Cont'd

I am not sure what the solution is, but Labor at least made inroads to collecting some of the largesse produced by the mining companies.

Another example, I'm sure has already been mentioned is the duopoly of Coles/Woolworths. And further, products that have been taken over by huge companies such as Vegemite now owned by Kraft. Following the trail of who owns what is a disturbing venture. We may think we are supporting a small local producer, when in fact that is no longer the case.

http://onthecommons.org/why-it-matters-who-owns-local-businesses

"Leave aside the tax favors, zoning deals and the rest that turn “the market” into a kind of Charlie McCarthy doll. What such people don’t grasp is that commerce isn’t just about stuff. It serves a social function as well. The mom and pop stores in Chelsea were places where people could know and be known. They provided precious human contact in the anonymity of city life. This was especially important for older people, and others for whom shopping might constitute the only social encounters in long empty days."

None of this type of control favours smaller sustainable populations.

Hey squeers, great thread. I would suggest Capitalism, like democracy, basically sucks.
It just sucks less than any alternatives so far trialled.
The problem I see is that capitalism requires discrimination at it's rotten core. A market, free or otherwise, requires 2 types of people; producers and consumers. In order to be profitable, the people who work for producers need to be paid as little as possible, in order to allow for a profit margin. Consumers, OTOH, should be as wealthy as possible, to buy the goods produced.
Clearly, in a closed system, this presents a problem; as the producers are also the consumers. Obviously the problem is easily overcome by international trade; where discriminatory rules allow us to be consumers, and workers in another country to be our producers.
How is this discriminatory? We don't expect our workers to labour for the legendary 'bowl of rice'; but we are happy to buy products from other countries, whose workers do.
This inevitably leads to another problem. If I continue to pull wads of cash out of my pocket to give to you, strangely enough you will end up with wads of cash which I no longer have.
Japan has been struggling with just this problem for about 2 decades, now, and China is already starting to consider the ramifications.
You may (or not) remember about 15-20 years ago I think, Mitsubishi Australia proudly announced they had become so 'efficient' they were exporting cars to Japan.
A strange way to look at the fact that Japan had increased it's standard of living -and cost of labour- to the point where it was cheaper to buy cars from Oz, than vice versa.
So capitalism must continually seek out new markets, and new producers, for the greatest profit lies in the greatest disparity between the wages of the producers in comparison to consumers.
Think it's only a coincidence that the largest free market economy also has the largest, most belligerent army?
For my rather more personal experience of discrimination in capitalism, you might read a blog I wrote some time back:
http://thecomensality.com/avasay/can-capitalism-survive-in-a-world-without-discrimination/feed

Dear Severin,
Adam Smith was prescient about the danger of monopolies and specifically warns against them in his "The Wealth of Nations". Lenin in his, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism", used the term "imperialism" to describe the phenomenon of monopoly capitalism as a fundamental development of the "highest" stage of the system, the idea being that only such concentrations of wealth had the wherewithal to establish sophisticated new markets in far flung regions (who but a corporation could drill miles into the Earth's crust, a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, to supply the fuel "we all use?"). One need only read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and the evils of the ivory trade, or do some light reading on the history of the rubber trade in Brazil http://www.mongabay.com/10rubber.htm , to appreciate the "ethics" of these entrepreneurial projects, or the fact that the whole colonial project (the white man's burden lol) was in fact capitalism in action. Africa, a complex network of cultures, was of course carved up by the colonial powers into bite-size chunks and brutally exploited for yonks before they cleared out when the profit margins shrank from political uprisings. And the West has the hide to be morally offended by the likes of Robert Mugabe! So while I agree with you about the evil of monopolies, I'm less concerned with them pushing out the little guy (who would be just as rapacious given the chance; such is the "logic" of the system) in the dominant economic home-land, than I am about those being exploited. This cuts to the heart of the evil of abstractions like parochialism, provincialism, nationalism, and why I insist national borders are meaningless; they are in fact a crude rationale for the gross disparities that are not "God's will", but ruthlessly cultivated, husbanded and maintained. We're so busy complaining about the "ethics" of how the plunder is divided up, we completely forget how it was and is obtained.

