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#14895397
Now, one of the main principles of capitalism is that the harder you work, the more you get.

Well I'm sorry but that's simply not the case. It's more about how SMART you work, not how hard you work.

And the problem is, some people are way smarter than others. And those people take advantageous of those of us who aren't as smart.

How is that fair? How is it fair that say someone like me, for example, who isn't very bright, can't figure out how to make money, but someone else who was born with skills that I don't have (such as intelligence) can use his brain to get rich? How is it fair that I can struggle and work really damn hard every damn day without anything to show for it, whereas someone who is a genius can work way more effectively with way less effort? Does he really deserve to have more than me?
#14895405
Capitalism is even more complex than that AS. Born privilege is the most unfair aspect of Capitalism. How is it fair that a person born into wealth has opportunities that someone born into poverty does not? Working hard only creates the means to sell your Labour. What you get for that is determined by the skills you acquire throughout life. And intelligence is only one type of skill. There are plenty of skills even a dotard can acquire that he could sell highly. So stupidity is not an excuse to not make money. That is the idlers excuse.

Nonetheless there is a phase that might interest you if you are concerned with where Capitalism is heading...

"To each according to their ability, to each according to their need."

Perhaps Capitalism is on its last legs. A class divide can only expand so far until it snaps. And when it does, the rules are off.
#14895498
There is nothing in capitalism about the harder and/or smarter you work the more money you make.

Capitalism is about the right of owners of capital to earn money through the direct exploitation of the labor power of workers. They are abetted by this through government policies specifically designed to hold large numbers of workers in misery, so as to maintain such workers in a dependent position whereby they must sell their labor to the capitalists merely to survive. One conspicuous illustrating aspect of this is the maintaining of a 'surplus army of the unemployed'. Under the prevailing norms of American capitalism, this is referred to euphemistically in official parlance as 'full employment', which is not full employment in the sense normal speakers of English might understand the term, but is rather a target rate of unemployment.

Whereas in days of old 'owning capital' far more likely than now meant owning the physical means and mechanisms of production, with the progress of the joint-stock company, it now means merely holding ownership interests, or 'shares' in such joint-stock companies.

The matter of inherited wealth was mentioned. If one inherits say $10,000,000, and they earn a measly average return of 2%, that amounts to a $200,000 a year income at the year of their birth. Thanks to compound interests, assuming they fail to spend each and every penny of that income, the amount of wealth will increase (at an exponential rate).

Workers more often experience compound interest the other way, e.g. through the mechanisms of debt, which operate in the same fashion as 'returns on capital', but move in the other direction. Thus, workers become 'bound' by their debts, and they must work ever smarter and/or harder merely in an effort to keep up with debt repayments.

Is debt a matter of choice? Perhaps there is no greater necessary implement than a roof over one's head, and the system is designed to promote a state of debt bondage in return for this necessary implement. A tremendous amount of sales effort/expense is outlaid on the promotion of the assuming by workers of various forms of debt.

Capitalism has nothing to do with rewarding those who work hard. Capitalism has everything to do with rewarding those who own capital (that's why it is called 'capitalism'). Capitalism is entirely dependent to function on the dependent relation of immiserated workers to capitalists, who as we have observed, most likely inherited their capital to begin with.

Even the small business person which employs workers is at most a proto-capitalist, with but a measly capital holding of their own (and likely with much debt, to go along with it).
Last edited by Crantag on 12 Mar 2018 02:26, edited 3 times in total.
#14895504
Would it be any fairer to take from the smart people to give to the dumb people? What's fair about that?

Or worse do the commie thing and take from everyone, both smart and dumb, and make everyone into the equally dispossessed slaves of communist overlords?

Is your lack of wealth even the real source of your misery? Like as not, you aren't starving or homeless so what bothers you is something more emotional, envy or loneliness or something like that. Just from personal experience I can tell you I am not rich by UK standards but I am pretty happy all the same.
#14895519
Communist China is seeing the emergence of 5000 new milionaires a week, and has a plan being implemented aimed at the elimination of extreme poverty by 2020.

The Chinese Central Bank announced progress yesterday on moving to make the Yuan convertable and further subplanting the USD as global reserve currency (prior international progress has been undertook internationally through the 'special drawing rights' mechanism based on a currerncy basket. It has also been undertook bilaterally by China and a fair number of countries through independent settlement pacts). Given the amount of settlement necessary on Chinese trade, the feasibility of emergence of the Yuan as international money has continually gained momentum.

The US strategic ambition of self-enriching through financial trickery is not a sustainable arrangement, and all But Americans (and perhaps some British-with their City of London) can clearly see this. Reciting past misnomers about economic flaws in the USSR and pre-reform China will provide cold comfort in the end.

