Yeah, the "cap-soc" binary and Descartes are two useful pointers to the cultural decay we witness hand-in-hand with the monetarist economy's systemic disintegration.

For a clear realization of how futile it is to distract ourselves with cap-soc" binary thought, consider recent comments by Gao Xiqing, President of China's Investment Corporation: "I have great admiration of American people. Creative, hard working, trusting, and freedom-loving. But you have to have someone to tell you the truth. And then, start realizing it. And if you do it, just like you did in the Second World War, then you'll be great again! If that happens, then of course, American power will still be there for at least as long as I live. But many people are betting on the other side".

Now that above quote is from a man who is meant to be, at least nominally, a "socialist". Of course, more significantly, Gao demands that the derivatives market be scrapped as "BS/cr@p". No such frankness or freethinking among the neolib west's ruling oligarchs as they keep hogging our media.

For a glimpse of the profound intellectual corruption - probably inspired by Cartesian subjectivity as one of its earliest propellants - consider ex-RBA clown Ian MacFarlane to the Lowy Institute on 3 Dec: "The events of the last year have been quite astonishing and the capacity to make forecasts of events that are outside the range of previous experience is extremely limited. We're almost incapable, biologically incapable, of making forecasts of events that are outside the range of our lifetime experience and I think some of the events of 2008 have certainly been of hat nature".

Apart from his general verbosity and tortured English, MacFarlane demonstrates the blinkered vision and base conceit common to these ruling, inbred cretins, including it seems Frantisek Lowy and all his vast toadying retinue. MacFarlane couldn't foresee it, so it must be a common failing in all humanity! His brain lacks the "capacity", so such deficiency must beset all human brains. Etc.

That is all before we even touch on the issue of "character"!

Shal “Communism works!
It just hasn't been introduced right yet.’

And hopefully when it does work it will be introduced by people who can actually write English because “introduced right yet” is not.

“And if only people would allow communism to work the way Marx intended then it would prove how well it can work.”
No I have better things to do with my life than waste it on the ravings of a mid nineteenth century dilatant.

Fact, communism crushes individuals and their innovative and inventive problem solving spirit under its bureaucratic weight.
Communism ensures its own extinction by its focus on mediocrity and the false premise that individuals are all equal, when they clear are not.
“The market doesn't work. It rips. And boy have we seen some ripping over the past 30 years.” Actually the market does work but the efforts of some socialist inclined fools decided they knew best and underwrote the debts of people without the means or moral fortitude to pay their debts.

That is why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the first to collapse.

Shal, I suggest you come back when you have acquired some practical experience of life and grown to understand the dangers of promoting a political system which has the blood of more people than the Nazis upon its hands.

I see Q&A is quick to promote his middle of the road path of mediocrity… a bet both ways… I suspect he is an expert at that, rather than giving support a specific agenda…

very “political” of you Q&A, back everything, be accountable for nothing…
side step responsibility, avoid blame and wash your hands of any responsibility, at all cost… it explains your elevation through academia

Col Rouge,

Please note the colon after "collapse" which clearly indicates that what follows represents the views of the apologists for communism. I suggest you learn to read and also to acquire the rudiments of punctuation and grammar. If you could read and if you could decipher punctuation you would realise that what I was saying is exactly the opposite to what you attribute to me.

Grim
The question how best to provide for the material welfare of the mass of people cannot come down to ideology, because reality must cut in at some stage. For example an ideology that we can make crops grow by rain dances is not on an equal footing with natural or economic science.

“In the hard sciences, the true test of understanding is the ability to make accurate predictions. Quite clearly, no one, socialist communist or capitalist has managed a complete understanding of economics or meteorology as yet.”

Fair enough. On the other hand, every belief is not equally true.

The Austrian school of economics maintains that the methodology for the science of human action must be different from that of the natural sciences, because humans act purposively, which planets and clouds do not. This methodology is to start from propositions about human action that cannot be denied without self-contradiction, and then to logically deduce universal propositions of human action that must necessarily follow, and thus to build up the body of economic theory.

The Austrian school predicted the current financial crisis years in advance when all the establishment schools of economics were cluelessly saying the economy is fine, and also predicted the Great Depression years in advance.

Poverty is the original and universal condition of mankind. Nature does not pour riches in our lap. Social co-operation is the key to the things that people want.

Every ideology promises greater material welfare for the masses of people. But whether the means chosen actually work to achieve this end is not a matter of majority opinion, or ideology, but of economic science.

The process by which people become materially better off is uneven and unequal. If people were equally wealthy, or if conditions were even, economic activity would come to a stop, and so would the rise in the S.O.L.

People who think that the rise in the SOL over the past two hundred years is because of forcible re-distributions are merely displaying their ignorance. The great rise in the SOL in modern times became possible from the insights

(cont.)
of the economists that the wealth of nations comes from work, savings and trade, and not from forcible takings or physically making money - that was the watershed in political economy.

Ultimately social co-operation can be based on individual freedom and voluntary exchange, or on compulsion and central planning. There is no third way.

The fact of the existence of poverty is not an argument against capitalism. It is precisely modern capitalism that has given rise to the expectation that people should not have to live in poverty any more.

It is ironical that those professing most concern about the poverty of the masses have done the most to retard the processes that relieve it. Having complained for the last 150 years that capitalism grinds the masses to subsistence level, they now complain that it provides a living standard that is too high.

It seems inconsistent to criticise the existence of poverty on the one hand, and the use of natural resources to relieve it on the other.

Only when people understand that the true basis of wealth and social welfare is in peaceful social cooperation, only when people get over the belief that forcible taking is the way to a better and fairer society, will we realise the better and fairer society that people yearn for.

The fatal conceit is to believe that the problems of natural scarcity can be conjured away by forcibly re-arranging property titles, and that human society can be moulded into any shape at will provided we can bring enough force to bear.

Mil_observer
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
Murry Rothbard

Once you have confused the definitions of “capitalism” and “free trade”, with systems of extensive and intensive governmental central planning of economic interventions for socialist or mercantilist reasons, the rest of your argument is futile

Shal ... thanks mate - I just spluttered my vino all over the keyboard and monitor!

avahappyone ... ROFL