Occupying the Moral High Ground

[john eden]

What do you mean by quite well off? Do you mean that they have jobs? Academics and journalists are reasonably well paid, but just as many (if not more) are left wing marxoids, so I don't think that's relevent.

I have never met anyone who proposes this retarded idea who was poor, let's put it that way.

It seems quite clear to me that all the concessions forced out of the ruling class which offer basic protection to workers (such as not being sacked for no good reason, or being able to get a decent education and health care) are seen as a terrible burden by those who are wealthy enough to pay for everything themselves.

It is as a clear a picture of the class war as you could paint.

 

[vimothy]

Pardon me, but isn't that EXACTLY what Communists say about Communism? I'm sure you, of all people, need no lesson on what happened in the USSR.
The modern USA, while obviously a damn sight better place to live than Stalinist Russia, isn't exactly a utopia of peace, prosperity and cheap health care, is it? So what's gone wrong? Is it because America isn't free-market enough?

There isn't a "right". Socialism fails for economic reasons. People starve. Then it fails becausee it's politically bankrupt and oppressive. America is not a utopia and shouldn't be expected to be. People who start out trying to create utopias normally end up stuffing people into mass graves and ruining their country. A free market is a feedback loop, a socialist market is imaginary and arbitrary. For example, in the shops in America you can by a huge variety of sanitary towels. Imagine being a woman in the USSR, traipsing through the streets to cue in shops for diminishing supplies of cotton wool (not sanitary towels) and then decide which you prefer.

 

[vimothy]

Here you go:

At a West Los Angeles supermarket, for instance, I catalogued fifteen varieties of Proctor & Gamble’s Always sanitary napkins, examples of ever-intensifying progress. Disposable sanitary napkins date only to 1920. The self-sticking technology that liberated women from uncomfortable and barely functional belts...was developed only in the 1970s. Those intensive improvements, and rarely acknowledged products, make a tremendous difference in women’s lives. Stifling mundane, intensive progress can even have political consequences. Interviewed shortly before the 1996 Russian presidential elections, Muscovite Olga Vladimirov explained her intended vote to the Los Angeles Times: “How could any woman who remembers the indignity of scrounging around the city and standing in endless lines for cotton wool even think about going back to life under the Communists? I didn’t even know what a tampon was before the democrats came to power.”

- Virginia Postrel, the Future and its Enemies

 

[vimothy]

Any brilliant day-to-day products get developed in Communist countries?

As I look around the office I see exactly none.

 

[john eden]

Freedoms, in order of priority:

1) Freedom to trade
2) Freedom to choose between 15 million brands of sanitary towels

[....]

100,000,000) Freedom from hunger, disease, etc.

 

[vimothy]

Freedoms, in order of priority:

1) Freedom to trade
2) Freedom to choose between 15 million brands of sanitary towels

[....]

10,0000000) Freedom from hunger, disease, etc.

That is utter bullshit John, absolute utter bullshit. Where do you think had more famine and food shortages, capitalist USA or communist USSR?

If you want freedom from hunger and disease you should move to a capitalist country.

 

[vimothy]

Freedom to trade prevents food shortages and famine, FFS! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand)

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well hang on a minute, do we NEED 15 varieties of sanitary towel? (Well obviously I don't need any at all, but you get my point.) What about when you go into a supermarket and see a dozen (essentially indistinuguishable) kinds of butter, some of which have been shipped to Britain, in refrigerated container ships, of course, from New fucking Zealand? How mind-bogglingly wasteful, profligate, anti-ecological and downright pointless.

I'm not saying governments should impose rules to allow shops to stock no more than three kinds of butter, or ban the importation of good we can perfectly well make ourselves, I'm just pointing out...well, I'm not sure actually. But the butter thing really bugs me.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Any brilliant day-to-day products get developed in Communist countries?

As I look around the office I see exactly none.

In Soviet Russia, office sees YOU!

 

[vimothy]

Well hang on a minute, do we NEED 15 varieties of sanitary towel? (Well obviously I don't need any at all, but you get my point.) What about when you go into a supermarket and see a dozen (essentially indistinuguishable) kinds of butter, some of which have been shipped to Britain, in refrigerated container ships, of course, from New fucking Zealand? How mind-bogglingly wasteful, profligate, anti-ecological and downright pointless.

What do you mean, need? You don't need butter in any case, let alone a dozen varieties of it. The reason products exist is to supply a demand, the reason that they improve (as in the sanitary towel example) is because of competition. Choice is not wasteful. Price fixing is wasteful (because supply and demand can't meet). A planned economy is wasteful.

I'm not saying governments should impose rules to allow shops to stock no more than three kinds of butter, or ban the importation of good we can perfectly well make ourselves, I'm just pointing out...well, I'm not sure actually. But the butter thing really bugs me.

