The fatal flaw in the author's argument, and in the argument of Doran and Klein whom he cites, is that in purporting to criticise "capitalism" they do not distinguish between private and public ownership or control of the means of production. This failure is fundamental and makes the entire argument nonsense.

You can see, can't you, that if agriculture were collectivised a la the dream of Lenin, it would be meaningless nonsense to impute the resulting mass starvation to "capitalism"?

Well? At what stage has the author, or Doran or Klein, made the fundamental distinction on which their entire argument rests?

For example, take the aggressive wars of the USA. These are wars carried out by the State, using the power of the State, funded by its monopoly power of taxation, and by its assumed monopoly power of controlling the money supply, in reliance on the monopoly military power of the State. They involve forcing the whole the population to pay non-consensually for the State to control the means of producing war in the State's unilateral discretion. If you don't agree with it, you don't have an option to withhold payment, as you do in voluntary transactions. If you try withholding payment, the State will send its armed agents to arrest you, and if you don't submit or defend yourself, they'll beat you into submission or shoot you or cage you. It simply gibberish to think of this as "capitalism". It's the opposite!

The corporate military-industrial complex is entirely State-funded, a State phenomenon. The fact that private corporations are more efficient at doing anything than the State, including make weapons, does not prove the author's point. It only proves that if the State wants "more bang for the buck" (the concept of efficiency as expressed by the State) it contracts out to private businesses.

Thus the author and his ilk are hoist with their own petard. Their critique of capitalism only stands up if you define capitalism to mean "State ownership and control of the means of production based on the State’s claimed monopoly of coercion" - the exact opposite of the meaning of capitalism which refers to private control of the means of production based on market i.e. consensual transactions. That’s what the whole issue is about, dummy! And you missed it with your undergraduate boilerplate critique of capitalism quoting Lenin!

No school of economic thought refers to itself as “neoliberal”. This is used entirely by socialists and Keynesians as a term of abuse referring incoherently to refer to anything they don’t like, without taking care to distinguish the critical variables, of private versus government ownership and control of the means of production.

The idea that the massive governmental junketing in Iraq shows anything other than massive GOVERNMENTAL junketing just shows complete confusion. To make his case, the author would need to show that, in the absence of government interventions either in the USA or Iraq to bring about such results, such expenditures on such things would have resulted anyway from the free movement of capital in free markets – the opposite of what he’s arguing.

The author’s confusion is laughable and if you follow his line of reasoning to its logical conclusion you see it at its height: “government is controlled by wicked corporations therefore we need more government”!

If the left wing had not spent the last century urging for government’s endless and open-ended expansion of government power to control the economy, we would not have the results that government power is inter-riddled with every aspect of corporate life that they are now rightly complaining about.

The solution is more liberty, not more monopoly fascist socialism. Complying with the Constitution would be a start. Underneath the author’s confusion, in his just complaint, he agrees with Ron Paul.

The world would be a far better place if it got rid of capitalism entirely.

A world that is built upon worshiping greed above all else is disgusting. Greed makes pigs of us all, turns us into money-grubbers and whores who have no depth of character or nobility!

The rich should be taxed out of existence. They should be replaced by philosophers and artists and playwrights and humanitarians, people who have something valuable to offer to the world.

And the "philosophers and artists and playwrights and humanitarians" would decide what to produce and how and who for?

David G is showing why attempts to replace capitalism with a better system, killed over 200 million people in the last century.

Dreamers are all very well but when their dreams are backed up with a monopoly of lethal aggressive force it tends to turn out worse than bad.

David G always has the option of not buying and selling stuff, since voluntary exchanges are so wicked, but then he wouldn't be tryping stuff into his computer made by those wicked capitalists, would he?

Clearly the author of the book has an extreme left/passifist view of world history which, like most extreme views, results in egregious errors. The statement about capitalists profiting from war, for example, is fundamentally mistaken. Some sections of the private sector profit from war. Otherwise much normal economic activity shuts down. America had good reasons for entering World War I (although how this got dragged into the argument I do not know) including German insistence on torpedoing American ships. To claim it was to make the world safe for capitalism is simply absurd.

David G's complaints about greed are a throw back to the days of the hard left. If he can suggest an alternative that does not result in a basket case economy, I'd be interested to hear it..

