Capitalism, The Communism Of Economic Systems?

[phillip1882]

Yes I have and the Scandinavian countries have far less corruption in their governments than America does, in every objectively measurable way. And remember, we aren't talking about total-saturation socialism, I only said sudo-socialism, but either way.

so you're saying that because America is more capitalistic, that leads to more corruption??

i mean i agree with you, Scandinavian has less corruption, but it also the government of Scandinavian countries spends less %GDP than the us currently.

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/sweden

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/unitedstates

There are plenty of ways to control trade, governments do it all the time, in fact most of them do it on massive scales, it wasn't until recently that world-trade was so prevalent.

oh i agree with you government control trade; what i said was there's no way to control trade in a fair and balanced way such that everyone is better off. explain to me how you would control trade in such a manner and I'll show you someone on the losing end of that deal within the country itself.

 

A lot of times an underdeveloped country's government will cut all trade with other countries for specific industries in order to allow their internal industry to grow.

i assure you such measures hurt more than they help.

http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/does-free-trade-hurt-developing-economies/

Also, if you're going to go the standard of living route, I think it's pretty obvious that Sweden and Finland have far superior standards of living than America... or any other country on the planet for that matter...

again i agree, and again I'd like to point out they spend less %GDP on government than every other country.

I don't think you understand the fundamental differences between economy and government... Those freedoms to take action are not provided by some economic policy, they're provided and enforced by a government, entirely separate from the economic system it uses.

um. no. freedoms are not provided by the government. we don't derive our freedoms from the ruling class, they are inherit within every human being. even a slave can say **** the government even if it means a whipping.

How do you control it in a capitalist system? You answer that and both questions are solved.

um. no. i know how to control corruption in a capitalist system. boycott, strike, insurance against malfeasance, dispute resolution organizations.

government tends to stifle all of these things. lets say government was the only medical care provider. how would you boycott? with votes? and how would doctors strike? the government has the guns. and how would you insure against malfeasance? and how would you resolve a dispute if a doctor does a bad job?

[cal]

so you're saying that because America is more capitalistic, that leads to more corruption??

i mean i agree with you, Scandinavian has less corruption, but it also the government of Scandinavian countries spends less %GDP than the us currently.

No, I never said anything about corruption, you're the one that brought it up and made the claim that there's a causal effect between economic systems and government corruption. I'm under the impression that anyone in a separated state of rule is subject to corruption no matter what form of economy there is. That being said, I see less corruption in socialist countries than I do in capitalistic ones, and I wasn't even talking about the government, but thank you for providing the statistics to show that there is also less government corruption. I meant corruption on the social level, it's much easier to corrupt the capitalist system than it is the socialist one because the capitalist system is based upon the very idea of having a select few on the top and the rest of the populous at the bottom (remember this comes from serfdom where 95% of the populous was farmers).

 

About your GDP quip, sure they have a lower GDP, but if you run the numbers of their overall GDP to their populous, you'll see that it's about proportionate to Americas. After considering that, it's also important to note that the Scandinavian countries have a higher GDP Per Capita than America, giving me another reason to think that socialism is a more fair economic system because people in socialist countries literally have been treated more fairly, economically speaking.

 

oh i agree with you government control trade; what i said was there's no way to control trade in a fair and balanced way such that everyone is better off. explain to me how you would control trade in such a manner and I'll show you someone on the losing end of that deal within the country itself.

Alright. I think this was already sort-of outlined so I'll expand a little on it; this system would entail a government that provides and controls goods and services for specific industries like utilities and health care etc. but that is the limitation of it's control - those initial institutions setup to cover the basic human needs for survival and posterity. Any separate company is allowed to be started by citizens in any of the industries or fields that the government already provides for and their is even a hope that the citizen ran institutions can do a better job than the government-ran ones, but the key difference is that the government-controlled institutions are provided "free-of-charge" to citizens, granted they are paying taxes for these institutions but if you have read the stuff in the Online Nation thread you may know that citizens have options for what they pay taxes on and they may chose to not support one institution over another.

