Why Free Markets, Contracts, and Private Property Are a Joke - Page 5 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15211905
QatzelOk wrote:If I do, the liars will win. The liars have given us most of our language tools, by the way. Which means that most of our language tools have been.... booby-trapped.

It's unnatural for humans to remain apes in the jungle. We have a natural desire to discover, kill, create and procreate. The brains of our babies have become too big even for the vagina hole.

We will either become gods or destroy ourselves in the process. We're already gods, we've been cloning and gene splicing and creating new species. At best the luddites can only warn of the dangers of not being careful when playing with fire, but nobody is putting pandora back in the box.

#15211908
late wrote:The Reformation was a rejection of Catholicism.

Europeans who refused to be Christian-ified were killed by Rome.

So "Catholicism" has always been rejected.

You are pretending that Europeans once upon a time "signed on" to Catholicism, but tired of it over time.

Your suggestion that "the printing press" made the rejection of "another form of propaganda" possible... is very moot.

Costumed priests speaking Latin, reading a book, watching a movie... each is a way of delivering lies more effectively. But it's all propaganda, and takes us further and further from what we really need and want.

Free Market "thinking" is a joke.

Unthinking Majority wrote:It's unnatural for humans to remain apes in the jungle.

Yes, nature is unnatural. :roll: I think extinction will feel perfectly "natural" to you.
#15211972
QatzelOk wrote:
You are pretending that Europeans once upon a time "signed on" to Catholicism, but tired of it over time.

Your suggestion that "the printing press" made the rejection of "another form of propaganda" possible... is very moot.


Yes, nature is unnatural.



Rome spread Christianity with the sword.

It's called history. Technology can be quite disruptive. The example of the printing press is illustrative if you're familiar with that history..

As I thought, you don't actually have a coherent position, just a chip on your shoulder.
#15212022
late wrote:Rome spread Christianity with the sword.

Exactly.

So the idea that Christianity is some kind of "contract" with God or the State... is false. It is a form of forced behaviorism - a new normal for 4th and 5th Century European victims. And then, a new normal for First Nations during their long genocide by Christianized Europeans.

It's important to not the lack of agency in this conversion process, because it points to a generalized lack of agency in technological change.
...

Here's another example of how tools are never neutral, and have a tendency to create a "new reality" that is, of course, fake and dangerous.

The American war machine is another technology.

If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war
- Rosa Brooks, "How the Pentagon Became Walmart, 2016


Notice how the military was actually responsible for draining the resources from all the other government agencies like Aid, domestic infra, and social programs.

Free markets are not free - they are created with military atrocities and behaviorism. And the people who live UNDER free markets are not free. Only the billionaire class is "free" (to commit atrocities) under a free market.
#15212027
QatzelOk wrote:


Here's another example of how tools are never neutral




Free markets are not free - they are created with military atrocities and behaviorism. And the people who live UNDER free markets are not free. Only the billionaire class is "free" (to commit atrocities) under a free market.



Didn't say they were, I said you could use a hammer to build a house, or bash brains.

Again, the key here is reducing income inequality.
#15212082
BlutoSays wrote:
Then DEMOCRATS should stop pushing legislation that CREATES income inequality.



It's not *legislation* that causes -- or could conceivably prevent -- income inequality, it's the capitalist mode of production itself, since those with rentier capital in particular are economically rewarded for *non-productivity* (land, bank accounts, assets, etc.).

'The rich get richer.'
Last edited by ckaihatsu on 14 Feb 2022 03:37, edited 1 time in total.
#15212084
Of course the legislation causes it. Multi-thousand page bills that no one reads have consequences. Humans work out of their own pocket. When legislation is poorly crafted by idiots who don't have an idea (or don't care about) of how a person or organization will react to mandates, subsidies, price supports, heavy taxation, disincentives and all the other things packed into those bills, then congress just creates more problems and more inequality.

Seriously, we would get better results from a random number generator at this point than from Washington DC.

Notice how easily car companies came and went after Henry Ford, Daimler and a few others got into the car business and it grew. There were takeovers, mergers, changes in names and it was a thriving business. AKA - Creative Destruction. Then Uncle Sam came in and put a zillion rules on the controls for labor, environment, inputs of raw materials, designs, duties and customs, financing, and every other aspect of the industry.

