I want to respond to the socialist theme as embodied by some of @Winter's recent comments:
Socialism destroys opportunity. For example, the fact that there are poor ladies in the 3rd world, means some socially inept zitfaced computer programmer (like myself apparently) who can't get a wife in the West can use his high income to rescue a lady from poverty and begin a family. If we didn't have welfare in the West, then he wouldn't have to step so far out of his race and culture to find that opportunity, which would be better for our society and would also mean we are creating this massive debt bubble which helps to sustain globalization, macro economic misallocation (which in many cases is sustained on and complicit with global political economics which sustain the reasons the third world is kept locked in poverty).
I tie this into a comment I made to CoinCube, pointing out that we must accept some integrated failure as the cost of annealing fitness:
Socialists hate nature. They don't want to admit that power and opportunities are diversified and not distributed equally. They are appalled for example that some female might have to accept a marriage out of economic considerations (as if any woman ever doesn't regardless of her financial standing!
).
Winter is still living in (the past of the) Stage #4 and the world is moving out of the Industrial Age which required high fixed capital concentration as I written about in 2012 and CoinCube since had expounded upon such as his table of Stages:
I will be the first to admit I needed a week or two to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint:
The Rise of Knowledge
Quote from: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268#comment-1802005
I happily pay a lot of taxes so widows, orphans and all kind of poor people in my country can be supported.
Quote from: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268#comment-1803048
The fact that charity can and will reduce the number of people starving, at least in the 1930s, is only a stop gap for this fundamental problem. You cannot negotiate a deal relying on charity to keep you and your family alive if you fail. And we do not know how often charity failed.
Socialism destroys opportunity. For example, the fact that there are poor ladies in the 3rd world, means some socially inept zitfaced computer programmer (like myself apparently) who can't get a wife in the West can use his high income to rescue a lady from poverty and begin a family. If we didn't have welfare in the West, then he wouldn't have to step so far out of his race and culture to find that opportunity, which would be better for our society and would also mean we are creating this massive debt bubble which helps to sustain globalization, macro economic misallocation (which in many cases is sustained on and complicit with global political economics which sustain the reasons the third world is kept locked in poverty).
I tie this into a comment I made to CoinCube, pointing out that we must accept some integrated failure as the cost of annealing fitness:
Your mistake is presuming the State has any role whatsoever because you fear interleaved (not mass) failure. But integrated failure is the way nature anneals gradually towards optimum fitness (I am very surprised you don't accept this given you have cited evolutionary biology). The man is the one who invests in his children and thus the only one who should decide. The female also invests, but realize that she depends on the man and she knows this unless she has the State fucking up nature and creating Frankenstein divergence into scorched earth mass failure.
Socialists hate nature. They don't want to admit that power and opportunities are diversified and not distributed equally. They are appalled for example that some female might have to accept a marriage out of economic considerations (as if any woman ever doesn't regardless of her financial standing!
).Quote from: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268#comment-1802320
You assume a free labor market in equilibrium. That is when Id like to trade the value I will produce for the value you will produce. Deal? would presumably hold.
When there is an excess of labor, as there has almost always been since the start of the industrial revolution, this means that wages can drop below subsistence level. That has actually happened during the 1840s in Europe. If you want to know how that was, Charles Dickens wrote some nice fiction about that time. The result is that enough laborers starve to bring the market back into balance. Another result was a Europe wide revolution that lead to organized labor, communism, and a start of labor laws. Your vision of fair negotiations are simply another implementation of the Freedom to Starve.
But the labor market is not an efficient market at all. It is an oligopoly. The number of industrial employers available to a laborer are few, while the number of competing laborers are very many. The few employers always organize against the laborers (read Adam Smith about merchants and their view of free markets). Meanwhile, employers everywhere have used their considerable money and influence to prevent laborers to organize in likewise fashion (see my Union Busting link above for some of the efforts).
So, in your free labor market scenario, on the one side are a few well organized employers who negotiate a few percent of their surplus wealth, on the other side are many more, unorganized potential workers than there are jobs. These applicants are negotiating about the life or death of themselves and their families. They were truly Free to Starve.
If you do not want to call this difference a power imbalance, it still remains the same huge imbalance that determines the outcome of any negotiations. And that outcome was evident.
By 1910, around 10% of the population of the UK lived at below subsistence level (extreme poverty), while the top 10% owned 90% of the wealth and got 45% of the income. European countries installed laws against child labor because the overworking of children left too few able young men to populate the army.
A little reading in industrial history of the 19th century would show you that the guns of the state were generally trained at the workers to keep them from changing the rules of the game more to their advantage. So, if you insist on defining power exclusively as that what flows out of the barrel of a gun, then the power still sided with the owners, and not the workers.
When there is an excess of labor, as there has almost always been since the start of the industrial revolution, this means that wages can drop below subsistence level. That has actually happened during the 1840s in Europe. If you want to know how that was, Charles Dickens wrote some nice fiction about that time. The result is that enough laborers starve to bring the market back into balance. Another result was a Europe wide revolution that lead to organized labor, communism, and a start of labor laws. Your vision of fair negotiations are simply another implementation of the Freedom to Starve.
But the labor market is not an efficient market at all. It is an oligopoly. The number of industrial employers available to a laborer are few, while the number of competing laborers are very many. The few employers always organize against the laborers (read Adam Smith about merchants and their view of free markets). Meanwhile, employers everywhere have used their considerable money and influence to prevent laborers to organize in likewise fashion (see my Union Busting link above for some of the efforts).
So, in your free labor market scenario, on the one side are a few well organized employers who negotiate a few percent of their surplus wealth, on the other side are many more, unorganized potential workers than there are jobs. These applicants are negotiating about the life or death of themselves and their families. They were truly Free to Starve.
If you do not want to call this difference a power imbalance, it still remains the same huge imbalance that determines the outcome of any negotiations. And that outcome was evident.
By 1910, around 10% of the population of the UK lived at below subsistence level (extreme poverty), while the top 10% owned 90% of the wealth and got 45% of the income. European countries installed laws against child labor because the overworking of children left too few able young men to populate the army.
A little reading in industrial history of the 19th century would show you that the guns of the state were generally trained at the workers to keep them from changing the rules of the game more to their advantage. So, if you insist on defining power exclusively as that what flows out of the barrel of a gun, then the power still sided with the owners, and not the workers.
Winter is still living in (the past of the) Stage #4 and the world is moving out of the Industrial Age which required high fixed capital concentration as I written about in 2012 and CoinCube since had expounded upon such as his table of Stages:
You will probably need a week or two of studying the thread slowly.
I will be the first to admit I needed a week or two to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint:
The Rise of Knowledge