Trump Thread

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I'd say the biggest issue with many "championing the individual"-approaches is that they seem to end up championing a few individuals while most individuals are collectively screwed. It sounds good in theory or if you're part of a priviliged collective of individuals, but fails in practice, much like certain ideologies on the extremely collective end.

Economics is not a "fixed pie." Were it to be, then you can ONLY view capitalism as slavery and extortion of the many by the few. This is one of the implicit and flawed assumptions that undercuts the otherwise useful critique of capitalism proffered by Marx & Engels.

Economics is an expanding (and occasionally contracting but over the long haul expanding) pie. Thus the fortunes of most may hope of improvement over time.

To take advantage of these changes, numerous systems have developed over time. The West, having discarded autocratic/and oligarchic approaches [though not their lingering effects] has moved towards one of two macro "choices" for tapping into economic growth over time: equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.

I do not believe that equality of outcome can be achieved, though admittedly a noble goal in many ways, because individuals seeking to better the lot of themselves and their closest companions will seek to game any system to advantage. By contrast, I believe that striving for equality of opportunity faces fewer flaws -- though I acknowledge that this can never be perfected either. I view it as less bad.

[Husar]

Economics is not a "fixed pie." Were it to be, then you can ONLY view capitalism as slavery and extortion of the many by the few. This is one of the implicit and flawed assumptions that undercuts the otherwise useful critique of capitalism proffered by Marx & Engels.

Economics is an expanding (and occasionally contracting but over the long haul expanding) pie. Thus the fortunes of most may hope of improvement over time.

To take advantage of these changes, numerous systems have developed over time. The West, having discarded autocratic/and oligarchic approaches [though not their lingering effects] has moved towards one of two macro "choices" for tapping into economic growth over time: equality of outcome and equality of opportunity.

I do not believe that equality of outcome can be achieved, though admittedly a noble goal in many ways, because individuals seeking to better the lot of themselves and their closest companions will seek to game any system to advantage. By contrast, I believe that striving for equality of opportunity faces fewer flaws -- though I acknowledge that this can never be perfected either. I view it as less bad.

The view of economics as an ever expanding pie that everyone can get a bit more of with time is flawed in itself for several reasons:

1. It equates wealth with money and treats them both as absolutes. A person with five televisions will still feel poor compared to one with five hundred though. This sociological/psychological aspect is completely ignored.

2. It ignores that we live on a planet and cannot forever expand our use of resources unless we invent interstellar travel and various other things. These resources will eventually become a zero sum game as you can't just increase them as required. The same is true for the size of markets.

3. The rich can afford the tools required to expand at the expense of the poor. See e.g. Somalia where Europeans rampaged through and removed all the fish because the poor Somalians can't afford to prevent it.

4. As I posted somewhere as well lately, the system createsincentives to blame the poor as soon as they want more. See Somalia again where the fishermen who fought back with their own means were pirates and everyone was gloating over us killing them. Nevermind that we created the incentive for them to turn into pirates in the first place. Similar examples can be found within a country where poor people are called leeches while those who have plenty are praised as good businessmen for taking ever more.

5. The system inherently stabilizes the wealth of the wealthy and therefore the poverty of the poor, and this destroys the whole hoping for better fortunes part as social mobility decreases further and further. This is because the wealthy once again have the tools, whether through bribes, better (expensive, not universally accessible) education or otherwise, to influence the political and other systems to work for their own advantage and stabilize their position.

Point number one alone pretty much guarantees increased social unrest the bigger the gap between the richtest and poorest of a society. And from a moral point of view this gap is inexplicable. Most of the explanations I've heard so far are hollow nonsense.

I tend to see capitalism as a good system for growth, as you say it works well if and when it can expand and grow things. But in a world that cannot grow endlessly, such as the one on this planet, it will inevitably have to be replaced by a sustainable system that does not depend on endless growth.

As for everyone getting a piece of a growing pie, consider that investors, most of whom are very rich people, usually do not invest if they get a return of 5% or so if the pie grows by 2%. Thus they always make sure to slowly gobble up larger proportions of the ever-growing pie, whereas the poor can't do much against losing proportional ownership of the pie, regardless of the pie's growth, this makes them poorer as per point one. The fishermen who used to be fishermen and then lost even that low income as wealthy fisheries just took all the fish away to increase their own wealth are one example of this.