 

That being said, the other aspect of this system is the fundamental monetary control, outside of trade regulation. A system of crediting exists, meaning credit units essentially replace old currency, but because it is credit, you don't have to pay right away. This allows for slightly more elasticity in what freedom you have as a consumer, but only slightly as eventually you will not be allowed to spend more non-existent credit (you got throttled). I have not come up with a way so far to be able to allow all users of this system to maintain positive credit at all times, but I think that's the point - if you chose to spend it all, you chose to spend it all. The major major difference here is that in this sudo-socialist system of crediting, when your credits run out, your life does not. Farmers that are signed on to work for the government (the government has no say in what they farm btw) are subsidized by the government to pay for the farmer's salaries and the food is provided in markets and grocers like normal, but available for free if you want a government meal-plan (which I will find a better name for). You basically get a certain amount of food allowed per month on a meal plan (the way it's calculated and measured should be proportional to how many people are on the plan, so every person with a plan should be getting more than enough food). If you don't want to obtain the free food and want to purchase commercially grown and provided food instead, you are free to do so, or you can do a bit of both, it doesn't matter, the food is being grown and provided either way, the difference is that some of it is safety-net food that will always be there even if you have no money. The same goes to drinkable water for the public, majority-uptime electrical provisions to all major areas of power-use, health care, etc. Yes there will be heavy taxes to account for all these programs and institutions, however the taxes can never exceed 40% of your income which means you are left with 60% of your income for leisure and entertainment and other consumer/business related investments.

 

I can see arguments for 40% being too low in this scenario because 40% may not be enough to provide for every single "necessary" aspect of life, and depending on how convincing those arguments may be, I may be persuaded to augment the maximum tax amount to 60% and leave 40% for leisure, HOWEVER, that will only be after those arguments show that Proportional & Elastic Internal Crediting can not accurately control the value of a single credit to the point where substantial inflation or substantial deflation occur and the government system would need extra "money" (credit, but at the point you'd be buying credit from your citizens and that sounds absurd) from the citizens. I realized I used a term there that only sudo-exists because no systems currently use it, but in the Online Nation system, the government can create and destroy credit at will to algorithmically account for inflation and deflation, keeping the average credit value to that of 10k credits per citizen (so it stays proportional), making the raw numbers of the economy inflate proportionately to the number of citizens, but making the value of a credit grow proportionately to the inflation of world currencies (physical currencies too).

 

That was a little tl;dr, I apologize, but I hope that explained a bit and I look forward to see your handling of perceived problems with the system.

 

i assure you such measures hurt more than they help.

http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/does-free-trade-hurt-developing-economies/

"... deregulated markets in rich Western countries have been much more effective at providing for the material needs of individuals."

 

All I'm seeing is what comparative political scientists have been saying for a while, which is that closed trade is better for developing countries and free trade is better for industrialized countries. America is a post-industrial country and free trade is starting to fail us (but just starting, empire power is a bell curve after all). Post-industrial countries that are "first world" (in case that distinction even needed to be made, sorry) have only existed in very recent history and so far tend to economically favor socialist-esk economic systems, as shown by a few European countries (I shouldn't keep saying Scandinavia because they aren't the only ones to do it, Canada has a lot of good socialist policies too). But let's say I'm wrong, or really that comparative political theory is wrong, which it may be, a government cutting off trade for specific industries has the intrinsic effect of boosting that specific industry internally because the country HAS to provide said good/service on its own and thus a large market for said industry opens up within that country. This may hurt the country initially, but it helps in the long run (posterity is key when building a state).

 

again i agree, and again I'd like to point out they spend less %GDP on government than every other country.

This is a little different than what you said before. I've never heard about this. I also don't believe it. They certainly don't spend it on military (maybe Finland but not Sweden) so they must be spending it on something. If the government isn't spending a large amount of its money on itself or its institutions, then what is it being spent on?

 

um. no. freedoms are not provided by the government. we don't derive our freedoms from the ruling class, they are inherit within every human being. even a slave can say **** the government even if it means a whipping.

False, you don't derive freedom at all, freedom is not a philosophical concept that isn't always directly physically applicable. You're thinking of liberties. You derive liberties and you are inherently born with liberties. You are at liberty to resist power, but you probably don't have the freedom to, considering they are the power. Freedom is based around powers and what you are allowed to do in the physical world on an action-by-action basis. Liberty is where you can get meta with it. And even further, liberties are where you derive citizen rights, but no citizen is free to do anything a higher power dictates against. You're arguing that sure you may still do it, but you weren't free to do it, and thus you have acted unjustly to the state. The fact that you said slave in your example should point out another flaw with your concept of being "free".