This post gives me an idea for a trading company which takes advantage of the gains in monetary efficiency foreseeable through the rising tieds of Yuan-denominated trade (e.g. suplanting counterpart trade denominated in USD).
#14895523
Think about this AS.

Perhaps you are looking at this all wrong. Perhaps you are mistaking wealth for worth and having stuff with happiness.

Capitalism, on an individual level, is not acquiring some specified amount of wealth. It is about having the freedom to acquire the amount of wealth that is necessary for you to make yourself happy. So when you pick a number and flagellate yourself because you do not hit the number you are wrong to start with. Then you compound the problem by constructing the belief that it is because a) you are somehow at a mental disadvantage and b) that it is easy for smart people to acquire wealth.

I belong to two organizations. One of people with IQs in the top 2% and another with IQs in the top 1%. While statistics show that, on average, higher IQs tend to correlate with higher incomes that does not tell the story. I met a great many people at last year's annual gathering who saved all year to afford the trip to Florida. Sure there were affluent people there but there were also a considerable number of teachers, small business workers, service people and tradesmen. In fact, I would suspect that if the group was above average in income but not by that much. And this is the top couple of percent. Put 100 people in a room and the two members were arguably "smarter" than the 98 others. And oh the exhilaration of attending seminars and events designed for people who can absorb and process information quickly.

That said. Why weren't these "geniuses" all rich? Perhaps most of them are. They just don't have excessive amounts of money. I know a Franciscan friar. He has no money. Nada. Zip. He has two habits and some jeans. He is loaned a car and works with poor and homeless people. He is one of the richest people I know.

You know that great feeling you get when your music comes together and the audience is in it with you? How much would you pay for that? And no matter how much money I have, or how high my IQ, I can't buy that feeling.

You say you aren't very smart. I say that if you find what makes you happy above all things, you are the clear winner in the game of life. Even if you live at subsistence wages. Find what makes you happy and do that. If you get rich doing it...fine. If you don't you are still happy.

There is an old saying..."People who do what they love to do never spend a day at work." Be that guy.
#14895524
SolarCross wrote:Would it be any fairer to take from the smart people to give to the dumb people? What's fair about that?


If one group is over compensated and the other is under compensated, then yeah, it would be completely fair. Capitalist outcomes are the results of blind market forces, they're not any more inherently just or fair than the weather.
#14895532
So now we get additional anecdotal evidence, from Dr Lee, that in American society there is no clear correlation between intelligence and wealth. This is of course very predictable, in a society where wealth is most directly correlated with one's proportional ownership of capital; and where moreover most such rights to capital holdings are most often inherited.

I really don't care about IQ tests much, on a personal level. When I was working in a fishery in Alaska though I was independently approached by two MENSA members, who told me that I had ought to look into joining. Intelligent people can recognize other intelligent people, it seems. What were we all doing in an Alaska fishery? I sort of presumed that extreme places attract some extreme individuals.

I did take the online 'Mensa workout' test, and the result said I would likely qualify for Mensa through a real test.

As I am of course quite clearly fixated on China, let me provide some more details on their system. Education in China is heavily exam-based, and one's relative success on exams determines much with respect to one's relative attainment in education; and this indeed does much to determine one's lot. Is it a system with issues? Yeah, but the point is that it is merit-based.

The Chinese college entrance exam, or gaokou, focuses principally on 3 subjects: Chinese, mathematics, and English. (By the way, this is good news for the future subservients of China around the globe who happen to speak English. It turns out that thing about needing to learn Mandarin is sort of a misnomer, after all.)

So in short, under Chinese communism, it is more likely to be the case that intelligence actually does correlate with wealth attainment. Under the American system of monopoly capitalism, there is really no steady grounds for such a correlation.

Perhaps that is why American youth dream of being professional athletes or movie stars, one may suppose.
#14895543
So now we get additional anecdotal evidence, from Dr Lee, that in American society there is no clear correlation between intelligence and wealth


Well. Actually there is a pretty well established correlation but I do not disagree with you in principle . But then I do not define wealth as the acquisition of a great deal of money.

Your encountering Mensa members in the Alaska fishery comes as no surprise. They are all over the place. We are pretty good at spotting the secret handshake so to speak.

Under the American system of monopoly capitalism, there is really no steady grounds for such a correlation.


We are certainly not a meritocracy


Perhaps that is why American youth dream of being professional athletes or movie stars, one may suppose.


