not the *intent* of private or governmental producers.

On that relevant question, you have lost the argument, because you cannot prove – to your standard, or mine – that state interventions in general, and government education in particular, causes better outcomes than worse.

Why not? Because you’re only looking at half the ledger. You’re not taking into account the *downsides* of government interventions. You simply assert that, because you’ve got Aspergers, *therefore* coercion is preferable as a basis for education. This is simply a non sequitur.

But it’s worse than that, because you look on abuses for which government education is responsible, disown them, and still assert that the ultimate criterion is whether *YOU* are getting a benefit, with *no consideration at all* for the costs or wrongs imposed on other people. Pure selfishness without remorse. Your argument fails your own standard of empathy.

At best, the deep structure of your argument is this:
a) with private provision of education, there is a downside, that the scarcity of resources requires us to sacrifice other important values
b) but with government provision of education, society is not faced with that problem, since we just ASSUME without any attempt to justify it, that the resources used did not require the sacrifice of any other value.

It’s irrational and a double standard.

You need to demonstrate *why* and *how you know* that the social values that had to be sacrificed to provide government education, are less urgent and important than the values that were satisfied by government education, after we allow for its incompetence and abusiveness.

Go ahead. You - and Poirot - haven’t even started.

Peter Hume - rather than engaging in mindless point scoring - you could start to think that may be, just may be, you are not that well informed about capitalism and the free market.
The argument about 19th century experiences is simply that government needs to regulate the market it is a question of how much it needs to be regulated.
Secondly capitalism is unstable - something that we are witnessing now.
As John Gray writes:
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.

cont
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history,
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.

The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended.

Negative return
Defenders of capitalism argue that it offers to everyone the benefits that in Marx's time were enjoyed only by the bourgeoisie, the settled middle class that owned capital and had a reasonable level of security and freedom in their lives.
In 19th Century capitalism most people had nothing. They lived by selling their labour and when markets turned down they faced hard times. But as capitalism evolves, its defenders say, an increasing number of people will be able to benefit from it.
Fulfilling careers will no longer be the prerogative of a few. No more will people struggle from month to month to live on an insecure wage. Protected by savings, a house they own and a decent pension, they will be able to plan their lives without fear. With the growth of democracy and the spread of wealth, no-one need be shut out from the bourgeois life. Everybody can be middle class.

In fact, in Britain, the US and many other developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been happening. Job security doesn't exist, the trades and professions of the past have largely gone and life-long careers are barely memories