Ken McNab troops out the tired old todge that capitalism means war. By implication, Ken must be a socialist dinosaur. He must have lived for the past twenty years in a time warp, unaware that the world's premier Socialist states gave up on his beloved Socialism long ago. They finally figured out that the capitalists were right all along. Praising abject failure while attacking spectacular success is a difficult job, but Ken is doing his best.

Ken claims that the USA is conducting wars of imperialism. That's funny. The USA once conquered Japan, Italy and Germany and the last I heard, they were still independent countries with their own foreign policy which was often at adds with their American conquerors. If Ken want s to make a point, backing up his arguments with "facts" which everybody knows is just nonesense is not the way to do it. But reasoned argument and logic has never been strong points with the true believing Socialist.

The funniest thing about Ken's argument is how he and his fellow trendy lefty friend Daemon Singer contradict each other on US motives for war. Ken sneers that the USA is into war because war is a "racket" which is very profitable. While Singer claims that two wars that the USA was involved in recently sent the USA bankrupt.

C'mon boys. You have to get your reflexive anti Americanism straight. Either the US is into war because it is profitable, or it is not. Could you two fight this premise out between you and come back to OLO when you can both agree on an a generally agreed anti American argument

We have tried both communism and capitalism; and at the end of the day, in either system, the scum rises to the top.
Communism needs slavery to be successful, and to a slightly lesser degree, so does capitalism!
What other possible explanation could there be for the ever widening gap between the haves and the have nots, particularly in the English speaking capitalistic world.
If we were guided by the happiness index, we would take a leaf from the book of the Scandinavians.
We need to keep incentive as a means to keep productive outcomes.
We can't all be rocket scientists, brain surgeons of computer whiz kids.
And no, not all reward boils down to just the mighty dollar or entering into some sort of mindless competition to see who can accrue the most of it in a single lifetime or die the richest?
This anomaly indicates some are crippled for all practical purposes, by their own poverty consciousness.
Some of us even believe, others need to have less so we might have more.
This is highly flawed thinking and ignores the basic tenement of economics.
If those with the least have more, the incomes of all the higher socioeconomic rungs, will also improve.
The second trick is to remove all the drones and parasitic wealth suckers, so that the actual increases are not simply squandered or wasted on entirely unproductive outcomes.
We need something new and different.
That something is cooperative capitalism comrade.
That something is a vastly reformed and simplified tax system, that obliges everyone to pay a fair share.
And in so doing, massively reduces the individual burden, and ceases killing incentive or the entrepreneurial spirit, we must also have to keep each and every dream alive.
Perhaps the true purpose of our lives is the realization of dreams, and a willingness to finally cooperate, to actually maximize our chances of doing just that.
Dreams are hardly ever about money! Ditto real happiness!
Rhrosty.

David G

Your preference for a world without capitalism befits the concept of the new soviet man - a man that has cast off personal needs for the classless good. A China and Russia returned to full selfless Communism would surely be full of bliss.

But for you I dedicate this short video by the new US Ambassador to Australia and his husband http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/09/18/meet-john-berry-us-ambassador-australia

The US Ambassador John Berry and his husband are asking Australians where in Australia they should visit. Do you have some suggestions?

When they ask Tony they may stretch Tony's limited tolerance. Tony having just confirmed his opposition to same sex marriage and all.

Oh the ironies...:)

Happy Viewing

Pete

Rhosty, if capitalism in the English speaking world is so bad, why is it that every economic migrant is doing their utmost to head for Canada, Britain, Australia, the USA, and New Zealand? The rule of thumb for every immigrant is, "head for where the locals speak English"

Now, I am very proud that so many people admire our successful culture, I just wish they would stay in their own countries and copy us instead of thinking that the English speaking world can carry them forever.

Your economics are out of date. Traditionally, societies resembled a pyramid with the patricians on the top and the mass of the people on the bottom. But in the modern English speaking world, the shape of society is more of an egg, with more patricians on top, less people on the bottom, and the mass of the people doing OK in the middle.

I find it amusing that so many trendies on OLO either say that our society is bad because there are so many poor people, while at the same time saying that we are a rich society full of "greedy, selfish working class people" Please make up your mind. We can't be both.

