Truth To Power wrote: Competition is the only reliable stimulus to efficiency and excellence. Did you learn nothing from the Soviet Union's failure?
ComradeTim wrote:Was the Soviet Union a decentralised planned economy? Did workers control the workplace and the means of production? Was the delegate system in place? No? Then where is the relevance?
It was an example of what always happens when "wasteful" competition is removed from an economy: even more waste in the absence of accurate and effective incentives for efficiency.
Truth To Power wrote: No, because a vote is not a price.
In this case it is because it is a representation of need. The most needy elements of the economy will get first crack at the goods and so on.
That is a guarantee of general economic failure and poverty, because the most needy elements of the economy are precisely those that don't know how to make effective
use of the goods you demand they get first crack at. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE NEEDY. If you want to select someone to entrust with managing resources efficiently, do you choose a skilled and experienced manager, or a homeless bum on Skid Row? Because the latter is the needier one, and always will be.
Truth To Power wrote: No. Wage slavery is an emergent property of capitalist production that arises from forcible removal of the workers' liberty to use natural resources (land) when they have been appropriated as private property. Restore that liberty and remove the privilege of landed property, as I advocate, and the worker has free access to economic opportunity; employment then becomes a voluntary, consensual contract between moral equals.
Where does the means of production come into all this?
The "means of production" consists of two entirely different things: land and capital. Socialism and capitalism both refuse to distinguish between them (you have just refused again), which is why neither will ever be able to achieve liberty, justice and prosperity. I already explained that to you.
If it is still in private hands, how can there be any "voluntary, consensual contracts", due to the inherent power inequalities that entails?
Every contract is based on power inequalities, which are inherent in the human condition. It is not power inequalities that make voluntary, consensual contracts impossible under capitalism or socialism, but the fact that the worker has been FORCIBLY DEPRIVED OF ALTERNATIVES: by privilege, especially private landowning, under capitalism, or by removal of his right to property in the fruits of his labor under socialism.
Truth To Power wrote:It can't happen in the geolibertarian system I advocate because unlike under capitalism, the employer has no way to deprive the worker of access to alternatives.
What? What century are you living in?
I am living -- and more importantly thinking -- in the 21st century. You are living in the 21st century, but thinking in the 19th.
Most people's jobs, even in the third world have little to do with the land
That is very, very false, as the astronomical
value of land proves. Land value simply measures the economic advantage obtainable by using the site. The fact that land costs so much just flat-out PROVES its central importance in the economy, and in workers' access to economic opportunity.
and that number increases daily. How will me having access to the land help me if my boss fires me from a sales job?
By putting you in an advantageous location for getting another job, WITHOUT having to meet a parasitic landowner's extortion demands just to continue having access to such opportunities.
Truth To Power wrote: It was produced and saved by its owner.
Only a minute number of investors could possibly obtain capital that way.
That's just flat false as a matter of objective physical fact. A huge amount of investment capital has been accumulated by hundreds of millions of investors in exactly that way in pension funds, mutual funds, insurance policies, 401(k) and other tax-advantaged investment vehicles, etc., EVEN UNDER CAPITALISM. In a geolibertarian economy where each worker got to keep the fruits of his labor, almost any willing and able worker would be able to accumulate a significant fund of capital.
Most obtain it in ways before described.
Under the capitalist system, not the geolibertarian system I propose. You are again refusing to engage with the actual proposal under discussion.
Truth To Power wrote: But the wealth confiscated by landowners and employers under capitalism was not confiscated from "the workers." It was confiscated from specific workers who are now free (or, more likely, dead). Reparations for the wrongs done to workers in the remote past cannot be claimed by current workers merely on the grounds that they are also workers; and it is a recognized principle in law, for very good reason, that retrospective remedies to or from anyone but the original parties to a violation of rights cannot in general be supported.
Under capitalist law perhaps.
Under any form of justice.
Under socialist law, wealth confiscated at any point from workers should be returned to the workers via the Workers' Soviets.