Grim: <It [capitalism] just sucks less than any alternatives so far trialled.>
Dear Grim,
A point I did a poor job of getting across to other posters above is that the "alternatives" didn't get a fair trial. Capitalism is never going to stand aside and give another system a fair go, and it is far too well established for any other system to compete. Given the disparity, in terms of wealth, quality real estate, efficiencies, allegiances, solid-state ideology, and raw power, the bipolar stand-off that was the Cold War was actually no contest. I don't defend the evil of what these alternatives degenerated into, but I do argue that the corruption and paranoia (just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean you're not being followed) did not develop in a vacuum. Otherwise, I agree with everything you say, and I particularly like your blog (I hope some of my opponents above will read it).

I've been concerned with the ethical degeneracy incumbent upon capitalism, but mainly with the more basic, indeed Common-dog-f---, problem of the unsustainability of it all.
My first wife's cancer metastasised in the brain; by the time it was detected she had eight tumours varying in size. The scan actually showed how the brain in this closed system had slightly shifted in its axis (was traumatised) due to the invasive presence of the tumours. Why can't people see that similarly unsustainable growth and despoliation in the closed and fragile system of the biosphere, driven relentlessly by capitalism, is equally unsustainable, as well as reprehensible!
"Does capitalism drive population growth" intended to ask if unsustainable population was a byproduct of capitalism. Ironically, I suspect that only capitalism "can" (inequitably) sustain our population growth, but only in the short term and at dire collateral cost, including our moral degeneracy.

Squeers - the whole point is that capitalism, by definition, cannot but be unsustainable in a closed system..

Double negatives are difficult for most of us to grapple with Squeers.

Because if I read what you wrote it seems you are trying to say

Capitalism is sustainable in a closed system

But i do not think that is what you are saying and maybe you can explain exactly what you mean by “closed system”

Regarding - indeed it must seem grossly and unconscionably unfair to any moderately sensitive being who can see beyond his vanity and crude programming.

We are a diverse species, different folk see unfairness to different degrees, one will see a beggar in the street and want to help him, the other will choose to ignore him and the bottle of cheap alcohol beside him and suggest that if he can afford alcohol, he should start by helping himself.

Regarding - the accident of a fortunate birth, and often enough an ability to rationilise their ruthless profiteering--though that's easy in a culture that celebrates these indifferent intellects as "talented".

I would have thought you could acknowledge the real and ancient practice “noblesse oblige” contradicts your cynical statement.

The other point regarding ‘the accident of birth’. No one gets a perfect hand, everyone has something which challenges them. The point with human growth and development as individuals is to face the challenges which come with our birth and grow as a person despite them. Those who see others as being particularly blessed , gifted or born into privilege are usually projecting by their own envy and greed.

Re - you haven't said anything new, just the usual ideological mouthings.

Likewise, nothing you have said is innovative, challenging or new either.
It is but the usual mouthing of the pseudo-intellectual who feels entitled to criticise that which they just do not understand.

Grim - would suggest Capitalism, like democracy, basically sucks

Yes, but to paraphrase Churchill on the matter of democracy,

“capitalism is the worst form of ownership except all the others that have been tried.”

Squeers - is that the "alternatives" didn't get a fair trial.

Tell that to the Russians who suffered for 70 years under the yoke of oppression

The East Germans who risked machine gun fire to climb over the Berlin Wall to a better future in the West

The Hungarians and Czechoslovaks who protested when the Russians drove tanks into their cities

The Chinese who were likewise crushed under tanks

The Cambodians who were force marched into the killing fields because they were “educated” and needed to be re-educated.

Fact

Collectivism, in its practiced forms (not the airy-fairy nonsense of kindergarten stories) is unsustainable, as seem in the Aral Sea, and demonstrated by the Russian gulags, psychiatric hospitals, East Germany’s Stasi and Albania’s “internal exile” to keep people under control, not to forget the final execution of Ceausescu and his bitch wife.

I see you like quoting Lenin

Try these classic pieces of Lenin eloquence

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.

And

The goal of socialism is communism.

And my favourite, which so personifies every collectivist politician

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

But if you want the real essence of the alternatives to democracy and capitalism, in their practiced state, you just have to ask Stalin

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

And that is what is wrong with every thought from anyone has who thinks they know better than libertarian capitalists,

Lenin’s lies end up with Stalin’s corruption of the election process but Lenin’s useful idiots are still pretending it will be better next time.

Collectivism has been tried again and again and has failed again and again

Better you spend your time trying to work within the imperfect libertarian capitalist system than chasing the quixotic windmills of its alternatives