Capitalism or Socialism: Which is better?

[Sibirsky]

Like?

Luxembourg.

Wrong. Luxembourg had almost $2 trillion in external debt as of June 2009.

[Mercator Terra]

I would have to disagree with him. Either way theres gonna be a new bubble soon. The paper bubble...

You know what you need to do? You need to buy this book.

As does everybody who's holding on to the gold standard, or the pseudo-gold standard that you seem to be advocating here.

You should buy these books:

this book
and this book

[New Hampshyre]

It would also be accounted for in a planned econmoy if the planners are good. And i dont think people should be driving in unsafe cars.

Who the hell are you to decide what cars other people should want to drive? I'll have you know that some people don't want to spend a fortune on their vehicles and so they buy cares that are less safe then others but are safe enough for their own personal standards.

And you're assuming there CAN BE "good planners". That is IMPOSSIBLE. No planner has access to even a decently sized fraction of the information that is constantly altering the market. The US by itself has 300 million citizens, many of which make individual judgments based on supply and demand, prices, evolving preferences, ect that each minutely affect and guide the market. Centralized planning can't even begin to replace the innumerable of constant calculations the free market is processing.

lol this is the stupid assumption that people cant be altruistic.

Not in elected office they can't. Politicians MUST function to maximize their votes or they will get out competed. That's just how it is. If a politician doesn't buy votes and pay of special interest groups than he will not be able to beat those who ARE willing to do so. The political world is a very ugly place.

But then, private individuals ARE free to be altruistic with the wealth they earn. Try cooperating with others in their private capacities to achieve good ends, injecting the use of force into complex social and economic issues just makes it possible to prevent rational outcomes.

This does not take into account that there is most likely misinformation and disinformation in a market.

Those things don't exist in the government? All politicians are angelic geniuses who are infallible and not prone to disinformation spread by lobbyists? I think not. Politicians are human just like people in the private market are, and what is worse is that they are NOT AS CAREFUL with spending money and making decisions because their actions. If a private company isn't careful with its spending that company will die. Thus it has every incentive to spend money wisely. If a politician spends money on useless baloney it will help him get more votes from whoever was selling it. And if a wealthy politician makes a decision to vote against unsafe cars he doesn't lose a damn thing because his car's likely already an expensive and safe one and his constituents will probably naively be like you and think what he is doing is benevolent. It is only the people with the smallest political clout, the poor, who end up paying the full cost of that law by not being able to afford any car at all!

Private parties have incentives to resist mis/dis-information, but politicians don't. Their highest priority is getting re-elected and it often pays for them to use and be used by mis/dis-information.

Not if you ask what the consumers want, by making a poll.

You are seriously being ridiculously naive if you think polls can replace the constant information feed back that the market is going through. Every transaction that ever takes place on the market helps adjust it in subtle and important ways.

i'm a consequentialist, so i dont care if you think it is tyrannical.

Allowing the government to be tyrannical has some pretty serious consequences Arilando!

Tyrannical by your definition, not my definition.

But you DO admit then that tyranny has bad consequences and that is should be avoided right?

[Mercator Terra]

You know what you need to do? You need to buy this book.

As does everybody who's holding on to the gold standard, or the pseudo-gold standard that you seem to be advocating here.

I think he was less advocating the gold standard and more reiterating the problems with fiat currencies.Devaluation and subsequent busts being one of those problems.

I myself am for using a multitude of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, etc)

[Occupied Deutschland]

I myself am for using a multitude of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, etc)

Well, I can certainly understand that, I just don't know if it's feasible. Anyhow, that's for another thread.

Capitalism is Best -ism

[Sibirsky]

Also interest rates are still artificially low.

Bullshit, the money was too tight, even some not so nutty Austrians agree.

Why not let the rates float? Also, I dunno if I'd call Don Luskin an Austrian.

[Sibirsky]

capitalism is built on the outdated and heavily refuted, economical assumptions that consumers and businesses, are 100% logical, lack emotions, and are omnipotent.
in fact one of the biggest problems we have is a lot of economists we trained under that assumption and they haven't caught up with the changes in science.

No it isn't.

[Sibirsky]

There are literally hundreds of posts since I was last here. Going to summarize.

I support school vouchers and school choice.
If you can get an opinion of a doctor, you can and should get a 2nd opinion.
State schools are biased. Most only slightly, some more so, but all of them are biased.
Deficit spending is theft from those not yet born. At the very least it's taxation without representation.