The primary reason for poverty in Australia is because we keep importing it. The unemployment rate for Muslims is a scandal, while Pacific Islanders, aborigines and African blacks are similarly afflicted. It you want to do something about poverty, support Pauline Hanson.

The posters here who regularly gloat that capitalism 'defeated' communism are living a fairytale. So too, is the smug nya-nya-nyaaa bragging that everything is all happy and contented in capitalism land. If you can find that missing $30 trillion dollars that our perfectly functioning and victorious capitalist system misplaced sometime over the last 5 years, I might be willing to listen to your cockeyed neo-liberal whackery.

In the real world, the fate of any country that follows either a communist or capitalist system to an extreme is never a pleasant one.

When an economic system creates a massive class of powerless, alienated, poverty stricken people and a tiny bunch of fabulously wealthy people constantly having to guard their wealth and power, the system has to change. So too, when any economic system can only survive through endless war without and intensive domestic surveillance within, its condition is terminal.

this site and its associated links provides heaps of information in support of Ken's completely obvious thesis.
http://www.tomdispatch.com

In the history of the human race, certain beliefs have become famous for revealing the depths of ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy within certain members of the human species, and the need for such people to believe in absolutes which are close to insanity

1. The world was created in seven days.
2. The earth is flat.
3. The earth is the centre of the universe.
4. Killarney's statement that Capitalism did not beat Socialism.

It is just amazing how some people have such a compulsive need to believe in utopian theories that they are prepared to ignore self evident reality and claim that black is white. That most socialist states were in fact giant prison camps means nothing to Killarny. That the two remaining socialist states, Cuba and North Korea are two of the poorest nations on Earth and are giant prison camps means nothing to Killarney. The world's premier Socialist countries, Russia and China, can ruefully admit that state ownership of the means of production was an economic catastrophe and then begin adopting free market economies, and that means nothing to Killarney. That the Berlin Wall, that shining symbol of Socialist oppression of its own people collapsed, and free Eastern Europe who could not wait to embrace free market capitalism, means nothing to Killarney.

No what matters to Killarney is utopian theory which just can not ever be wrong. Killarney wants to save the world, and since capitalism has not saved the world, then socialism must have been the answer. Another five year plan, or two, or three, would have done the trick. We would have created a world with no war, no crime, and no poverty. All you have to do is put on your ideological blinkers and refuse to look at the inconvenient facts, and keep dreaming the impossible dream. If you wish for something really hard, it will come true.

Meantime, all you can do is to keep looking for flaws in a successful economic system to "prove" that your demonstrably failed system was right.

Killarney, keep in mind the old saying that throwing pearls to swine is a total waste of pearls. Let Lego believe in his capitalist fantasies even as it disintegrates.

The U.S. is being held up by printing money but that will soon come to an end. Then we will have a massive depression, one which might wipe out the fabulously rich.

Then perhaps we can start again with a system that doesn't worship greed and endless war!

Dear LEGO,

The bible does not claim that the world was created in 7 days - only that the heavens and the earth were created at the time and then in 6 days, not 7. To interpret this biblical statement as a statement about the physical world, as known by modern science, is indeed intellectual bankruptcy. That the earth is flat and the centre of the universe are very practical ideas in most circumstances: it all depends on the circumstances of applying those ideas, so that was not incorrect and made perfect sense at times when the fastest means of transportation was a horse.

In other words, the differences arise because the words 'heavens' and 'earth' were used differently in other eras than in this particular era when people tend to be so obsessed with the material/physical/objective world.

As for "Europe who could not wait to embrace free market capitalism": Europe could not wait to have a free market, where people may openly produce, buy or sell whatever they like for whatever consideration they agree to. Europe could not wait to have the state no longer interfere with their lives. That however has nothing to do with capitalism.

Socialism/communism (difference is only a matter of degree) is when the state/government directly controls the life of its people. Capitalism is when the state/government controls the life of its people indirectly and covertly via corporations that it supports in various ways and who could not exert power over people otherwise. Neither is good. In fact, those two evils can even live side-by-side.

In other words, free market and capitalism are two completely different things.

