The Fedora/Cringe thread

[Genevieve]

Blah blah blah capitalism is human nature

It blatantly isn't though, nobody actually lives that way. At least not legally, so it's immoral. And morality is a consequence of human culture.

Bullshit. The moment a person claims personal ownership, they're being capitalist.

Capitalism is larger than that though. My point is that no recognized government is capitalist so, in that respect, capitalism is just a personal ideology.

Capitalism is a description of an occurrence that started happening roughly in the 16th and 17th century. In hindsight. It's the onset of private property and its application. It's the basis of ideologies, but it's not an ideology.

[rickyarbino]

It's good that you agree.

[Genevieve]

Edited. Capitalism is like 'love' or 'running'. Something that people do that we decided to give a name.

[rickyarbino]

You could say that about anything tbh

[titchbit]

You aquire capital rightfully through homesteading it; by mixing your labor with the land. If you come across a piece of land unused by someone else and you mix your labor with it (build a home, use it for farmland, create a workspace on it), it becomes your property.

In conflicts of who owns the capital, a third, impartial party will be called in to arbitrate the conflict.

That sounds great in the abstract (I guess - it doesn't sound very....advanced, but it does sound kinda peaceful), but do you truly think that would ever work in real life? Wouldn't you need a state with a monopoly on violence to 'arbitrate the conflict'? Otherwise it will just be whoever has the most guns or, before guns were invented, the biggest muscles, gets everything, which is supposedly what lead to patriarchy thousands of years ago (i know, *cringe*). There might be one or two (to keep the fedora/cringe motif going) "nice guys" out there that will act as "impartial parties to arbitrate conflicts," but I think you're most likely to have a Judgment of Paris situation 99% of the time, leading to increasingly smaller groups of people gaining increasingly larger amounts of power while the unlucky people or the physically weak, etc fall behind until eventually one person gains almost all of the power (a monarch, pharaoh, emperor, sultan, etc) and you reach equilibrium where 1 person has most of the power/resources, a few people have some power/resources, and most people have almost no power/resources.

Yes you can always find a few counterexamples like the Roman Republic but monarchies were pretty much a global phenomena.

This is pretty much exactly what happened in human history from the beginning of civilization until the monarchies were replaced by other forms of governments.

Time and time again in history, it's been shown that in places with limited resources, people adopt a capitalist type of economy, whereas in places abundant with resources, they're closer to communist. When resources are scarce, which on a global scale they are, you need the mechanisms of a market to alocate resources efficiently.

ooooor when resources are scarce, people get scared of not having them so they become selfish and capitalism develops, whereas in abundant places, people are not fearful of losing resources, so they are more willing to give to those who are in need. capitalism is definitely rooted in human nature. so is socialism. just different parts of human nature. capitalism is rooted in fear and greed, socialism in kindness, altruism, happiness, etc.

[ehbes]

Blah blah blah capitalism is human nature

It blatantly isn't though, nobody actually lives that way. At least not legally, so it's immoral. And morality is a consequence of human culture.

you ignored the which pretty clearly means it was tongue in cheek

[rickyarbino]

I was just saying that it wasn't tbh, I saw it, just thought it would be a worthy point of discussion.

[ultraspatial]

ooooor when resources are scarce, people get scared of not having them so they become selfish and capitalism develops, whereas in abundant places, people are not fearful of losing resources, so they are more willing to give to those who are in need. capitalism is definitely rooted in human nature. so is socialism. just different parts of human nature. capitalism is rooted in fear and greed, socialism in kindness, altruism, happiness, etc.

keep telling yourself that

[Harkat]

more fun anarchist ladies

[Genevieve]

That sounds great in the abstract (I guess - it doesn't sound very....advanced, but it does sound kinda peaceful), but do you truly think that would ever work in real life? Wouldn't you need a state with a monopoly on violence to 'arbitrate the conflict'?

Private law has existed in various forms through-out history and a private police force in Detroit that does charitable work for people that can't afford them based on left-over profits, that teaches its employees not to resort to using their guns before dismantling the situation otherwise.. and hasn't used guns yet still exists.

Otherwise it will just be whoever has the most guns or, before guns were invented, the biggest muscles, gets everything, which is supposedly what lead to patriarchy thousands of years ago (i know, *cringe*).

2 people don't exist in a vacuum. You're assuming that when one person is treated violently by another person, that the violent person will be accepted into the community as if nothing happened. But that 1 person, no matter how many he guns they have, won't have more guns than the 100s of other people in that community.

Laws against violence have existed everywhere because people don't like violence. They don't exist because only 1 person is smart enough to know that violence is bad and enforces it on others.

There might be one or two (to keep the fedora/cringe motif going) "nice guys" out there that will act as "impartial parties to arbitrate conflicts," but I think you're most likely to have a Judgment of Paris situation 99% of the time, leading to increasingly smaller groups of people gaining increasingly larger amounts of power while the unlucky people or the physically weak, etc fall behind until eventually one person gains almost all of the power (a monarch, pharaoh, emperor, sultan, etc) and you reach equilibrium where 1 person has most of the power/resources, a few people have some power/resources, and most people have almost no power/resources.

Yes you can always find a few counterexamples like the Roman Republic but monarchies were pretty much a global phenomena.

This is pretty much exactly what happened in human history from the beginning of civilization until the monarchies were replaced by other forms of governments.