Perhaps. Certainly they see this as the "easy" way. But it may also be a combination of two features of these. One is that they suppose that movie stars and athletes earn extreme amounts of money. Or it may be that these folks represent what the kids really want. Rather than wealth they envy fame and sexual power as they see it. After all. How many young people envy hedge fund managers?
#14895549
Crantag wrote: in American society there is no clear correlation between intelligence and wealth. This is of course very predictable, in a society where wealth is most directly correlated with one's proportional ownership of capital; and where moreover most such rights to capital holdings are most often inherited.


Even if there was a high correlation it still wouldn't justify the wealth gap. We know that some professions are grossly over compensated in our system. American doctors for example while not being superior in knowledge, skill, or workload make way more than doctors in other developed countries, so we know we could cut pay by half and still get the same quantity and quality of care.

On the other end of the spectrum we know from the real world that we could radically increase compensation for so called unskilled workers without causing any significant adverse effects in the overall economy.

There are no real moral or practical justifications for the current distribution, our system is just the result of the golden rule
#14895556
You say you aren't very smart. I say that if you find what makes you happy above all things, you are the clear winner in the game of life. Even if you live at subsistence wages. Find what makes you happy and do that. If you get rich doing it...fine. If you don't you are still happy.


I found that a long, long time ago. It's my love of music that makes me happy above all things.

I want to thank you for pointing this out my friend. I just released an album that I completely and utterly love, and I've been feeling down because I can't get any recognition for it. You're absolutely right. I can be really fucking happy to have my love of music, regardless of whether I ever can make any money doing it.
#14895562
SolarCross wrote:Would it be any fairer to take from the smart people to give to the dumb people? What's fair about that?

Or worse do the commie thing and take from everyone, both smart and dumb, and make everyone into the equally dispossessed slaves of communist overlords?


SolarCross, haven't you figured out yet that Capitalism does take from everyone. Who owns planet Earth? Who owns the land under your feet? At some point in history, land would have been taken from someone by the sword. So to complain of the same thing potentially happening in the future is hypocritical.

But lets look at fairness within two systems:

System one: A person works very hard and saves throughout his life time to buy a house. He does, at the expense of time and luxuries. They then die and passes on that property to a family member who has done nothing to earn that property. Who then died and passes on that property to someone else who has done nothing to earn that property.

System two: The man acquires a property to live in and doesn't pay rents to a landlord. He works for the means of society. Society provides all the things the person needs at no cost to him. He cannot go into debt. When he has children they do not inherit his property however because they require a residence they acquire a property that they do not pay rents to a landlord.


Let me be clear. I'm not here to say that Communism doesn't have a weakness to become a corrupt system. Clearly it does. Throughout history Communism has been confused with totalitarism because it has been cloaked with the term Communism. But if it could be achieved, and I mean achieved to how Marx envisioned it, the system is completely fair. Money after all is a concept that is not a commodity. It is a system to pass on a debt (or IOU). Well that is fine in principle, but all that means is that if someone has enquired wealth from money, then someone must have acquired a debt from money. If someone benefits from money, then someone must not benefit from money. And these concepts can be passed on by born privilege. And that is definitely not fair. It creates a class divide. And if that divide gets too big it snaps. And if it snaps, the people with nothing have nothing to lose but everything to gain. The people with everything have everything to lose. And human nature means that people won't just accept this. They will take what they need if they believe a system is rigged against them.
#14895568
Money is often defined, for purposes of simplicity, as having three potential forms: those of commodity money, debt money and fiat money. Commodity money includes gold. Debt money is issued by banks, and fiat money is issued by governments and has a legal status. Today, fiat money and debt money are the most common. Commodity money is born of economical efficiency and convenience, basically. The other two are social evolutions, especially fiat money.

Productive capitals converted money into commodities, and Then commodities into money (M-C-M'). Financial capitals, principally through debt servicing, persist with the formula (M-M').

These are the germs of the technical evolution, fiat money.

I don't quite know where I'm going with this.
#14895614
American doctors for example while not being superior in knowledge, skill, or workload make way more than doctors in other developed countries, so we know we could cut pay by half and still get the same quantity and quality of care.


How wrong can one get?

American GPs earn a little more than their OECD peers. Some but not a lot. IF you look at their salaries in comparison to those of the average wage earner in their respective countries they are about the same. (Avoid charts that show gross wages. They are not reasonable comparison. Note also that American doctors pay for their own education.

For the rest of their career, doctors work an average of 59.6 hours/week. The average doctor's career ends at 65. If they finish their residency at 29, they'll spend 36 years working almost 1 ½ times more than most other Americans. In other words, it would normally take 54 years to do the work that doctors do in 36


...so we know we could cut pay by half and still get the same quantity and quality of care


:lol:

yea right. I won't even attempt to answer that idiocy. Suffice it to say it is not true in any of the developed countries except one.

