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The Forum > Article Comments > Capitalism may be unwell but it is not dead. > Comments

Capitalism may be unwell but it is not dead. : Comments

By John Passant, published 30/12/2008

Workers can build on capitalism and create a new world where the economic crisis is consigned to a museum and war and want becomes a memory.

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The fundamental intellectual failure of this article is that it does not distinguish between capitalism on the one hand, and on the other hand systems of extensive and intensive government interventions intended to forcibly override capitalism and replace it with a better and fairer system, for socialist reasons.

If, for socialist reasons, you make it illegal to employ people at the market rate, it is hardly fair to blame the resulting unemployment on "capitalism".

Australia's three levels of government now expropriate over 50 percent of everything that Australians produce every day, and almost all of it is spent on interventions intended to fix prices of goods and services other than they would be on an unhampered market. Yet John Passant presumes to refer to this state of affairs as "capitalism". No wonder you are able to find fault with it!

This confused jumble of ideas is unable to produce any critique that has explaining power.

To persist with the labour theory of value is laughable. Reality does not reward toil and trouble. If the labour theory of value was correct, General Motors would not have just lost $10 billion. Advocates of the labour theory of value are obstinately and wilfully in the wrong.

As for the garbled theory of class struggle, the reason Marx, after 35 years, never finished the chapter in Capital in which he had intended to explain the entire basis of his theory, is because it cannot withstand critical scrutiny. For example, the main capitalists today are superannuation funds, the main shareholders of which are the masses of workers. Are they 'workers' or 'capitalists'? Marx's theory is rubbish, and persistence in it is religious superstition.

The only theory of class struggle that holds water today is the struggle between the class of taxpayers on the one hand, and tax-eaters on the other.
Posted by Diocletian, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 12:20:11 PM
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The article reads like a text from the 1960s or is it the 1930s. We've tried socialism, it was even worse than capitalism.Yes, the system is unwell, the current crisis is due to incompetent regulation by government agencies, not the failure of the market system itself. Neo-liberals, with their fantasies of the genius of the unregulated market fell into the same trap as the Communists, too much ideology,too little understanding.
Posted by mac, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 1:08:01 PM
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Up until the last few paragraphs one might have thought reality had been sighted from deep within the SA bunker, but those last few paragraphs quite effectively disperse such sillyness from your reader's minds.
Posted by Jai, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 3:05:12 PM
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Both the Roaring Twenties and the latest stuffed up capitalist phase since the mid 1970s have shown that capitalism needs government guardianship more now since any time since its birth under Adam Smith.

While Adam Smith did admit that his Laizess-faire free-market could look after itself with its own early warning signals,
he still believed that governments had a very important role.

In fact Smith is said to have believed that money-lending should be under government supervision

Also there is the way our English language has used what is called the double-ee's as not only proven in freedom and the free-market but much more so in such words as need and greed.

The point is though it is easy enough to define need, how can we ever make a law to define greed, when as Smith went on, it is greed that is needed to prime competition?

Certainly the problem with the world today is deregulation either giving greed too much freedom or too much of a free go with liberal lending.
Posted by bushbred, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 4:03:53 PM
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Let me make a few comments.

Diocletian, the state and market have been intertwined for centuries. One does not negate the other but they complement each other. Indeed the USSR was the classic example of the state becoming the supreme capitalist.

Mac and Bushbred, how will more regulation address the business cycle or even moves into depression (if that were to occur)?

Dear Jai, what bunker? Nice image, but no reality to it. And these are my views. The last few paras are aspirations
Posted by Passy, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 5:16:02 PM
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The state and the market are intertwined in the way that a parasite is intertwined with its host. Everything the state gets, it takes by force or fraud from someone who has first produced it. The state exists only where there is a surplus to expropriate. That's why the Aborigines didn't have one. T

he state exists as a more or less stable equilibrium of peaceful producer and forceful exploiter. It's why, now there is an economic downturn, there is talk of the state reducing its expropriations from business. The market exists to the extent that people can benefit from peaceful production and exchange. The state exists to the extent its beneficiaries can get away with forcibly taking what other people have produced.

The state does negate the market, as virtually all state activities are directed at using force (tax and regulation) or fraud (manipulation of the money supply) to rig prices at levels other than what they would be on an unhampered market.

While the state requires the market in order to exist, the market does not require the state to exist. The market does not intrinsically require a forcible monopoly of protection services, nor of adjudication services, in order to exist, since these same services can be and are provided in competitive markets. The reason states exist is not because the market requires them, but because they are monopolistic operations who use violence and threats to plunder the class of peaceful producers and traders, hand out privileges to shore up their own support base, and bribe the class of intellectuals to be their high priests and cheerleaders.

During the reign of the Russian communists, the state killed tens of millions of people by starvation. To talk of this as a "complement" to peaceful productive activity is macabre and deluded. It shows a failure to understand the issues.

To talk of the need to curb greed ignores the role of the state in causing the economic crises by its monopoly control, and abuse, of the money supply. Those who do not understand this are merely displaying their ignorance.
Posted by Diocletian, Tuesday, 30 December 2008 8:21:12 PM
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