Dear David G.,

Very few people worship greed and those too must be insane.
Most of us, however, have greed to one degree or another.
Greed is not the property of the rich or of the poor.
Greed is not dissolved when one either receives wealth or loses it.
The only remedy to greed is finding a deeper spiritual cause to live for.

The world would be a far better place if it got rid of socialism entirely.

A world that is built upon worshiping power above all else is disgusting. Power makes pigs of us all, turns us into power-grubbers and whores who have no depth of character or nobility!

The apparatchiks should be driven out of existence. They should be replaced by philosophers and artists and playwrights and humanitarians, people who have something valuable to offer to the world.

Dear Yuyutsu.

I haven't read my Bible since I was 15 years old, and realised that it was just a bunch of old legends written by ignorant people who obviously did not have a clue about anything. I remember that after God created the Earth, the dummies who wrote it claimed that God then "created the stars", as if the little bits of flickering light in the heavens was just an afterthought. These people did not know that the Earth is just a grain of sand on a beach compared to the immensity of the universe.

The amazing thing is that there are still a lot of religious people who still believe in this crap. Many Christians believe it, and all of the Islamic world believes it. This is what blind faith can do to your reasoning abilities. And David G is in the same class of people if he is still in denial about capitalism not beating socialism. How anybody can disregard self evident reality because their ideology is more important is an amazing thing. But we see it here quite often with the people on OLO who never cease to denigrate the western world that they choose to live in.

I think that some of these people have a compulsive need to think that they are smart and they have been conditioned at school by the left wing teachers and the media to believe that "smart" people always attack the western world, especially the Americans. That is as far as their limited reasoning abilities can take them. Anything that contradicts their sacred belief system is an attack upon their fragile self esteem. To recognise that they were wrong would force them to confront the limits of their own intelligence. So they will continue to deny even the most self evident fact because the alternative is unthinkable.

To admit that they were wrong would be to realise that they are not smart at all. This they can never do. Better to deny reality and keep advocating complete nonsense than learn something about yourself that you don't want to know.

LEGO, I am not troubled by you being an apologist for capitalism and endless war. The world is filled with such folk.

I know that you have been programmed to hold right-wings views that you have and that you are an advocate of endless greed and 'might is right'.

I know also the you find those who don't share your narrow, elitist views a nuisance, and threatening, and you wish you could put us into the POL LEGO re-education camp where our views would be beaten out of us.

Do you think that greed and a desire for war is instinctive in humans or is it programmed? How did you arrive at your current position? Was it drilled into you via parents or school or was it achieved by serious reflection and philosophical examination?

I await your response!

To David G

Like yourself, I left school programmed to think that Imperialism was utterly wrong, racism was utterly wrong, all men were created equal, and that the democratic socialisation of the means of production was the way to run an economy. But I lived through a time when many former colonies who's people demanded independence from colonial rule. sank right back into barbarism. Which according to the trendy social theorists ( the angry young men of the day) was never going to happen. Many colonies went from well governed profit making concerns to totally dysfunctional societies forever holding out the begging bowl to the rest of the world.

Next I questioned racism. If all men were created equal, why was it that the same races and ethnicities were always a failure? No matter if they ran their own countries or inhabited the countries run by whites, they always became dysfunctional. The only excuse that the socialists could come up with, was that it was all the white guys fault. White people "oppressed" black people, discriminated against them, and kept blacks from reaching their full potential. That is a racist argument in itself. I therefore concluded that the socialists were not so much pro black as anti white, and that is still a position I hold.

Next came Socialist Britain, which in the early seventies came close to bankruptcy, and was so paralysed with socialist inspired union strikes that the PM of Britain, Labor leader Jim Callahan, gave up trying to talk sense to the idiots and he simply resigned. He told the fools to sort the mess out that they had created themselves. Into his position came a remarkable woman, Margaret Thatcher, a brilliant grocers daughter who gained a science and a law degree, and who began to claw back Britain from bankruptcy by reversing socialism. She closed down a lot of government owned coal mines that were helping to keep Britain broke.

continued

Meanwhile, over in Socialist Eastern Europe, people were getting shot on TV jumping over the Berlin Wall. They were trying to escape from poverty stricken socialist dictatorships to get into prosperous free countries with free markets. The explanation of the Socialist left was that the Berlin Wall was to stop people from capitalist countries from flooding into socialist countries. And the people getting shot jumping over the Wall were all western spies and saboteurs. Even Lexi could probably fiure out that that was complete BS. But I had an uncle like you who was a True Believer, and he believed it. He was actually upset that the could not go to the USSR and see The Workers Paradise for himself.

