From: mlorrey@datamann.com
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 16:22:21 MDT
From: "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey@datamann.com>
X-Mailer: YaBB
[quote from: Charles on 2002-10-22 at 10:58:30]
Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> Charles, In attempting to define how you would go about constructing a
> mathematical theory of capitalism you sort of illustrated one of the
> problems we have had with socialism. Most folks don't recognise that we
> have approaximately a 200
> year history of socialism. There is a book called Heaven on Earth
> that is a book place to start on that theory.
There is far more than 200 years in the history of socialism. Religious
communities were essentially socialist in nature quite far back in time.
Likewise, the essential tribal structure is, internally, basically
socialist.
Tribal structure is also essentially despotic, where the strongest get
the most/best food, individual expression is repressed by group political
consensus, and there is no individual choice in many life choices, from
vocations to marriage partners to religious/philosophical outlooks, etc.
>
> Yet, the facts are fairly simple. Over the last 200 years socialism
> has had ample time to theorise on every aspect of their system. They have
> installed that system several hundred times in socialist communities and
> several dozen times in socialist nations.
> What have been the results?
There may well have been, as you assert, sufficient time, but neither
capitalists nor socialists have created a coherrent theory of the
systems that they are proposing. Basically because they don't have a
good well-defined definition based on physical observables.
Capitalism is very well defined.
> Sometimes the communities or nations have remained in the hand of
> well meaning theorists (I suppose they were) and have ended in failure
> having fleeced the people that were true believers and invested their
> capital, thought, or labor into the system. Sometimes these failures were
> long drawn out but failures in the end.
Some were quite successful for generations, until they were swallowed up
by encroaching neighbors. Some may still exist. I haven't gone
investigating. I'm not that interested, and anyway I've never seen a
complete census of socialist groups. But it is true that the successful
ones don't tend to grow very large. Oneida was about the largest
successful group that I can think of, until the intolerance of their
neighbors hampered them.
You mean the Oneida indians? They were hardly socialist.
>
> Sometimes the communities or nations have been controlled by thugs.
> I don't have to explain those to you the examples are numerous -- Stalin,
> Mao, Hitler, Tito, Mussolini, Pol Pot, etc.
Do you really feel that those examples (except, possibly, Tito and
Mussolini), fit even the loose definition of socialist that exists? They
were selfish powerful tyrants, and no different from the estemable
one's that we supported, e.g., Papa Doc, or who what that lunatic in
Vietnam.
I see really no difference between the despots of large socialist nations and
the petty despots that always seem to take over small communes. Socialism
attracts bullies, layabouts, and looters.
> In the case of China they seem to have suffered a dictator but also
> in the end had the dictators release the economic sphere in order to hold
> onto their power. However the persecution of the populace continues.
China is merely continuing the imperial tradition under a new name. Nothing
to see here. They are just trying to modernise their system
without the emperor giving up any power.
The chinese have historically been able to separate commerce from politics
very well. Also, calling China capitalist is even worse than calling Europe or
a large share of the US economy such.
> It is a long sorry 200 year record of total failure. It has gotten
> to a point that if you point to an example of a socialist nation that is
> not a failure then we are justified in replying "wait."
> I listen to conditions within various nations that tend toward socialism
> and have never seen one I would wish to live in.
> On the other hand, what ever short comings we have had in the
> development of capitalist theory you can't fault our results. You can try
> but with our shortcomings we still out perform the socialist.
If you want to look at our good points, you should also look at our bad
points. We have slaughered native peoples, fought bloody wars,
persecuted our citizens, maintained slaves until europe nearly gave up
on thinking of us as civilized. And we have a larger fraction of our
citizens held as slave-laborers than any other country today. We call
them criminals, and that lets us sleep easily. But why are there so
many of them?
If Europe though our slavery made us uncivilized, a) why did Britain support
the Confederacy during the war, and b) why did Vermont outlaw slavery before
any other nation, state, principality or province in the world?
> There is one other dirty little secret about the sorry record of
> socialism. It isn't as well founded in theory as the proponents would have
> us believe. Go to von Hayek's Road to Serfdom, he devastates their theory.
And the dirty secret of capitalism is that the people in charge make
slaves of those on the bottom. Sorry, I'm not a capitalist *OR* a
socialist. I'm a libertarian. If I thought it had a reasonable chance
of working I'd be an anarchist, but anarchy is unstable. (Well, so is
everything, or at best only quasi-stable, but I'd perfer something a
*little* more stable than anarchy.)
You can't be a libertarian and not be a capitalist (i.e. a believer in the
superior utility of free markets). Despite what is claimed on The Anarchist
FAQ.
> How can this be? Most folks don't spend a lot of time checking out
> socialist theory so if the the socialist say things that sound good it
> passes. Von Hayek takes those theories and analyses them.
> The theories come up short -- very short. Ron h.
The, matter, that the socialists present is as meaninglessly emotional
as that presented by the justifiers of capitalism.
If you want to start meaningful development of your arguments, you must
first use well-defined terms. And that means that they are based on
observables. On what basis, e.g., do you assert that the Nazi's were
socialists and not capitalists? Do you take *their* word for it? Do
you take their word for anything else? (If they told me the sky was
blue, I'd want to check it myself.)
Speer's postware autobiography (actually written after he got out of prison)
clearly demonstrates that Nazis considered themselves socialists, albiet
hardly of the free love variety. For example, they rationalized their secret
treaty dividing Poland with the USSR with arguments that it was only rational
for socialists like themselves to ally with communists and other socialists.
When socialists claim that a) Nazis weren't socialists and b) neither are
they to be compared with them, you have to ask some rather basic questions,
especially of those claiming to be socialist anarchists, namely:
a) If you live in anarchy, how are you to enforce communal ownership that is
necessary for socialism to function?
As a previous socialist poster admitted rather revealingly, you HAVE to have
some sort of structure to impose communal ownership of property. They went
on to claim that what is important is what sort of structure it is that is
imposed.
If you think it takes guns, tanks, and stormtroopers to go around confiscating
private property and keeping everyone from using more than their fair share of
communal resources, then you are going to wind up with something that looks a
lot like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, etc.
If you think that if you can instead destroy everybody's private property in
a world war to such an extent that everyone is equally poor, and taxing what
remains in the Reconstruction, it would be far easier afterward to impose
communal ownership by mere statute and the rule of law by incrementalism
(which is what generally happened to Europe, even Western Europe, post WWII),
also known as 'the lobster treatment'.
Those 'socialist anarchists' who are not merely ComIntern members in sheeps
clothing (i.e. Greens Party) generally have a pie-in-the-sky view that they
oppose the use of force to achieve their 'socialist anarchy' utopia, which
leaves such idealistic states in the realm of religious fantasy as has been
previously noted.
My only opposition to people voluntarily belonging to communal organizations
(corporations being merely one form organized by statutory authority of the
state) is that they generally act in ways inimical to free markets in the long
term, either by using manipulation of instruments of the state to gain market
advantage, obtain exclusive access, or raising barriers to competition, as
well as utilizing economies of scale to manipulate pricing.
---- This message was posted by Mike Lorrey to the Extropians 2002 board on ExI BBS. <http://www.extropy.org/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=53486>
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