And finally.

...not being superior in knowledge, skill, or workload


Not necessarily true. There is a reason students come here from all over the world to be educated. You would have to cherry pick specialties to make this comparison work. Needless to say, if I were to need surgery and cost was not a factor, I would pick from a list of good US hospitals. If cost were not a factor I would choose cancer treatment in the US over that anywhere in the world.
#14895615
Sivad wrote:If one group is over compensated and the other is under compensated, then yeah, it would be completely fair. Capitalist outcomes are the results of blind market forces, they're not any more inherently just or fair than the weather.

Market forces aren't blind though. Market forces are people, ultimately billions of people, buying and selling, saving and lending, evaluating endlessly evaluating. The market is a living hive mind composed of all of human life and when we meet aliens, alien life too. You are just one little component in the hive mind. You are like a single neuron strutting it out that you are wiser than the whole brain.
#14895724
Agent Steel wrote:Now, one of the main principles of capitalism is that the harder you work, the more you get.

That doesn't sound anything like capitalism, where the hardest workers are often the poorest.
Well I'm sorry but that's simply not the case. It's more about how SMART you work, not how hard you work.

No, it's only about how much you are legally entitled to take. You don't have to work smart, in fact you don't have to work at all; you don't have to produce; you don't have to contribute in any way. As long as you are legally entitled to take, you can just take.
And the problem is, some people are way smarter than others. And those people take advantageous of those of us who aren't as smart.

You don't have to be smart. You can be stupid, even comatose. All you have to do is own a legal entitlement to take.
How is it fair that say someone like me, for example, who isn't very bright, can't figure out how to make money, but someone else who was born with skills that I don't have (such as intelligence) can use his brain to get rich?

It would be fair if getting rich meant making a commensurate contribution. But that's not capitalism, where getting rich means placing oneself in a position to be legally entitled to take.
How is it fair that I can struggle and work really damn hard every damn day without anything to show for it, whereas someone who is a genius can work way more effectively with way less effort? Does he really deserve to have more than me?

You're complaining about the wrong thing. It's not the productive geniuses who get rich. It's the taker geniuses. I know, personally, one of the productive geniuses. He led the Nortel Networks team that developed most of the switching technology the Internet was built on in the 1990s, and his name is on dozens of the related patents. He continues to do world-leading work in optical switching and data transmission. But he is not rich. The guys in his company that got rich were the top execs who used their back-dated stock options and share buybacks to loot the company, while my friend and his team of engineers were waiting for their options to vest. Surprise! By the time their options vested, the stock had crashed, and they were worthless. The taker-genius CEOs and CFOs and their rich buddies on the board of directors took billions from Nortel, bankrupting it, and leaving the actual productive geniuses who did the work with nothing but their engineers' salaries.

So start complaining about the right thing. The problem with capitalism isn't that the geniuses get rich by being the most productive. It's that the takers get rich while producing and contributing little or nothing, or even destroying.
#14895727
B0ycey wrote:Born privilege is the most unfair aspect of Capitalism.

No, privilege is.
How is it fair that a person born into wealth has opportunities that someone born into poverty does not?

What you should be asking is how the person born into poverty had his access to opportunity forcibly removed and made into the private property of the privileged, whether the latter were born into it or not. Do you really think the worst thing about slavery is that some people are born into slave-owning families, or inherit slaves??
Working hard only creates the means to sell your Labour. What you get for that is determined by the skills you acquire throughout life.

No, it's determined by what the privileged are not legally entitled to take from you.
And intelligence is only one type of skill. There are plenty of skills even a dotard can acquire that he could sell highly. So stupidity is not an excuse to not make money. That is the idlers excuse.

Intelligence is not a skill. It is the capacity to understand. The US Army has determined that a person with an IQ of less than 83 -- about one standard deviation below the mean, accounting for roughly 15% of the population -- usually cannot be trained to safely do anything useful in the Army.
Crantag wrote:Communist China is seeing the emergence of 5000 new milionaires a week, and has a plan being implemented aimed at the elimination of extreme poverty by 2020.

It is absurd to describe China as communist. It was never communist; was socialist from 1949-79, and has since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping been more geoist than socialist or capitalist. It is important to understand why China has boomed since abandoning socialism, while Russia first collapsed, and has since then struggled economically. Russia privatized the land and natural resources, creating an instant capitalist oligarchy. China has retained land in public ownership, enabling it to gain the efficiencies of the market while avoiding much of the inequity of capitalism. Of course China is entirely corrupt, and gives away far too much publicly created wealth to location holders (almost all of China's rich have got that way by holding land); but at least it recovers a significant fraction of the subsidy it would otherwise give them.
Crantag wrote:Capitalism is about the right of owners of capital to earn money through the direct exploitation of the labor power of workers.