 

um. no. i know how to control corruption in a capitalist system. boycott, strike, insurance against malfeasance, dispute resolution organizations.

government tends to stifle all of these things. lets say government was the only medical care provider. how would you boycott? with votes? and how would doctors strike? the government has the guns. and how would you insure against malfeasance? and how would you resolve a dispute if a doctor does a bad job?

After reading this last bit I think we're talking about very different government types. The whole time I've been referring to the online government I'm currently structuring, which doesn't have any of the problems you mention in this last quoted bit. I think I covered all of these problems specifically in that block of text in the middle of this post but I'll give a quick re-go at that to help quell your qualms.

 

You can still boycott, strike, etc. against organizations in this system, and if the boycott/strike/w.e is successful against a government-funded/ran institution in this system, then that institution is destroyed and the other existing citizen-funded/ran organizations and businesses of the same industries win out. Think of this system as like having an extra "company" for any major necessity like healthcare or whatever, and that extra company that competes with citizen companies is government-ran/controlled/w.e, but only that one specific company. The rest of the companies of that industry have fair opportunity to out-do the government-ran company. So if the government company is ****, the citizens don't have to use it. Granted the downside to the citizens is that now they will have to pay for whatever that service was, but that's by their design.

 

Also, the government does not have the guns. The Online Nation would be a ruler-less government, granted social leaders will still arise from the populous and they might have influence on voting turn-outs for certain matters, but it's all citizen-driven. You might also then have worries about a Coup d'état where the military takes over and says the Online Nation's rules don't apply anymore. I've recently realized that this may be a big problem with a ruler-less society and so to counter-act this I'm thinking that there will not be a standing military force but there will be strong local police forces and strong local swat forces. I have to tackle this issue separately but it is being tackled, so worry not.

[phillip1882]

I'm under the impression that anyone in a separated state of rule is subject to corruption no matter what form of economy there is. That being said, I see less corruption in socialist countries than I do in capitalistic ones, and I wasn't even talking about the government, but thank you for providing the statistics to show that there is also less government corruption. I meant corruption on the social level, it's much easier to corrupt the capitalist system than it is the socialist one because the capitalist system is based upon the very idea of having a select few on the top and the rest of the populous at the bottom (remember this comes from serfdom where 95% of the populous was farmers).

okay, again I'd like to point out we don't have capitalism is America. at best we have a mixed economy.

 

capitalism is not based on the idea of having a select few on the top.

capitalism is based on free trade, property rights, and contract law.

its true we have a select few at the top right now; but that's not a result of capitalism. that's a result of cronyism, as Ron Paul likes to say. government hands out billion dollar deals to corporations in exchange for elections in the US. over 75% of Obama's money came from the financial sector, where as almost every penny of Ron Paul's money came from "grass roots" Americans. now you tell me who appeared more socialist, and who more capitalist?

 

this system would entail a government that provides and controls goods and services for specific industries like utilities and health care etc. but that is the limitation of it's control - those initial institutions setup to cover the basic human needs for survival and posterity. Any separate company is allowed to be started by citizens in any of the industries or fields that the government already provides for and their is even a hope that the citizen ran institutions can do a better job than the government-ran ones, but the key difference is that the government-controlled institutions are provided "free-of-charge" to citizens, granted they are paying taxes for these institutions but if you have read the stuff in the Online Nation thread you may know that citizens have options for what they pay taxes on and they may chose to not support one institution over another.

 

okay, how do citizens control where government spending goes? lets say i give you 100 dollars but i say "don't use it to gamble with." how would i physically prevent you from gambling? i mean, are you saying there will be a little check box of options saying "only spend here, here, and here" and the government will honor that? I'd love to see that actually work. if it was that simple we would be in paradise right now.

 

and you need to define the word tax. in every country, either you pay taxes or your a criminal and can be thrown in prison. would the same be true with this online nation? what if you can't pay for some reason?