Today, there are so many barriers to entry to the automotive industry because of rules and regulations that no new players enter the market. (Tesla did, but with high subsidies from the tax payer). That's the way the players in the auto industry today want it. They use legislation as a weapon to drive out competition. Same with restaurants and restaurant chains, big box stores vs. mom and pop shops, etc., etc. It's not by accident. Large businesses can hire people to deal with and profit off of complex legislation the government has enacted. Mom and pop shops with a few people don't have the staff to absorb that cost. And you know what happens to the consumer once there's no competition and the big guys rule.

As I said earlier, democrats should stop creating legislation that causes inequality. It's hilarious how they name bills in congress that do exactly the opposite of what the bill is named. Problem is, democrats and their constituents do not drill down into legislation and figure out the details. As they say, the devil is in the details. They like bumper sticker one-liners that sound nice and easy. In doing so, they make things worse, not better for just about everyone.

BTW, democrats are particularly good to blame because their fix to EVERY problem is to just throw more money at it. That's their ONLY solution. More money will fix everything. It's such BS.
#15212119
BlutoSays wrote:
Of course the legislation causes it. Multi-thousand page bills that no one reads have consequences. Humans work out of their own pocket. When legislation is poorly crafted by idiots who don't have an idea (or don't care about) of how a person or organization will react to mandates, subsidies, price supports, heavy taxation, disincentives and all the other things packed into those bills, then congress just creates more problems and more inequality.

Seriously, we would get better results from a random number generator at this point than from Washington DC.

Notice how easily car companies came and went after Henry Ford, Daimler and a few others got into the car business and it grew. There were takeovers, mergers, changes in names and it was a thriving business. AKA - Creative Destruction. Then Uncle Sam came in and put a zillion rules on the controls for labor, environment, inputs of raw materials, designs, duties and customs, financing, and every other aspect of the industry.



Capitalist Stalinism, huh -- ? (grin)


BlutoSays wrote:
Today, there are so many barriers to entry to the automotive industry because of rules and regulations that no new players enter the market. (Tesla did, but with high subsidies from the tax payer). That's the way the players in the auto industry today want it. They use legislation as a weapon to drive out competition. Same with restaurants and restaurant chains, big box stores vs. mom and pop shops, etc., etc. It's not by accident. Large businesses can hire people to deal with and profit off of complex legislation the government has enacted. Mom and pop shops with a few people don't have the staff to absorb that cost. And you know what happens to the consumer once there's no competition and the big guys rule.



Note that you just spoke favorably about mergers-and-acquisitions, so that's just the way the system works, right -- you just said-so.

I still think that you can't really 'individualize' the growth dynamics of all of capitalism, to just the Democrats, though the Democrat-Republican two-party system (the bourgeoisie) *is* socially hegemonic.


BlutoSays wrote:
As I said earlier, democrats should stop creating legislation that causes inequality. It's hilarious how they name bills in congress that do exactly the opposite of what the bill is named. Problem is, democrats and their constituents do not drill down into legislation and figure out the details. As they say, the devil is in the details. They like bumper sticker one-liners that sound nice and easy. In doing so, they make things worse, not better for just about everyone.

BTW, democrats are particularly good to blame because their fix to EVERY problem is to just throw more money at it. That's their ONLY solution. More money will fix everything. It's such BS.



Uh, *Steve* -- ? You around? (grin)
#15212123
ckaihatsu wrote:It's not *legislation* that causes -- or could conceivably prevent -- income inequality, it's the capitalist mode of production itself,

There's no such thing as the capitalist mode of production. Marxist terminology is nonsense. The Roman Republic on the other hand as a socio-political system could be described as capitalist.

Orthodox Marxism's goal is to replace something that is not a dictatorship of the bourgeois with some thing that is not a dictatorship of the proletariat. In Cultural Marxism the proletariat is replaced with some other "virtuous" group or groups. "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" is an oxymoron, so cultural Marxism is actually more materialist and less idealist than orthodox Marxism.
#15212127
Rich wrote:
There's no such thing as the capitalist mode of production. Marxist terminology is nonsense. The Roman Republic on the other hand as a socio-political system could be described as capitalist.




Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism



---


Rich wrote:
Orthodox Marxism's goal is to replace something that is not a dictatorship of the bourgeois with some thing that is not a dictatorship of the proletariat.



Jeez, that's so cute -- great phrasing -- ! Good for *you*!


x D


Rich wrote:
In Cultural Marxism the proletariat is replaced with some other "virtuous" group or groups.



Dictatorship by PBS -- ?


x D


Rich wrote:
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat" is an oxymoron, so cultural Marxism is actually more materialist and less idealist than orthodox Marxism.



