Quote Originally Posted by Goofball
They most certainly are. Consumers ultimately dictate the rewards for all workers, be they trash collectors, movie stars, or corporate executives. A municipality that pays it's trash collectors too much will have to raise property taxes to such levels that owners will become dissatisfied and vote in new city leaders who will make cost cuts in areas like trash collectors' wages. A movie studio that pays its actors too much will eventually go under due to experiencing losses, as will a corporation that pays its executives too much.
People are often blind to everything except what is in front of them. Letting people decide the pay levels of professions is a terrible idea, because of social stigmas, raw greed, and basic human idiocy (and its cousin, ignorance). Unfortunately, this means that any and all systems are doomed to failure, because every human is inherently greedy, and desperate to spread his or her own gene pool. It doesn't always surface, but it is down there, in our basic survivalist instincts.

The short answer: neither capitalism nor communism, or anarchism, or socialism, or any other system will work. Unless we can find a way to remove the Reptilian complex and limbic system from our brains and operate entirely on the neocortex, this will always remain true. And besides, removing the instincts that tear down our systems will also turn us into mindless automatons, perfectly utilizing whatever system we are handed.

So pick an economic and governmental system, and defend it all you like, because in the end, it won't work- the point is to be hopeful.


(In case you are wondering, yes, I have been reading "The Dragons of Eden".)