You basically get a certain amount of food allowed per month on a meal plan (the way it's calculated and measured should be proportional to how many people are on the plan, so every person with a plan should be getting more than enough food). If you don't want to obtain the free food and want to purchase commercially grown and provided food instead, you are free to do so, or you can do a bit of both, it doesn't matter, the food is being grown and provided either way, the difference is that some of it is safety-net food that will always be there even if you have no money. The same goes to drinkable water for the public, majority-uptime electrical provisions to all major areas of power-use, health care, etc. Yes there will be heavy taxes to account for all these programs and institutions, however the taxes can never exceed 40% of your income which means you are left with 60% of your income for leisure and entertainment and other consumer/business related investments.

okay let's make sure we're clear here. you get free credits from the government, which you pay taxes on. the government uses the tax revenue to pay for health, food, electricity, and maybe housing, for citizens. let's use your low example of 40%. so let's say the government gives you a daily salary as a farmer of 500 credits, but taxes you 40%, so now your down to 300 daily credits. now as a farmer i already have food as I'm growing it, but i still need the other essentials; housing, electricity and health. so the government will provide these things by paying electricians say 1200 daily salary, and taxing them 40%, giving them 720. and will give a daily salary to home builders, say of 1000, and tax them 40%, giving them 600, and doctors say 2400, and they actually receive 1440. now, the government still needs to provide police, fire department, law courts and prisons. so I'm assuming they are gonna give these people that run them daily salaries as well and tax them.

now here's my question. where does all that tax money go? remember, the government can provide credits for free. so that 40% from everyone has to go somewhere. where does it go?

 

This is a little different than what you said before. I've never heard about this. I also don't believe it. They certainly don't spend it on military (maybe Finland but not Sweden) so they must be spending it on something. If the government isn't spending a large amount of its money on itself or its institutions, then what is it being spent on?

no, what i am saying is that as a percentage of gdp, the government of sweden spends less money than America does. currently the us government is printing roughly 85 billion dollars a month (roughly) and giving most of it to banks. the government of Sweden isn't printing anywhere near as much nor taxing as much as America. even going by % capita. and i don't blame capitalism for this, because we don't have capitalism.

 

False, you don't derive freedom at all, freedom is not a philosophical concept that isn't always directly physically applicable. You're thinking of liberties. You derive liberties and you are inherently born with liberties. You are at liberty to resist power, but you probably don't have the freedom to, considering they are the power. Freedom is based around powers and what you are allowed to do in the physical world on an action-by-action basis. Liberty is where you can get meta with it. And even further, liberties are where you derive citizen rights, but no citizen is free to do anything a higher power dictates against. You're arguing that sure you may still do it, but you weren't free to do it, and thus you have acted unjustly to the state. The fact that you said slave in your example should point out another flaw with your concept of being "free".

okay fair enough.

 

You can still boycott, strike, etc. against organizations in this system, and if the boycott/strike/w.e is successful against a government-funded/ran institution in this system, then that institution is destroyed and the other existing citizen-funded/ran organizations and businesses of the same industries win out. Think of this system as like having an extra "company" for any major necessity like healthcare or whatever, and that extra company that competes with citizen companies is government-ran/controlled/w.e, but only that one specific company. The rest of the companies of that industry have fair opportunity to out-do the government-ran company. So if the government company is ****, the citizens don't have to use it. Granted the downside to the citizens is that now they will have to pay for whatever that service was, but that's by their design.

okay show me a successful boycott of any government program please.

that is, a direct refusal to pay, without being harassed or arrested.

and again you need to define the word tax. if its involuntary payment i can't refuse.

[cal]

okay, again I'd like to point out we don't have capitalism is America. at best we have a mixed economy.

Fair enough, most countries in the world then have mixed economies though. I mean sure it's not pure capitalism, but it's more capitalist than anything else.

 

its true we have a select few at the top right now; but that's not a result of capitalism. that's a result of cronyism, as Ron Paul likes to say. government hands out billion dollar deals to corporations in exchange for elections in the US. over 75% of Obama's money came from the financial sector, where as almost every penny of Ron Paul's money came from "grass roots" Americans. now you tell me who appeared more socialist, and who more capitalist?

Your argument here is invalid because Ron Paul is basically Christ incarnate, I don't think it's even fair to compare him to other politicians because he's not really a politician himself.

