So Tony - are you saying that an individual must sign up to a specific socio-political in pure form.

If I had a socio-political model it is pragmatist. I always fail psychometric testing and my answers are invariably, it depends.

Capitalist

Marketeer

Socialist

Humanitarian

Darwinian Libertarian


If I have a creed it is pragma not dogma. I have never seen dogma solve anything - whether left or right, capitalist or socialist.

Each 'system' has pros and cons and working with the context and intelligently responding is surely the most important thing. Dogma can only limit one's responses.

 

I agree with TROUT again, in a minute I am going to be agreeing with Jtaylor and Martin2005, if that happens please kill me.

PS I still think the majority of our current crop of bankers are blood sucking scum who should be PERSONALLY liable for their losses. Also Goldmans board should all be in prison.

 

Agreed, but you're rather missing the point. Government governs, Christ guides. If we're to remove Christ from the equation as per Nietzsche and Marx with what will he be replaced? Humans look for leadership. Greed is destructive and society needs a way to temper the instinct without recourse to flawed, human dictatorship.

Greedy people are so greedy without a compass (or the wrong kind of compass, see objectivism) that they'll dump the very principles that lined their pocket (free market) and benefit from the intervention of the state - you've pointed this out yourself above. Capitalism worked when the dominant zeitgeist was a Christian one. Remove the anchor of Christianity and capitalism will eat itself; as I said earlier, it will be poetic justice if Smith's 'invisible hand' kills the idea because the idea is weak without that which initially made it strong. The ultimate expression of memetics and economic Darwinism.

I don't support the idea of government dictating anything. Governments should govern on behalf of the people. Dave's 'ethical capitalism' is simply a euphemism for Christian capitalism because scholars know Christian philosophy has been is a key component to the success of capitalist economics. Capitalism with a spliff rather than a line of coke. Of course, history will be the judge.

 

If you'd understood post 118 you'd realise that you already do agree with me. How would you like to die?

 

Where they are liable through negligence I agree and in the US that is very real.


As for Goldman - some of them are going that way!

 

See how I included mart2005 in there as well

 

Exactly. I'll repeat again: capitalism has not failed; it hasn't eaten itself with greed. It has been the fault of the greedy corrupt few. When the principles of a system are fair, that should be the goal, or at least getting as close to it as possible. That's the fix, not more centralised authority.

There's a major difference in the details a few of us are talking about here. It's between a government taking care of the people and the people taking care of themselves. The free-market is the latter. I want no part of the former. Just enforce the law FFS; make things fair.

As well as the (bad) effects they've had on the market, the government is also stifling creativity and entrepreneurship. A simple case would be this: some people would like to build a factory. They get approval, planning etc. But now they can't just rock up and get the building up using their own ingenuity. The government tells them how they're to do it, what they have to use to do it, wear, etc, etc. All that adds on massive cost in both time and material. And that's just putting up the f*cking building.

It's not enough to get your employees' free agreement to work for you. You have to provide them with what the government wants you to provide them with, work by their guidelines for fairness, etc. And then one wrong move and you can be taken to the cleaners for something that isn't even a crime, and end up virtually bankrupt.

Honestly, we need to start rolling back this interference. It creeps constantly. You don't notice, but it makes everyone softer and softer, and the conditions an employer has to hire under ever more stringent and off-putting. Running a company these days must be many, many times more difficult and more risky than it has ever been. All these rules are the thin end of a very large wedge.

And then, after all that, we complain about employers not hiring? The lack of jobs? Why businesses have ground to halt?

Davey's capitalism isn't anything right now; it's merely words rolling out of his mouth, and I don't thing it's likely to advance much beyond that stage, to be honest. I'll believe it when I see it. But can you imagine any of the current crop making significant changes to the system? Doesn't seem likely.

 

Again, the invisible hand will never kill anything. The invisible hand is a description of a mechanism which, logically, self-corrects. It's perfect for its purpose.

What will kill capitalism will be the people in government ignoring its principles and allowing it to be corrupt. And if that happens with capitalism it can happen with anything else. So I don't quite get the logic of aiming for something less perfect in principle to begin with.

 

Fred the shred loses his title - as though theres not enough excitement for one week

 

i do not completely disagree with your implied point about the virtue of a mixed econoy and need for regulted capitalism because of the tendnecy to lead to monopoly negative externalities etc blah blah.

still pragmatism is only a method and your point only supeerficially plausible.pragmatism to what end exactly?

reading between the lines you seemvery much to believe there is a class of people in our society who deserve succes form some inate point of view...if they cannot get it through the market (when it fails) then the state step in to help and potect them. i am sure the house of romanov also believed a similar thing about themselves.

consider this for a moment. the capitalist should stay ndependent from the state not just to protect the state from the interests of the capitalst but to protect the capitalist from the caprices of the state.

 

well i think it is useless to appeal to christianity but i see your point. i just think
the main problems can be solved with doing nothing...inaction...on behalf of the state i.e not siding with financial elites or other capitalists and letting the market allocate and manage capital. it might be naive but if not we either surrender to naked oligarchy and jacboot morality or we go with marx and agree that capitalism will result in political conflicts too great for the state to recconcile in any civilised way. they are the same thing i guess.

