The answer to failed communism (sometimes deliberately confused with both socialism and or Buddhist philosophy) and dysfunctional extreme exploitive capitalism, lies in cooperative capitalism comrades!

Take a Butchers at U tube and and an article on Co-ops as established in Maleny Queensland! An excellent template to emulate, but only if you actually believe in free enterprise and free markets! And actually owning the fruits of your own enterprise and endeavor!

The touted alternative is the tax dodging and ultra exploitive trump model which harms all it touches, including hundreds of mum and dad family firms/investors!

Take a butchers, I dare you!

And rest assured, regardless of the Ideology you're currently welded to!?

Junking it in favor of cooperative enterprise, comes with endless improvement!

Co-ops were almost alone as private, capitalist, free market reliant, free enterprise, as surviving the Great depression virtually intact!

And come with more local economy growing, flow on factors, than anything else! Government or private enterprise!

Take a butchers, it won't hurt much, I promise! Unless of course if you're a foreign investor looking for a shoe in, or one of the spit lickle Quislings, who serve them!?

And then understand how failed enterprises like Queensland Nickel i.e., could be resuscitated as community building, environmentally conscious, "PRIVATE ENTERPRISE"!

Or why state based banking ought to be rolled out exclusively as PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, profit motivated, credit unions!
Alan B.

Adian: Neither are the, add nothing of any value or worth, usually counterproductive or barely veiled negative musings of what if, or I don't think, specialists!

Some Double Dumb socialists in Europe have proposed a wealth tax on those who've likely paid tax all their lives by virtue of their own productive enterprise and endevour!

Thereby ensuring many of the self funded better off retirees seem to be seeking sanctuary in abominations like Russia!

Simply put, smaller personal tax obligations, (small and costing more to avoid than pay) sometimes equates to a "larger pool" of collectable revenue!

Always providing the (more equates to less) experts don't get involved and screw it up! And no, I'm no fan of failed and disgraced trickle down economics!

An expert? Well an x is an unknown quantity, and a spurt is merely a very large drip under extreme pressure!
Alan B.

I see the final line says "Bruce Haigh is a political commentator and retired diplomat, who served in Sri Lanka."

This is indeed the sort of trip Bruce would vomit up, but I think Sam deserves the opprobrium since he wrote it.

This article proves we need to keep the academics, & particularly the of philosophers down the end of the garden path, where their particular brand of fairy dust induced daydreams can do least harm.

We must never let these people out into the real world, not only for their own safety, but so they do no more damage to the wellbeing of real people. It is this very type of off world dreaming that saw South Australia as dark & lightless as North Korea just last week.

Down there with the fairies, Democrats & Greens, they can mix with the very few who don't realise what garbage they talk.

Craig Minns

“Oh and nobody has tried to make a case here against capitalism or socialism or any other "ism".

Yes they have. The author is arguing that there is an alternative to the more free market policies of Thatcher and Reagan, namely the more socialist policies of earlier decades. He’s arguing that it’s wrong that high tax rates destroy growth (which he despises), and wrong that corporations owned and controlled by private capitalists are better than worker self-managed corporations. And he’s arguing that capitalism causes “poverty, misery, and destitution”; that it “despoils the environment and robs man of a human environment fit to live in”, and is “insane”.

Read the article, my friend.

And to the extent that you have also advocated government interventions to lead to a supposedly better result, you have adopted the same indefensible defects as the author.

“All that the author, AC and myself done is to point out...”

No he has not. He’s arguing that there is a better alternative, namely, more socialism. The “alternative” he’s arguing for is not a more free market solution, is it?

“…that there are some ways in which the modern socio-economic model is creating outcomes that we see as undesirable”

What modern socio-economic model? Society and economy don’t come about because of a “model”. If they do, post a copy of this model and let’s all have a look.

Any criticism of the configuration of business, society, employment and government, which the article and your post seem to be, is incompetent unless you distinguish what parts of the problem are because of the market, and what parts are because of government. You haven’t done that.

For example, there’s no point advocating government interventions to remedy unemployment, if the unemployment is being caused by earlier government interventions in the first place, such as criminalising employment at the market rate, on the basis of the socialist idea that employment for profit is intrinsically exploitative. That’s what the minimum wage laws are and do, and that’s what the author is defending, correct me if I’m wrong Sam. Sam? Hello-o?

(cont.)

The goods and services that the market provides, don't get to you by religion. There is no need to have recourse to any religious belief in markets to observe or believe that they do; and nothing simplistic or irrational about that belief.

But the same cannot be said of socialism, because it is rationally indefensible because of the economic calculation problem. If you don’t know what that is, FIND OUT.

If you want to assert that socialism of any kind is as capable of doing as well, let alone better, in terms of any human welfare criterion you care to specify, without using a double standard, or without reposing open-ended irrational faith in the State as a moral and pragmatic magical superbeing on a double standard, then you need to prove it.

And you will find, if ever you turn your mind to it for the first time instead of just baldly assuming it from the outset, that you can't do it, just like you can't prove that my argument is circular.

There is no requirement on anyone to accept from your mere assumption either that the Invisible Magic Teapot exists, nor that that any particular government intervention is justified, unless you can prove it. All you're doing is projecting your irrational religious methodology onto me.

So go ahead. If you can, do it. Make sure you identify and avoid any equivocation or circularity from the outset, use units of a lowest common denominator, refute the economic calculation argument, and show your workings.

If you can't, don’t wriggle and backbite - just admit it.

It’s important to understand that the socialists have got nothing. That’s why it’s never worked, and can’t work.

Sam
Do you know what is the economic difference between private business and government, or not?

If so, what is it? If not, say so.