 

But seriously, I don't see how you can honestly say that when given the chance to screw other people out of money, there won't be someone in all the people of the planet that doesn't screw people out of money. My proposed system doesn't eliminate it at all, their will still most likely be the same exact number of people trying to screw others over, the difference is that the amount they get out of people will be substantially reduced. The screwing won't be so great, proportionately.

 

okay, how do citizens control where government spending goes? lets say i give you 100 dollars but i say "don't use it to gamble with." how would i physically prevent you from gambling? i mean, are you saying there will be a little check box of options saying "only spend here, here, and here" and the government will honor that? I'd love to see that actually work. if it was that simple we would be in paradise right now.

Yes, actually. When you pay taxes, you don't pay the full 40% (or whatever percent) of your income directly to the government, instead you get to pick and choose which taxes you pay (which really means you pick which institutions and programs you support) and the funding for those institutions and programs gets re-proportioned based on the citizen's tax choices. Granted, if no one at all (or very few people) chooses to fund a specific program, that program is not immediately eliminated (because we don't want to suddenly force people out of their jobs), but instead gets some money from the government to continue running long enough for the automated program-dissemination bill to be created, entered into the system, and voted on by the citizens (which by default has a one-month turn-around for the whole process). So even if a program or institution is created by the government, the citizens have a choice to destroy it as well (granted there will be like a six-month grace period where the program gets a chance to run anyways).

 

and you need to define the word tax. in every country, either you pay taxes or your a criminal and can be thrown in prison. would the same be true with this online nation? what if you can't pay for some reason?

Well this system is ran online, obvious sorry, and the "currency unit" being used is Credit (the non-physical owing credit that we currently have plastic cards for), and that's all directly linked to your online account, somewhat similar to something like a bitcoin. The government engine in this system see how much you made per quarter or whatever and says "Cool beans, you're in the bottom 20% of earners? You only have to pay 20% of your taxes." To which you get a form to fill out next time you log in, or next time you visit a bank, whatever. There's no way to not pay taxes in this system. If you stall too long and don't submit your tax form, you get fined, and the way fines work, because the government is the system of crediting, the money gets taken directly out of your account (it will be a small fine). You can contest fines and if you weren't able to log in for weeks at a time or you were on vacation or whatever your reasons, you can contest the fines and get the money back, then pay your taxes. You wouldn't contest the fines with a computer program though, there will be people who's job it is to review reports in the system and handle people contesting fines specifically. They can log into their audit account (I guess that's what it'll be called, idk) and see when the last time you logged into your account was, etc. There will be a lot of people doing "government" jobs in this system because there's nobody actually working as the "government". Since there's no separated group of body governing people, a lot of the regulation gets passed onto citizens in the forms of decent-pay jobs. That's a whole 'nother thread though, so I don't want to get too into it in this post, maybe later.

 

okay let's make sure we're clear here. you get free credits from the government,

We must not be clear here. Never did I say you would get free credits. Currency in any form cannot be free, that defeats the purpose, even if it is owed crediting.

 

the government uses the tax revenue to pay for health, food, electricity, and maybe housing, for citizens.

...

now, the government still needs to provide police, fire department, law courts and prisons. so I'm assuming they are gonna give these people that run them daily salaries as well and tax them.

now here's my question. where does all that tax money go? remember, the government can provide credits for free. so that 40% from everyone has to go somewhere. where does it go?

The government does not provide free credits, it pays people who worked for them, just like our American government pays government workers their salaries. And yes, when looking at government workers, it seems silly to pay them and then take their money away again (which I didn't think about, so now there will probably be a stipulation when signing up for a government job saying something along the lines that you will only get paid what you would have earned after taxes were taken out, so government employees wouldn't pay taxes, but they're make less proportionately than what others make even though it's all relative). But for the rest of the populous, which will still be more than half of the work-force, their taxes go directly to paying the people that work in these programs that provide free food, health care, etc. If their is extra money, that money is put into a government reserve, and if the reserve becomes full, then that extra money (I should stop saying money, because it's not really money) goes into the isk-sink, meaning it's systematically destroyed by the government to stop inflation.

