How do you know how much compassion I have “sly?”

Your name says it all.

Unfortunate many businesses have been run offshore by people like you.

They have been welcomed with open arms into the new countries, and we then buy the product back, creating our national trade deficit.

You say you are entrepreneurial, so we will see a large socially aware business on the Australian business scene. I will look forward to it and be the first to congratulate you.
This will be because you will have achieved what many have not, maintained the same “selling price”, and not avoided any of your company tax obligations as well as keeping favor with belly by paying 40% over award.

This will all have to be achieved while decreasing the personal ecological footprint on the world’s resources as we have passed “peak oil” and we will see the demise of personally available oil in our life time.

How about some debate “sly” instead of arrogant personal put-downs against people you don’t want to have anything in common with, with your extremely closed mind?

Have you ever stopped and thought why, after 100 years of increasing socisilasm in this country, we have achieved a greater division of income between rich and poor?

I have, and with the modeling as part of the research to work out why it has happened and what we need to do to stop it.
Yes it is possible, and we don’t need more draconian laws to do that.

I would love to see change to return the gap between top earner and bottom income earner in a company from 100 to “10 to one” as it was 50 plus years ago.

At the moment we will continue down the same path, no matter what you say or do, leading to economic problems for this country.
Yes, the crime rate will increase as the wealth gap increases; with people like you telling the less well of (due to present policy’s) that they are “entitled” to someone else’s wealth.

That we do agree on.

Dunart, If your so decent why did your first post say most people
here are whingers. Thats a real smart way to start your debate.

tao: I said barter was one of many forms it took. Money, gold, whatever, is just a convenience. You're so hung up on a small number of people owning or controlling things that it seems to exclude the possibility that some people may actually be happy with the arrangements, and that some people may not be, so they do other things. If I don't like a particular business (eg. how a hospital does its cleaning), most of the time I can take my business elsewhere (although not in the case of government funded, controlled or regulated services). People grow their own food, or make their own other objects, or they trade them with their neighbours or they form co-operatives. Some people pretty well exist right off the radar in the black market. A lot of the time this has nothing to do with anything you're talking about.

I'm not saying people can have their cake and eat it too, but it's possible to exist in a world much different to what you talk about. The point is that most people are too lazy to do so. Put up or shut up I say. Most people don't want to sell up and move to the country and try to be self-sufficient, whilst living a pre-20th century lifestyle, or else live in some sort of communal arrangement. Some people do so only in degree. That's fine. That's up to them since it doesn't affect me (except when they want the government to take my money to fund them).

There are plenty of lifestyle choices over which I disagree with the "mainstream" but my vision of utopia doesn't involve me telling them how to live their lives. I'll mind my business and they'll mind theirs. Frankly, I don't see much difference between what you espouse and that of any other political or religious zealot who wants to tell everyone how he or she must be shown (forcefully if necessary) the errors of his or her ways. I don't want to make people perfect, I just want to live my life.

Shorbe,

As much as you’d like for us all to hole ourselves up somewhere and leave each other alone, it is pretty unrealistic and denies reality. How many acres of land would be required for you to be “self-sufficient”? There are 6 billion people on the planet, do you think they could all just tootle off and settle their little hobby farm – without buying it from one of the few who already owns it (with money)?

Not to mention the fact that most people in the world don’t have anything to “sell up” in order to put up or shut up – except of course, their labour. Most people in the world don’t have sufficient food, shelter or medical care.

And I see you’ve diverted the argument (introduced by you) about the inequality of labour – to your “market” reality - “choice”.

You say that some people may actually be happy with the arrangements – yes, the ones who own it all. I seriously doubt that most people would “voluntarily” go without basic food, clothing, shelter or medical care on a sustained basis. What dream world do you live in? Oh that’s right, the one that justifies your belief system.

You think that people require the profit motive to do anything, but that “unintellectual labourers” should do their work for a pittance – so you can make a profit. You want “reward” for your “entrepreneurial” effort don’t you Shorbe? But everyone else who wants their reward, or just food on the table, for their equally essential (if not more essential) contribution is just a “whinger” or engages in the “politics of envy” and they should just “shut up”. And you have the audacity to say my ideas are anti-human.

For someone who doesn’t want to tell people how to live, you sure do a fair bit of it.

You seem jaded Shorbe, and have a low opinion of human beings. As I said, don’t judge others by your own standards.

Belly – just answer the question.

tao: Obviously we're not going to agree on much at all and we're going to run around in circles.

Never the less, it must really irk you that your belief system has been rejected categorically and mine hasn't. The people of eastern Europe couldn't wait to get rid of Marxism and embrace capitalism quickly enough, and millions in the third would can't wait to get into "The Great Satan" and pursue capitalism themselves with fervour. Deluded or not, they've put ideas such as yours where they firmly belong -- in the trash can of history. You keep believing that your ideas will ever be seen as viable anywhere by anyone but, ironically, a bunch of intellectuals though.

Dunart,

You talk about supply and demand, yet capitalists can’t stand it when the shoe is on the other foot. The current and future “skills shortage”, which is nothing but a shortage of the “supply” of labour, strikes fear into the hearts of capitalists because there will be a “wages blowout”. You’d think capitalists being so in love with supply/demand would be happy to pay the higher “price” of labour, but no, that would cut into their profits. So what do they do? They try to “interfere” with the supply side of the labour market by bringing in foreign labour. And they “blackmail” workers by threatening to move their capital elsewhere.

I don’t know what you mean by “increasing socialism” but we do not live in a socialist system. The widening gap between rich and poor has occurred in a capitalist system, and is a result of the objective process of that system. And it is not just happening here, it is happening in all industrialized countries – and in reality everywhere in the world. Over 50 years ago, socialist ideas were much more predominant than they are now, which is how workers were able to gain improvements in their working conditions. Capitalists gave a little rather than have the workers overthrow them. Those conditions are now being eroded.

You talk about people thinking they are “entitled” to someone else’s wealth. Yet workers create all of the wealth in the world with their labour – there is no other way to do it - and capitalists think they are “entitled” to appropriate it. I refer you back to my earlier comments about the inequality of labour and wonder if you really don’t need anyone to collect your garbage, clean the hospital, teach your children, care for your elderly mother. Business managers can’t do anything without people to manage or products made by others. I particularly refer you to my comments to Shorbe in my last post about reward for effort.

I think you are kidding yourself Dunart.