Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Sep 02, 2021 3:11 am
I don't believe in socialism, at least the who-owns-the-means-of-production kind. More specifically, I don't think it works or is particularly desirable.
This is not entirely in keeping with reality, but I suppose you may think what you like.
...Drawing income from capital is legitimate; but not to the point of having the whole economy spiral into plutocracy.
This needs to have a huge number of asterisks and caveats applied to it. For one, how the capital is
acquired is important. If one happen to have some amount of money to invest in a business for which one does no work, the amount the investment can pay off ought to be legally capped at a certain amount (perhaps 150-300% of the initial investment), with the investment being closer to a sort of bond with a definite maturity, not actual ownership in the business. We might also include a note that capital is often built on the backs of others (it's entirely preposterous to support Bezos owning all of Amazon, since he did not do all, or even
most of the work of building it, and a large share of its success, as with anything in capitalism, was a function of being in the right place at the right time), and that this process of building and acquiring it is not legitimate.
You're right in pointing out that labor relations are unequal at heart.
Unequal was not my wording — non-consensual was.
UBI would help a lot, but it's never going to be enough (it probably won't pay your mortgage.)
And why not? As mechanisation of manufacturing continues, and more jobs simply cease to exist, there will come a point when there will be more people than there is work for them to do. It's eventually going to
have to, so we might as well get to work on it now.
Other factors that help are, I think, strong trade unions. Perhaps more importantly, a healthy labour market. If your labor market's a seller market... a lot of problems aren't problem anymore.
While this is true on some level, large businesses, having a lot of power, have a very easy time of making it into a buyer's market, and a decent UBI would make it
instantly and
irrevocably into a seller's market. I feel like there's some not seeing the forest for the trees in the idea that it will never work. If I'm not much mistaken, every study about it has shown that it tends to improve things when you remove existential duress from people, who can think, plan, and so on more clearly. It also, if I'm remembering right, increases the rate of people doing socially-beneficial but unpaid things.
There's also some issue with treating people as something for which there's a "market". Capital-centered thinking has gone quite a way too far, and it's time to rein that in.
[qupte]By nature, unprofitable industry will close down, and companies will fail -- the only thing you can do to fix that is make sure people can find employment elsewhere. Same thing for unscrupulous employers (much less of a problem if the employees can easily go work elsewhere.)[/quote]
While this is, again, at least somewhat true (bad businesses have a habit of not dying as fast as they ought to), there's also no reason to rely on the private sector to provide jobs or income (we can also do a jobs guarantee, too, so that, if people need more than the UBI, and the employer isn't paying enough or doing this or that other thing they need to, you can just walk down to an employment office and go get paid to do something socially useful instead).
It's worth keeping in mind that coops tend to increase unemployment, so they might be counterproductive in the long run. (When given a choice, owner-employees will favor higher wages over recruiting.)
This is a problem? Again, we don't need to rely on the private sector to provide work either way.
How about public ownership of companies? On the whole neither good nor bad.
It depends on what the company does. Privately-owned utilities are usually
bad.
Privately owned companies will do much better on most respects most of the times.
They tend to overproduce and be inefficient and wasteful, in my experience; at least the large ones.
But the market has a way of screwing things up in the long run, so what are we going to do?
Maybe try something other than capitalism, an economic system that requires intense State intervention every decade or so? Social Democracy seems to have stabilised it somewhat, so it's a good starting point, but even there, we still have social problems. Thinking there's an endpoint rather than some sort of continued objective to keep improving, or any one magic bullet, is rather silly.
(I see this with housing in the Paris area.... It's a very imperfect solution, and I'm pretty sure in thirty years they'll all have to be privatized again, but hey, it's an imperfect world.
They wouldn't "have to be" privatised (in the sense of selling off to some private investor; simply selling them at a reasonable rate to families or individuals to inhabit them as primary residences is fine, but that isn't usually what "privatisation" is understood to mean). In fact, privatisation is not the be-all end-all of economic improvers (again, with utilities, and I understand the UK train system, and most US rail, too, I believe these have caused more problems than they've provided solutions). With the state of the world now, I think the ideas of Reagan, Thatcher, and Rand may be laid aside as discredited by reality (Reaganomics has notably failed to deliver on its broad promises, and low public investment has proved a terrible idea).