I'm not sure either. Do you want less choice?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm not sure either. Do you want less choice?

I want things in shops that, as far as possible, have been grown or made in this country in an environmentally sound way, have been bought from the producer at a fair, non-exploitative price and aren't wrapped up in three layers of unnecessary packaging. This is currently not the case, most of the time.

When you've got food we (i.e. the UK) could grow ourselves shipped in from the other side of the world, extortionately expensive lamb chops that were bought from the farmer for so little it's scarcely worth his while raising them and apples set in foam containers with celophane over the top, I think it's worth asking what the hell's going on.

This seems to have turned into a supermarket rant. Well, sorry, but I think it's important.

 

[adruu]

A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. "What's it like in there?" asks the visitor. "Well," the devil replies, "in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."

"That's terrible!" he gasps. "I'm going to check out communist hell!" He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. "I'm still in the free world, Karl," he says, "and before I come in, I want to know what it's like in there."

"In communist hell," says Marx impatiently, "they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."

"But… but that's the same as capitalist hell!" protests the visitor, "Why such a long queue?"

"Well," sighs Marx, "Sometimes we're out of oil, sometimes we don't have knives, sometimes no hot water…"

 

[Mr. Tea]

Ahaha, nice.
I was expecting the lost souls in communist hell to be loudly proclaiming how much they love being tortured, or something...

 

[Slothrop]

The thing I don't understand about absolute free-marketism is how it gets around the tendancy of wealth to accumulate. It seems fairly obvious that if I have more money than someone else, it's going to be comparatively easy for me and my descendants to get even more money than said other person - I can invest in property and get steadily richer off the proceeds, or send my kids to better schools and universities or whatever. This seems to be a feature of even the mixed markets we have at the moment, and I don't see that freeing the market further is going to do a lot to change it.

Market socialism gets around this by progressive taxation, inheritance tax and (in theory) providing everyone with a good enough education that children from poor backgrounds have as good a chance of making stacks of cash as children from rich backgrounds.

As far as I can tell, free market capitalism just shrugs its shoulders and says 'well they shouldn't have been poor then.'

Am I missing something? Do free-marketers believe in a mechanism by which wealth gaps don't actually grow? Or are wealth gaps not considered to be a problem? What happens when the poor (who may or may not have access to health and housing purely through the bounty of the free market, but lets be nice and assume that they do) turn round and see 5% of the people living in diamond encrusted castles eating larks tongues and quails eggs and think "we're having some of that, whether by violent revolution or by democratic change, depending on the extent to which greater wealth gives you greater access to the mechanisms of democracy"?

 

[crackerjack]

Adruu - LOL

 

[john eden]

That is utter bullshit John, absolute utter bullshit. Where do you think had more famine and food shortages, capitalist USA or communist USSR?

If you want freedom from hunger and disease you should move to a capitalist country.

As we have already established that the USSR did not achieve communism, this seems a bit irrelevant.

It is a question of priorities tho. And for me, looking after the vulnerable will always be more important than trading.

There is also the larger issue, that Mr Tea has highlighted, of the environment. Looking after the planet is also more important than developing a gazillion kinds of soap powder. But there is no room for this in the free-market ideology either.

 

[crackerjack]

As we have already established that the USSR did not achieve communism, this seems a bit irrelevant.

I do think this is a bit of a cop out. Every country that has proclaimed itself communist (whether through opportunist or ideological reasons) has ultimately tilted towards tyranny.

This is a fact that can't and shouldn't be omitted when discussing communism's merits as an ideology.

 

[Slothrop]

Oh yeah, that's the other question that always bothers me about free marketism - do you just have to ignore external costs?

The environmental part of this doesn't neccessarily just mean stuff like global warming, either - it could be not chucking toxic chemicals into the water supply because it's cheaper than getting rid of them properly...

 

[Mr. Tea]

I do think this is a bit of a cop out. Every country that has proclaimed itself communist (whether through opportunist or ideological reasons) has ultimately tilted towards tyranny.

This is a fact that can't and shouldn't be omitted when discussing communism's merits as an ideology.

Hear, hear. This is the cop-out to end all cop-outs as far as ideological arguments go.

 

[john eden]

I do think this is a bit of a cop out. Every country that has proclaimed itself communist (whether through opportunist or ideological reasons) has ultimately tilted towards tyranny.

This is a fact that can't and shouldn't be omitted when discussing communism's merits as an ideology.

I agree.

But it is also important to note that there were and are critics of communism on the left as well as the right.

To turn things on their heads - as far as I know a proper free market system has never existed either.

So at the end of the day me and Vimothy are both starry eyed idealists, putting our faith in a better future.