 

I'm sure he'll be able to cope with the "loss". Ed Miliband meanwhile must be feeling smug, first Hester's bonus and now Goodwin's knighthood, I guess he must now start searching for the next opinion poll bandwagon to jump on.

 

Evening, Allan. Back at post 85 I issued a challenge:

https://www.scoobynet.com/showpost.p...9&postcount=85

It may have been overlooked, but I don't think you met it. Again, how would this self-correction have looked without intervention? Bare in mind where we are now with intervention. Describe this "perfection" you speak of.

Think of capitalism as the Yin and Christianity as the Yang. Remove the latter and all you're left with is darkness which is what I think you may start to describe should you rise to my challenge.

 

Well, people seem perfectly happy to appeal to Mammonism, believing it to be perfect! How's that for a false God?

 

I think you must be reading a whole different book from another author in between those lines!

Putting that aside - which class of people is this that you think I imply deserve success?

 

I did answer the first point in my following post, albeit briefly. It's obvious what would have happened, and I think you know.

But, again, you're criticising capitalism (or its princples). I'm telling you that it's not capitalism you're really criticising. Perfection wasn't used to describe something everyone sees as perfect in every way; rather, it's the way the market functions, and allows individual sovereignty, to an extent. If I have an idea for a way to produce something, I might come to you for a loan (you're loaded). If it's beneficial to you, you agree. Whatever venture we enter into is our responsibility only - not society's, or any other quasi-religion. If it fails, you are out of pocket to the sum of the investment, and I have to find a way of feeding myself. To do that, I'll go to the first person I can think of and find a way to make it beneficial for them to let me in on what they're doing or help them in some way - again, that will only happen if they feel like it. It might sound naive, but that is just the idea of how it works. Of course it's going to be sh*t going to get work from someone in exchange for peanuts and working in the cold with little, if anything, to be positive about... it's going to be sh*t losing your investments when you give them to people who can't use them. But it's much better than showing up on the doorstep of someone who had nothing to do with it and appropriating them in order to compensate something you did voluntarily.

Of course it's only something I would want to work towards though. There should be a gradual unwinding, in my opinion, year by year, of this sort of interference. If you stop bailouts for banks, and remove some of the safety blankets of society (not necessarily in terms of subsistence benefits, but certainly related to work and employment - anything in the realms of business), it could take decades to work up a prudent framework and get back to this level of consumption in a sustainable manner (all things, e.g. technology, being equal (and it arguably could take that long anyway)). But then you would have a society of people who were prudent and personally responsible. I also think you'd give them back elements of Christian ethics, which IMO come with personal responsibility and having to work for your lot. People would appreciate what they'd have. They wouldn't be nihilistic zombies. That comes with the welfare state and being mollycoddled. Hopefully some of them would even think of their own hard experiences and contribute to charities to help people in worse situations than themselves. We've seen the prudent family who save for the future in this country before... it's the ideal you obviously think about. If you give people back responsibility for their own lives, and take it away from the paternal state, it could be what we end up with.

 

Add culture in to the mix and you have 'social three-folding' an actual self-correcting process where no one realm seeks to dominate the other. Of course the banks will have something to say about that, I'm sure.

 

I'm very familiar with Libertarianism. How does this plan work with a load of reds sitting in Westminster?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine

 

I'm talking about what Jefferson would have called a 'monied aristocracy' although it includes the 'talented' managerial class which you fear will all leave the UK.

 

Yes that would be the whole point like separation of church and state.

Thing is we have a central bank which is a de facto part of the state, so state and banking are hard to separate...the state deploys monetary policy to steward the economy etc.

 

Well I was talking about this fallacy that because the mob are attacking executive pay then executive pay must be ok then? I was saying from the POV of reason (not emotion) it can also be attacked.

I think to some extent executive pay to other industries is higher because of the high pay in banking but you have a point.

Sure fine let's take a Capitalist POV and let the market decide pay, but then failure must be punished or the market goes haywire and the state sided with and promoted failure with the bail-outs.

 

Yes that is exactly what I am saying, but it is not just the market going corrupt it would be the government being manifestly an oligarchy.

It is remarkable in this country how we have brushed away these concerns in the name of perpetuating the status quo at seemingly all cost.

What other company would the state feel compelled to buy for 45 million as - on the face of it - a necessity to continue our civilization?

Jefferson had a point.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."

 

I'm not playing Devil's advocate here, Tony, I'm interested in your hypothesis. What would have happened if the banks had been allowed to fail?

 

banking should be the means to an end -- i.e. providing finance and liquidity to innovators and industry

unfortunaltely, instead of the means to an end, it has become the end in itself

and consequently we have seen a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich

 

No idea. Does anyone?

 

Yep.

 

Well, one can make some fairly sound predictions, yes. I'm just interested to know how you can be so gung-ho and certain about non-interventionism without actually having figured out the outcomes. Seems a bit reckless to me. What would have happened to my mum's retirement or Leslie's savings or the chippy owner in my village? They're the people I'm interested in, the ones whose lives are gambled with by the cùnts in the city.

 

And how does/should it provide this finance and liquidity?

 

I don't know what is going to happen tomorrow but I still get up without a feeling of impeding doom.

The fact is nobody knows, but the ones bleating about how badly the system was going to crash, and plunge everyone into ruin, were the ones with most to lose. Nobody knows the exact consequences of the bail-out either.

Certainty is for slaves.