[Sociobiology]

No, capitalism is not built on that at all. Maybe Austrian style libertarianism, but not capitalism in a broader sense. Also, the people you are debating against, on the whole, are not economists at all.

Subjective beliefs...

that rational choice theory was the dominate paradigm fro many years and is being replaced by Behavioral economics is a subjective beleif?
that neoclassical economics and the myth of homo economicus, were the dominate form of used for economic and business modeling for the last hundred years is conjecture?
your ignorance is showing.

[New Hampshyre]

No the free market does not reward the companies that are making a contrubtion to society, they reward the company that treats it's workers the worst, has the best commercials, pollute the enviroment the most, and has the cheapest but worst products.

Who has been spoon feeding you this nonsense?

Let's say we have 2 equal companies that produce the same product. Lets say that 1 then starts making the product a little better without increasing the cost. This would lead more customers to buy its product and less to buy from the other. This rewards the better product's company for providing consumers a better product. There. You have just been proven wrong. Now go read a little about economics.

I'll continue if you need any more reassurance that you're speaking non-sense:

Lets say we have 2 equal companies that produce the same product. Let's say that 1 then starts treating its workers worse without increasing their pay. That company is now more likely to have strikes, lower morale, and a worse reputation. These first 2 lead to lower efficiency which gives their competitor an advantage and the 1st company is thus punished for its bad behavior. Thus, treating workers badly negatively effects companies and they have an incentive to not do so.

Let's say that we have 2 equal companies that produce the same product. One figures out how to produce their product without polluting without increasing the cost of the product. This gives them an advantage since they can now sell their product as a green alternative which some customers prefer to polluting products.

PS: The free market has a much greater track record in preserving the environment then non-free economies. You can see that in the annual report at freetheworld.com

A lot of that is due to the fact that the free market causes us to automatically conserve scarce resources. As a resource becomes scarce in the free market its price goes up since its supply is dropping relative to demand. That rise in price causes people to conserve the use of the resource, recycle it, and find alternative resources to replace it.

The private market also gives people incentives to take better care of resources. For example, loggers who are allowed to log in public lands will take as much as they can take because they know that if they don't, other loggers will. But on privately owned lands loggers only take the trees that are ripe for logging and they replace what they take so that they can log more in the future or so they can preserve the value of the land that they own.

Let's say that we have 2 companies that produce the same product. One makes a more expensive but higher quality product. They then are able to sell more of their product to those who want higher quality and are willing to pay the higher price. The other company then sells more of their product to those who don't think that the higher quality is worth the price. Neither company necessarily wins out, but the customer does since he now has more choices.

As for commercials, that doesn't really matter because lobbyists are the commercials of the political world so the government is just as susceptible, or even more so, to the any aspects of salesmanship.

And you do know that a government can influence saving rates?

Yeah... And it has incentives to use the savings rate to benefit the here and now at the expense of future generations because they are under election pressures in the here and now.

[Hydesland]

that rational choice theory was the dominate paradigm fro many years and is being replaced by Behavioral economics is a subjective beleif?

Serious behavioural economics is more supplementary rather than contrary to rational choice theories, nobody ever thought that people were always rational, only that in aggregate, the majority act rational (and rational in economics means something quite specific and not unreasonable, it is not the same as 'logical' and absolutely not the same as omnipotent), and that irregularities and anomalies tend to balance each other out. The only thing of any relevance is biased or consistent irrationality, rather than random irrationality, which has always been known about, but, it being unbiased, is just noise and has little affect on models. There has been much empirical work on this, it is by no means conjecture.

[Mercator Terra]

Subjective beliefs...

that rational choice theory was the dominate paradigm fro many years and is being replaced by Behavioral economics is a subjective beleif?
that neoclassical economics and the myth of homo economicus, were the dominate form of used for economic and business modeling for the last hundred years is conjecture?
your ignorance is showing.

I would call Austrian Economics behavioral economics because its based on praxeology (study of human action). Not everyone is rational and Austrian Economics understands that. Though Austrian Economics understands that people (be it rational or not) tend to buy the cheapest item with the most quality. So I dont see your point.

[New Hampshyre]

capitalism is built on the outdated and heavily refuted, economical assumptions that consumers and businesses, are 100% logical, lack emotions, and are omnipotent.

No. Capitalism takes it for granted that people are fallible and variable, that is one more reason why people's personal decisions should be left up to them. If they make bad decisions, they will be the ones paying the price, and this gives people the best incentives to act carefully and rationally.