And that sort of collective punishment is what makes "socialist law" stupid, evil garbage. Confiscating wealth that A took from B and giving it to C is not justice, sorry -- let alone your plan of confiscating wealth that A earned as a productive entrepreneur and giving it to C because he is a "worker." You could with equal "logic" and "justice" claim that as some men have raped some women, "men" owe restitution to "women." It's just absurd, irrational and evil collectivist claptrap.
Why should the heirs of thieves profit from the wealth of the dead, rather than everyone (including those said heirs as they would have been made workers by asset confiscation).
For the exact reason Henry George explained: the thief's heir is not the thief, his victim's heir is not his victim, and it is impossible to unravel all the wrongs done in the past, or even to be confident that in attempting to do so you are righting wrongs and not compounding them. Did you even read what he wrote? You haven't attempted to address it, let alone refute it.
Truth To Power wrote: I don't know how he got the money, and YOU DON'T EITHER. More importantly, how he got it is not relevant to the economic relationship of investor to worker, as Henry George showed.
Precisely! it should be assumed that all investors got their money from slavery and so it should therefore be confiscated!
No, it should not, because that is self-evidently a false and stupid assumption. All of socialism is based on such self-evidently false and stupid assumptions.
However, even if they did achieve investor status by honest means, the system itself should be abolished, as it is unequal system.
What system? Capitalism? I'm with you. Consensual employment for mutual benefit? Not so much.
You need to take a couple of months off work to ponder the deep wisdom of someone much, much smarter than you: "The worst form of inequality is trying to make unequals equal." -- Aristotle
Truth To Power wrote: Garbage. You are invalidly trying to pretend that the wrongs done to past workers by past employers under a past system can be righted by robbing current employers and giving the loot to current workers under the current system. That is self-evidently absurd and dishonest.
I see. You want to allow the heirs of thieves to keep their stolen gains, while the workers suffer.
Yes, because unlike you, I am willing to know the fact that the workers will suffer much, much more if we adopt a policy of redressing injustice
collectively, without regard for who is actually a perpetrator of injustice and who a victim of it.
The Libertarian mentality everyone!
This, from the guy who said, "it should be assumed that all investors got their money from slavery"??
The socialist mentality, everyone!
Truth To Power wrote: You could with equal "logic" claim that because white cotton growers in the antebellum South kept their black field workers as slaves, current black cotton growers should be forced to make reparations to their Latino field workers. It's just absurd and dishonest.
No, they should have their assets seized and distributed to all workers, including themselves as they will have by said action been made workers, instead of "growers".
Are you one of those fools who thinks managing a business or farm isn't work? Or are you one of those fools who thinks managers will be just as expert, motivated and
productive when managing the collective's capital for the collective benefit as they would be managing their own capital for their own benefit?
Truth To Power wrote:You are prepared to forgive those who now farm cotton for the crimes committed by other cotton growers hundreds of years ago? How magnanimous of you....
No, for the crime of using wage labour, which is a form of slavery.
Garbage. It is only being deprived of other alternatives under capitalism or socialism that makes wage labor slavery. Geolibertarian institutions restore the equal individual right to liberty, enabling all to have access to economic opportunity without having to pay landowners' extortion demands, or spend one's life in servitude to the Collective.
Truth To Power wrote: I've seen that kind of stuff before. Especially the continuous resort to the false dichotomy fallacy of capitalism vs socialism, which is just a step above claiming that Republican vs Democrat exhausts the alternatives.
What you are talking about is a strange and probably never to be used form of capitalism, as it aims to keep the means of production in private hands, as far as I can tell.
It's not capitalism, as it does not admit private ownership of land. What I propose is private ownership and control of
capital for its rightful owners' rightful benefit, and rightful public administration of possession and use of
land for rightful public benefit -- which will almost always mean control by private users for their own benefit, obtained by paying the land's use value (market rent) to the community to devote to public benefit.