Now, the desire to not seek war is a noble one. But I am a realist, I and I understand the primary reason for war. Human beings are tribal and territorial. Two different cultural groups will fight over the resources in any territory. And that is instinctive. It is in our DNA.
No amount of sitting around a campfire singing "Kumbaya" is going to change that. Nor is mixing up the races in "multicultural" societies. Because unless you are deaf, dumb, and blind, you must be able to see that most conflicts today are within culturally divided nations. All we are doing is creating new future battlefields.

Now, you explain to me how you can ignore the failure of socialism and then blame the system which won for everything that ever went wrong in the world

LEGO, thanks for your detailed answer. I understand you perfectly and will not attempt to argue with you or try to refute your right-wing rationale.

I do have one question however. When the world ends in a nuclear holocaust, one caused by human greed and a love of war and plundering, will you applaud enthusiastically just before you and those dear to you are vaporized?

To David G

You asked me how I came to my worldview and I told you. I could have written 5000 words, but I had to make do with 500. In return, I asked you to justify your own position, and what did you do? You dodged it.

Look mate, this is the reason why I laugh at socialists and trendy lefties. You and your friends are very good at criticising everything but asked a polite question and you do the runner.

I can only conclude that your position is poorly held and you are frightened of defending your own ideology. I have been on debate sites for over 10 years and I have seen a lot of trendies like you. They ask questions, and ask questions, and they make moral declarations, after moral declaration, but rarely do they ever even try to submit a reasoned argument that could shine some light on how they came to think in such an incredible way.

Any impartial observer who happened upon our posts would naturally decide that I am being open and honest, while you, for all your moral posturing, are being coy and elusive. Unless you can justify your own position with a reasoned argument then you are going to lose to me every time.

If you do have some brains then you had better start using them. If you are unable to defend your own position, could I respectively propose that it is because it is wrong? If your position can not stand up to critical examination, then what are you, as a supposedly intelligent person doing defending it?

You are now asking me another question, a loaded one which means that I must accept that your position is right before I can even answer it. Sorry mate. Answer my question and then I will think about answering yours. If you can't manage that, then what are you doing in the arena? Draw your sword, admit defeat, or go and rethink your ideology. Because passionately defending a position which you can not justify is not what an intelligent person does.

"You are now asking me another question, a loaded one which means that I must accept that your position is right before I can even answer it," says LEGO!

I rest my case!

Dear LEGO,

The people who wrote the bible were ignorant of the things that are important for most people today. OTOH It is likely that they were well-versed in other matters which today only few find interest in.

A shift in values occurred, especially around the 17th century, and with it a shift in language and terminology. It's silly to attempt reading the bible in modern English as if written by contemporary (but ignorant) people, simply because the translated words as spelled still have a meaning today, albeit other than the original.

As I read the first chapter of Genesis, I understand it as a hymn in praise of the Sabbath, with the punch-line appearing at the beginning of the second chapter (dividing the bible into chapters occurred only in the 13th century!). What was most important to the ancients in this case is to justify and explain the importance of having a day of rest - they couldn't care less how this piece of rock they stood on came about or those different lights in the sky that appear in the day and in the night: that they even considered such questions is a late projection by people of a totally different era.

So why then read the bible at all (or any other ancient scripture)?
Haven't we plenty of excellent and accurate geology and astronomy text-books already?

-Because it contains some forgotten truths, like the value of taking a regular day off, away from creating new things - how refreshing and badly missing in this restless 24/7 society!

So here again we face a problem with language:

Was it Capitalism that won over the hearts and minds of East-Europeans, or was it free-market? Were they so excited to trample down the Berlin wall only in order to replace their master, instead of being slaves to the communist state, becoming slaves to Capital and the corporations who had it? I think not. Also, was it only butter, eggs and toilet-paper that they were after, or was it also personal freedom, including the freedom of speech, movement, association and religion?