Yes, this is the state. Not the market.

ooooor when resources are scarce, people get scared of not having them so they become selfish and capitalism develops, whereas in abundant places, people are not fearful of losing resources, so they are more willing to give to those who are in need. capitalism is definitely rooted in human nature. so is socialism. just different parts of human nature. capitalism is rooted in fear and greed, socialism in kindness, altruism, happiness, etc.

No. And I'd prefer to discuss economics without subjective value judgements about the humans involved and without calling one 'inherently evil' and the other 'inherently good'.

Scarcity means that not everyone can make use of a certain set of resources. So we need to figure out a way to alocate those resources to their most efficient use. A market comrprised of say a million people, is a market where billions and billions of economic decisions are made every day, since people make thousands of econonic decisions in one day that all effect other people as well.

Say you're standing in front of a store and contemplating buying a candybar. Your decision NOT to do that itself is an economc decision. And it goes deeper than that; sitting at home and deciding whether you want to grab a can of soda or get a glass of milk is an economc decision with various outcomes; say you have 0.4 liters of milk and you do decide for the glass of milk rather than the soda. Then if you were to get a glass of milk earlier in the day and use up 0.2 liters of milk, but suddenly at random decide to make a meal that requires 0.3 liters of milk 6 hours later, then you'll get in your car, use up gas that you tanked (so getting in your car is another economic decision), get a the milk at the store and because you feel like, a pack of gum on your way out, get back into your car, use up more gas, notice your tank is getting low and buying more gas... all by the time you got home.

Had you decided to get some soda rather than milk earlier in the day, none of those other things would've happened that way since you already would have had all the ingredients you needed by not using up that milk.

Do you see what I'm saying? An economy is an impossibly intricate web of decisions that heavily weigh on other decisions. A pre-planned economy cannot take this into account accurately.

This has to do with scarcity because people make various economic decisions per day, by themselves, that affect where resources are alocated to. If two businsess owners who both require wood for their businsess are in the market for wood, they both make individual choices of how much wood they need and how much they are willing to spend on it. Since wood is a scarce good, the person willing to pay the most for a certain amount of wood will get the most out of the wood, because his demand for wood is also based on costumer demand for the products of that wood. Is the other person, who is less willing to pay the same amount of money on wood out of luck? No. He just gets less of it, because the product he makes is of less demand so he personally values wood less and therefore buys less of it.

Tom Woods explains this through Murray Rothbard's parable of the ham sandwich. How a boring little product is based on millions of economic decisions.



Edit: this last part is why I find it inredibly difficult to explain economics and why I believe free market economics is unpopular. It's incredibly difficult to explain without leaving things out.

It's easy to explain 'the homless don't have homes, here are houses, let's put those people in those houses'. It seems logical on the surface and straight forward enough and anyone that disagrees with it must be an asshole who likes homeless people to suffer. What's not immediately obvious are the longterm adverse effects it could have on the economy as a whole and people such as myself who support free markets look at it from that angle. It's not that we don't favor putting roofs over people's heads, it's that we prefer doing it through a market based approach. Which is easily possible.

[Genevieve]

You could say that about anything tbh

Communism as argued for by Marxists was specifically devised BY Karl Marx. It's a devised system.

Capitalism is merely what happens when anyone claims property rights over anything. Liberalism (in its original sense), libertarianism, etc. Are ideologies that honor this occurrence. When you claim a pen, a house, a bodypart, your mind, etc, as your own, you're being a capitalist. Or even when you're claiming any of those things to be someone else's property, then too you are being a capitalist.

[hubb]

Capitalism is putting money in a box and throwing away the key.

[Genevieve]

Capitalism is putting money in a box and throwing away the key.

Except since people are still incentivized within a capitalist economy to actually make money, in part due to past success, this analogy falls flat on its face.

[hubb]

It was a jest. But only because I think the definition you've 'landed on' after quite a few posts, excuses it too much and we completely disagree on it being a part of human nature. In a phenomenological sence you can kind of call it 'nature', like Marx does, but it's important to understand capitalism is not exclusively growth/beneficial transactions. It's a beats of its own that spins out of control almost immediately.

[Harkat]

god this conversation is boring

more neckbeards please

[hubb]

I'd rather write some breakcore about it tbh.

[Genevieve]

It was a jest. But only because I think the definition you've 'landed on' after quite a few posts, excuses it too much and we completely disagree on it being a part of human nature. In a phenomenological sence you can kind of call it 'nature', like Marx does, but it's important to understand capitalism is not exclusively growth/beneficial transactions. It's a beats of its own that spins out of control almost immediately.

Try to argue about capitalism as a demonination of private property rather than the boogeyman definition by Karl Marx. Because you're projecting Karl Marx's subjective value judgement driven critique onto my definition of capitalism. He was a critic (and stupidly bad on economics and ignorant about the workings of markets), he was biased per definition. If Marx and Marxism influenced thought is your main influence on capitalism, how do you expect to pose a fair critique?

[hubb]

Some of my dads m8s died from complications from an assasination attempt during the riots that followed the german student revolution and they where phonetapped into the 70's and had visits from units similar to swat teams a couple of times.
So I kind of have a hard time being objective about what i see as right wing ideology tbh.

[hubb]

Try to argue about capitalism as a demonination of private property rather than the boogeyman definition by Karl Marx.

I get your point, I just think it's too strong a word to say or use natural in relation to it.

[cyclopian]

alright enough of this zzzzZZZ political discusion

back 2 cringe: