Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[wufwugy]

The problem with these things is most people are ideologues, one way or the other. Staying objective it hard apparently, but if you can pull it together, you stand chance of seeing the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism in every situation and adjusting for it.

Every firstworld country seems to agree that the idea of "public" or "essential" services highlights the failings of rabid libertarians, who say the government should have no role in the roads, or fire departments and the like, the private sector will sort it out. They act as if the government was mining the rocks that went into the gravel that helped pave the road, when all that is (usually) handled privately, as it should be. But the free market is selective, and certain areas of any country would inevitably suffer when the free market has no use for them. Paying taxes is worth the price of not having 3rd world pockets within your society. I think everybody is better for it.

I tend to agree, but I think increases in dynamism probably have a negative correlation with the need for governments. At the very least we can see this in a broad way through economic globalization basically making a world war a thing of the past. The more integrated we are, the more people have important roles, and the more people have important roles, the more democratic the society ultimately is, and in a better way than the traditional "one man one vote" democracy

It's important to note that if the US government stopped doing things in the economics sphere, most of what would change is just elimination of things that benefit special interests. Things like height limits on buildings. Maybe at some infancy of capitalism would there have been a threat of sweatshop type work without government intervention, but we don't have that today

Also, I no longer find the idea of "rule by corporation" to have any merit. We tend to think that if there was no government then companies like Koch Industries could just spend their money to erect their own governing power that could do things like lock away any protesters at fracking sites, but I don't think that's remotely true. They, and the rest of the natural gas industry, doesn't have nearly enough money to get away with that. The amount of money that would come in against their efforts is far greater, and it still wouldn't be that necessary to keep them from their authoritarian schemes. "Rule of law" is not a natural phenomenon. It is a social one that depends on prestige and legitimacy. The amount of prestige and legitimacy the US federal government has is far beyond anything the largest industries on the planet could wield, because all other varied industries and citizens and factions give it that legitimacy. We would never give the Kochs that legitimacy. The drug war is a great example. The government did (does) that. All those arrests, trials, prisons, and ruined lives are not on the hands of various companies. Many companies have piggybacked or influenced the government, but it's the colossal legal legitimacy the government has that allowed the drug war to exist in the first place

[seven-deuce]

The more integrated we are, the more people have important roles, and the more people have important roles, the more democratic the society ultimately is, and in a better way than the traditional "one man one vote" democracy

"In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.

Inquiries of this kind turn out to be dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding for them, so we won't have to worry about them in the future."

http://www.alternet.org/visions/chom...our-free-press

Also, I no longer find the idea of "rule by corporation" to have any merit.

If the government is completely removed and corporations are owned privately, decision making will be transferred from the government that is accountable to unaccountable private institutions on the hunt for big profits. This does not seem like a good idea to me. People have no say in how a company should be run whatsoever and none of their information would have to be disclosed to the public.

[wufwugy]

"In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population - the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale - they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.

Inquiries of this kind turn out to be dangerous stuff because they can tell people too much about the nature of the society in which they live. So fortunately, Congress has banned funding for them, so we won't have to worry about them in the future."

http://www.alternet.org/visions/chom...our-free-press



If the government is completely removed and corporations are owned privately, decision making will be transferred from the government that is accountable to unaccountable private institutions on the hunt for big profits. This does not seem like a good idea to me. People have no say in how a company should be run whatsoever and none of their information would have to be disclosed to the public.

30% of people having influence is kinda huge. We certainly don't have an aristocracy anymore. The point was mostly about growing integration, anyways

The point of my "complete removal of government" thing was to show how many of its decisions don't just get taken up by corporations. Most of the decisions end up just vanishing, because no companies have anywhere close to the level of prestige and legitimacy that a central government does. So if you want to go protest the Keystone XL pipeline and not get put in jail and tried as a terrorist, you can, because the Kochs and everybody else would not have nearly enough power to legally bind you.

In this scenario, however, there would arise institutions of legitimacy in some areas, but the amount of harm they could do to us would be far less than the government has done with things like the drug war. I don't say this to support removal of government. All sorts of security threats in all sorts of ways have to be dealt with, and I don't believe the market has evolved to handle those