 

It's a giant system of re-appropriating currency, but it's doing basically the same thing our current governments across the world do. The major difference is that the Online Nation does its moving algorithmically, because it's just a computer program. Having the money moved proportionately like this, by scripts, gets rid of the crony problem you were talking about earlier, because the scripts don't judge people based on if they like the same movies or have the same stance on politics. Whenever I write on this forum I feel like I say ten things that don't relate to what's being talked about haha. I hope this explains a bit though.

 

no, what i am saying is that as a percentage of gdp, the government of sweden spends less money than America does. currently the us government is printing roughly 85 billion dollars a month (roughly) and giving most of it to banks. the government of Sweden isn't printing anywhere near as much nor taxing as much as America. even going by % capita. and i don't blame capitalism for this, because we don't have capitalism.

Oh okay, that makes more sense now lol. But we do have capitalism, compared to Sweden we're very capitalistic.

 

okay show me a successful boycott of any government program please.

that is, a direct refusal to pay, without being harassed or arrested.

and again you need to define the word tax. if its involuntary payment i can't refuse.

You can boycott with your credits, by not paying taxes for specific programs. You can also have government employees boycott going to their own jobs, which won't mean much unless one of them also submits a law into the system (which any citizen can do) to change whatever they want changed. I see what you're saying, and so yes boycotting will be a little different for government institutions, but you can still do it. Also yea, about the word "tax," I did talk a little about this earlier in this post, but in case you want more detail, taxes work the same way they currently do, they aren't paid until you, the individual, chooses to pay them. Taxes cannot be taken directly from your account (because taxes tend to be a significant portion of your money, so it wouldn't be fair to force them out of people), but fines on taxes can, and the fines would be applied every month you go without paying your taxes, like interest on a credit bill. Bee Tee Dubs, tax fines are whatever 2% of your owed taxes amounts to. So now that I think about it, it's exactly like paying interest on your credit card bill. Maybe I set it up that way subconsciously, idk lol.

[phillip1882]

But seriously, I don't see how you can honestly say that when given the chance to screw other people out of money, there won't be someone in all the people of the planet that doesn't screw people out of money. My proposed system doesn't eliminate it at all, their will still most likely be the same exact number of people trying to screw others over, the difference is that the amount they get out of people will be substantially reduced. The screwing won't be so great, proportionately.

well, freedom means risk, freedom means personal responsibility. if I'm not responsible for my actions, who should be?

 

let's say i earn 1000 dollars a week, but I'm a compulsive gambler, and often lose it in the casinos. would gambling be illegal, under your system? don't you view this as "screwing people" out of money?

 

let's say its not since it's voluntary exchange, as it would be under capitalism.

what about other "unnecessary risk" say a large stock market investment, or insuring against floods in flood prone areas?

how would you judge what is necessary, and how would you redistribute wealth?

 

I've been screwed out of money, okay? i know what it feels like, but that doesn't mean you should bear responsibility for my mistakes. either I'm personally held to account for my bad choices or I'm not. either i "get screwed" and learn form it or i get government assistance and don't.

Yes, actually. When you pay taxes, you don't pay the full 40% (or whatever percent) of your income directly to the government, instead you get to pick and choose which taxes you pay (which really means you pick which institutions and programs you support) and the funding for those institutions and programs gets re-proportioned based on the citizen's tax choices.

ummm no. not once ever on any income tax from I've received have i seen an option saying: "don't use this money for military spending." or "don't use this for food stamp funding" or "don't use this for medicaid" I've never seen it in a vote, I've never seen it on any tax form that i have to pay. the government takes the money and pretty much spends it however it sees fit. that's what its always done. please prove otherwise.

We must not be clear here. Never did I say you would get free credits. Currency in any form cannot be free, that defeats the purpose, even if it is owed crediting.

please explain how "Credits" would come into existence, who would issue them, and how would you earn them from a non government agency.

You can boycott with your credits, by not paying taxes for specific programs.

Taxes cannot be taken directly from your account ... but fines on taxes can.

what's the difference is between a fine and a tax?

either way your paying money.

[pgrmdave]

...tax fines are whatever 2% of your owed taxes amounts to. So now that I think about it, it's exactly like paying interest on your credit card bill. Maybe I set it up that way subconsciously, idk lol.

2%? That's awesome!  I'll never pay taxes again!  I'm sure I could earn more on my money than 2%, so it'd be like getting money for *free*!