Good thing you showed up.

Saw the floodlight signal projected into the clouds, huh -- ?

Let's get back to what it *is*, shall we -- ?



In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a state of affairs in which the proletariat holds political power.[1][2] The dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the post-revolutionary state seizes the means of production, compels the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party, and instituting elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalise ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership. During this phase, the administrative organizational structure of the party is to be largely determined by the need for it to govern firmly and wield state power to prevent counterrevolution and to facilitate the transition to a lasting communist society. Other terms commonly used to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat include socialist state,[3] proletarian state,[4] democratic proletarian state,[5] revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat[6] and democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.[7]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictators ... roletariat
#15212176
BlutoSays wrote:Today, there are so many barriers to entry to the automotive industry because of rules and regulations that no new players enter the market.

I agree with the pattern you are calling out. Capitalism might be our economic system, but our legislation process has become a bought-and-paid-for joke, as you describe.

Canada has a deficit every single year... because this makes private banks get richer on interest payments. That's why we have deficits even in good years when we should have had a surplus.

And in much the same way that "new car companies" can't enter the field, ALL OTHER VEHICLES can no longer enter the "public" roads (such as bicycles and pedestrians) because the rules of the road were re-written to make them killing fields for any dupe willing to try to walk or bike on them.

Our "rules of the road" are meant to push people into cars. And they have worked at that thing alone. Pushing people into cars.

► Show Spoiler
#15212210
QatzelOk wrote:
I agree with the pattern you are calling out. Capitalism might be our economic system, but our legislation process has become a bought-and-paid-for joke, as you describe.

Canada has a deficit every single year... because this makes private banks get richer on interest payments. That's why we have deficits even in good years when we should have had a surplus.

And in much the same way that "new car companies" can't enter the field, ALL OTHER VEHICLES can no longer enter the "public" roads (such as bicycles and pedestrians) because the rules of the road were re-written to make them killing fields for any dupe willing to try to walk or bike on them.

Our "rules of the road" are meant to push people into cars. And they have worked at that thing alone. Pushing people into cars.

► Show Spoiler



You're anti-corporate for the sake of *anti-consumerism*, even to a fault, as when people *require* the commodities that corporations produce, virtually monopolistically / monolithically -- like a needed vaccine in response to a pandemic.
#15212239
ckaihatsu wrote:You're anti-corporate for the sake of *anti-consumerism*,

If you think the only reason to be anti-car in our day is "to spite consumerism," ...then you haven't been following either the rise of morbid pollution, or the destruction of human empathy and community.

There are very rational and humane reasons to hate the car, and what it has done to us and will continue doing to us. This has nothing to do with contrarianism. Stop trying to "drown a fish" with post-modern nonsense.

Like Opium addiction for the Chinese last century (another free-market joke), car-addiction has made us stupid and dependent. If our economy crashes liek the Soviet Union did, we will not be able to leave our suburban houses, and they will burn down because of lack of policing.

What an unfunny joke North America's car addiction is to itself, and to the rest of the bombed out world.
#15212247
QatzelOk wrote:
If you think the only reason to be anti-car in our day is "to spite consumerism," ...then you haven't been following either the rise of morbid pollution, or the destruction of human empathy and community.



All you're doing here is *presuming* / assuming that that's my position. That's an imposition / imputation on your part.

*Of course* I'm against global warming, and I've noted Extinction Rebellion's explicitly anti-capitalist politics at the core of this issue.


QatzelOk wrote:
There are very rational and humane reasons to hate the car, and what it has done to us and will continue doing to us. This has nothing to do with contrarianism. Stop trying to "drown a fish" with post-modern nonsense.



I didn't accuse you of 'contrarianism' -- you can hate on the car all you like, because it's none of my business.

*Politically* there's a common need for *transportation* and I agree that the car isn't the best *implementation* of desired transportation services.

Also, I'm *not* a postmodernist -- note that I'm addressing social conditions as being *common* to everyone, and a distinct part of objective reality.


Worldview Diagram

Spoiler: show
Image



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QatzelOk wrote:
Like Opium addiction for the Chinese last century (another free-market joke), car-addiction has made us stupid and dependent. If our economy crashes liek the Soviet Union did, we will not be able to leave our suburban houses, and they will burn down because of lack of policing.

What an unfunny joke North America's car addiction is to itself, and to the rest of the bombed out world.

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