Statism is built on the outdated and heavily refuted, economical assumptions that politicians and bureaucrats, are 100% logical, lack emotions, and are omnipotent.

If people WERE perfect then we could trust politicians to manage our lives for us, but politicians are just as fallible as anyone else AND they know our situations a lot less they we ourselves do. But, they funny thing is, if you REALLY believe that a politician knows how you should live your life better then you do, you're free to have him boss YOU around. you just can't give him the power to boss other people around.

[New Hampshyre]

capitalism is built on the outdated and heavily refuted, economical assumptions that consumers and businesses, are 100% logical, lack emotions, and are omnipotent.

No, capitalism is not built on that at all. Maybe Austrian style libertarianism, but not capitalism in a broader sense. Also, the people you are debating against, on the whole, are not economists at all.

Hydesland, did any of us assert or act under the assumption that people are 100% logical, lack emotions or are omnipotent? No. Then please don't act like we have. Sociobiology was obviously putting words in our mouth, don't encourage that.

[Sibirsky]

Dude... In the free market people have incentives to invest in the companies that are best able to return high profits. If a company is making high profits its because they are providing a service that society needs more of. This system automatically sends societies resources to the places where they are most needed.

And individuals and private institutions have FAR higher saving rates than governments.

No the free market does not reward the companies that are making a contrubtion to society, they reward the company that treats it's workers the worst, has the best commercials, pollute the enviroment the most, and has the cheapest but worst products. And you do know that a government can influence saving rates?

Jesus fucking Christ.
People line up for days for the latest iWhatthefuckever Steve Jobs has created. His products are a contribution to society. That's why people line up for days to get them.

Incomes at Apple (including the corporate owned Apple Stores) average more than the overall average.

Yes, government influences savings rates.

[Hydesland]

Hydesland, did any of us assert or act under the assumption that people are 100% logical, lack emotions or are omnipotent? No. Then please don't act like we have. Sociobiology was obviously putting words in our mouth, don't encourage that.

No, but a lot of the models used to justify laissez faire libertarianism do require that assumption.

[Mercator Terra]

What are your views on agorism?

[Occupied Deutschland]

Hydesland, did any of us assert or act under the assumption that people are 100% logical, lack emotions or are omnipotent? No. Then please don't act like we have. Sociobiology was obviously putting words in our mouth, don't encourage that.

No, but a lot of the models used to justify laissez faire libertarianism do require that assumption.

A lot of the models used to evaluate/study/examine or provide proof for economic theories (laissez-faire and otherwise) and economics...make the same assumption. So unless you discount economics as any kind've a means to study people's behavior, you're up a creek.

[New Nassrau]

socialism steals from the upper class's hard earned money THEIR MONEY. socialism promots people not to work because the govt will give them handouts. soon the upper class will leave the country and where is the govt's money? the country is thrown in rioting because the crap of the country doesn't get it's handouts. socialism is crap. capitalism is better

[Sibirsky]

Hydesland, did any of us assert or act under the assumption that people are 100% logical, lack emotions or are omnipotent? No. Then please don't act like we have. Sociobiology was obviously putting words in our mouth, don't encourage that.

No, but a lot of the models used to justify laissez faire libertarianism do require that assumption.

How? People smoke, drink and use drugs. None of those are rational choices. It's delay discounting.

[Sibirsky]

What are your views on agorism?

Favorable.

[Hydesland]

A lot of the models used to evaluate/study/examine or provide proof for economic theories (laissez-faire and otherwise) and economics...make the same assumption. So unless you discount economics as any kind've a means to study people's behavior, you're up a creek.

Many models required agents to be rational in aggregate (although many don't), but not omni-potent, for instance.

[Occupied Deutschland]

A lot of the models used to evaluate/study/examine or provide proof for economic theories (laissez-faire and otherwise) and economics...make the same assumption. So unless you discount economics as any kind've a means to study people's behavior, you're up a creek.

Many models required agents to be rational in aggregate (although many don't), but not omni-potent, for instance.

True enough.

[Mercator Terra]

What are your views on agorism?

Favorable.

I just started getting into it. I really like it. I haven't SEK3's book yet but I plan I buying it. (I cant stand reading book from a screen or I would just read the pdf)

[Quailtopia]

Though Austrian Economics understands that people (be it rational or not) tend to buy the cheapest item with the most quality.

*cough*