Nope. Wrong. Capitalism is about the legal entitlement of landowners to own workers' rights to liberty (i.e., their freedom to earn a living), and to make them pay full market value for permission to exercise those rights. Owners of capital (in classical economics, tools, buildings, and other products of labor devoted to production) must also pay landowners full market value for permission to employ their capital productively. The result is that the landowner takes all production above what labor can obtain on marginal land (the Law of Rent) plus the full value of all public services and infrastructure (the Henry George Theorem), leaving the capital owners to compete away each others' returns. That is why most owners of capital do not gain but lose money, and only the inherent variability of returns in a dynamic market system enables a handful of them to get rich. Those who get rich under capitalism are almost exclusively privilege owners, not capital owners.
They are abetted by this through government policies specifically designed to hold large numbers of workers in misery, so as to maintain such workers in a dependent position whereby they must sell their labor to the capitalists merely to survive.

The policy in question is privilege: legal entitlements to benefit from the uncompensated abrogation of others' rights, such as land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc.
One conspicuous illustrating aspect of this is the maintaining of a 'surplus army of the unemployed'. Under the prevailing norms of American capitalism, this is referred to euphemistically in official parlance as 'full employment', which is not full employment in the sense normal speakers of English might understand the term, but is rather a target rate of unemployment.

The unemployed are unemployed because they can't afford to pay full market value to landowners for permission to earn a living.
Whereas in days of old 'owning capital' far more likely than now meant owning the physical means and mechanisms of production,

As long as you refuse to distinguish between the contribution to production made by the owners of buildings, equipment, etc. that add to production and the non-contribution made by owners of land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc. that only transfer a portion of production to their owners without adding to it, you will not be able to say anything informative on the subject of economics.
with the progress of the joint-stock company, it now means merely holding ownership interests, or 'shares' in such joint-stock companies.

That you imagine this difference to be significant is the measure of your lack of understanding.
The matter of inherited wealth was mentioned. If one inherits say $10,000,000, and they earn a measly average return of 2%, that amounts to a $200,000 a year income at the year of their birth. Thanks to compound interests, assuming they fail to spend each and every penny of that income, the amount of wealth will increase (at an exponential rate).

You again refuse to distinguish between $10M earning $200K/yr by increasing production by $1M/yr through investment in buildings and equipment and $10M merely taking $200K/yr by being legally entitled to do so through owning land, bank shares, IP monopolies, etc.

You REFUSE to know the fact that the relevant difference is not between an inherited $10M and $10M obtained by a first-generation entrepreneur, but between $10M that represents the cost of ENHANCING production by providing useful buildings and equipment that would not otherwise have been available, and the VALUE of being legally entitled to TAKE a portion of production WITHOUT contributing anything to enhance it, but just threatening to withhold what would otherwise have been available.
Workers more often experience compound interest the other way, e.g. through the mechanisms of debt, which operate in the same fashion as 'returns on capital', but move in the other direction. Thus, workers become 'bound' by their debts, and they must work ever smarter and/or harder merely in an effort to keep up with debt repayments.

No, that's not it at all. Workers have to pay debt interest because that is the cost of getting permission from banksters to use the debt money the banksters are privileged to create. If the productive don't borrow the money themselves, their employers or governments have to do it, and the productive are on the hook for the interest either way.
Is debt a matter of choice? Perhaps there is no greater necessary implement than a roof over one's head, and the system is designed to promote a state of debt bondage in return for this necessary implement. A tremendous amount of sales effort/expense is outlaid on the promotion of the assuming by workers of various forms of debt.

The system is designed to give banksters interest for permission to use the debt money they are privileged to issue. It doesn't matter who the borrower is, the productive have to pay the interest.
Capitalism has nothing to do with rewarding those who work hard. Capitalism has everything to do with rewarding those who own capital (that's why it is called 'capitalism').

Not capital. PRIVILEGE.
Even the small business person which employs workers is at most a proto-capitalist, with but a measly capital holding of their own (and likely with much debt, to go along with it).

It has nothing to do with how much they own, but whether it is actual capital -- buildings, equipment, etc. -- or privilege. The firm that owns $10M in equipment but not the land under its premises will typically struggle to be profitable, while the firm that ONLY owns $1M worth of land, and produces nothing whatever, will reliably make profits year after year.
Last edited by Truth To Power on 12 Mar 2018 23:35, edited 1 time in total.
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