 | Monday, December 8, 2008 at 11:50:04 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: John Harris
E-mail: John.Harris00 at gmail.com
He's known as the 'The Inventor'?
Are you cereal?
Honestly reading that chart, it made me think of a Simpsons episode, Kang and Kodos have taken over Bob Dole and Bill Clinton; while giving a speech:
(Kang is Bob Dole)
Kang: Abortions for all!
[Crowd boos]
Kang: ... Very well, no abortions for anyone!
[Crowd boos again]
Kang: Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!
[Crowd cheers and waves miniature flags]
John. |
| Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 12:17:11 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Amy Zook
E-mail: azook(at)mit.edu
What I found exquisitely sad in reading that chart was that, though their philosophical foundation is horribly confused and their understanding of economics badly mangled, what they intuitively advocate as the "just" system IS ACTUALLY a true laissez-faire economy. If you look at their description of "capitalism," what they are actually OBJECTING to is our government-subsidized, mixed-economy model which DOES oppress those not among the "wealthy and political elites."
"Prices, wages and profits set by free and open markets" instead of "Prices and wages protected from global competition"? "Economically empowering people directly through private property to protect themselves against environmental hazards"? "Technology owned and controlled by private sector entities that are directly accountable to many shareholders and stakeholders" instead of being "subject to government oversight"? Sounds wonderful to me!
Now if only the silly fools had the philosophical understanding to back it up, they'd be doing a world of good. |
| Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 14:36:33 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: jether
E-mail: jether(at)ymail.com
"A capitalist economy in which large numbers of men cannot effectively participate in the production of wealth because the ownership of capital is concentrated in the hands of the few is hardly a just economy. Though its capitalistic form of distribution is based on full respect for the property rights of the few who are capitalists, the economy violates two of the three principles of justiceâ€"â€"the principles of participation and of limitation.
The economic hardship, or, worse, the abject misery of the great mass of men, was the immediate consequence of the injustice that was done in the capitalist economies of Great Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century. The cause was not the private ownership of capital, which is as just as the private ownership of labor power; nor was it the purely capitalistic form of distribution, which is also in itself quite just in an economy that is capitalist in its mode of production. The cause was the highly concentrated ownership of capital.
In addition to being unjust, with deplorable consequences for the welfare of the masses, the capitalist economy we have just been describing would have “sowed the seeds of its own destruction,” as Marx predicted, had its capitalistic form of distribution continued without modification. With the major portion of the wealth going to the one-tenth of the population who were the owners of capital, the residue that went to the remaining nine-tenths gave them insufficient purchasing power to support a high level of production.
Only by raising the general standard of living and creating a widely diffused purchasing power can the consumption of wealth support mass production in a capitalist economy. Hence if it was nothing else, the transformation of the form of distribution from a purely capitalistic one into a partly laboristic one was highly expedient. It kept the economy going, and saved it from the disastrous climax of the cycle of boom-and-bust.
There is ample evidence of such motivation in the explicitly stated policies of the New Deal, as well as in the declarations of those union leaders who picture labor as in partnership with capital to make capitalism a prosperous economy for the welfare of all concerned.50 But the action of labor unions and the effort of government regulation to create a partly laboristic form of distribution were not entirely motivated by considerations of expediency with an eye to keeping the economy afloat. The original, abiding, and deeper interest was in alleviating human misery and improving the lot of the masses.
Without excluding or minimizing a concern for the stability of the economy, the controlling principle in the transformation of the form of distribution stemmed from deeply humanitarian motivesâ€"concern for pressing human needs and the economic welfare of the “forgotten man.” These good purposes, as well as the efficiency and prosperity of the economy itself, were served by creating a mixed form of distribution which over the years has become more and more laboristic, less and less capitalistic.51
These good ends were served, however, without correcting the injustices of the nineteenth-century capitalism which was selfdestructive as well as inhumane because, with a highly concentrated private ownership of capital, it maintained a purely capitalistic form of distribution. On the contrary, the mixture of a laboristic with a capitalistic form of distribution in a capitalist economy, especially in a technologically advanced one in which nine-tenths of the wealth is produced by capital instruments, does serious injustice to the owners of capital. It invades, attenuates, or erodes their property rights in capital in proportion as it makes a larger and larger cut in the distributive share which should be theirs by right of earning it in order to increase the distributive share given to the owners of labor power, which is for the most part not earned by them.
The present capitalist economy of Great Britain and the United States, therefore, not only fails to correct the injustices that it inherits from the last century, but also adds thereto the injustice of a form of distribution that has become more and more laboristic, as measured by the increasing portion of the wealth that is rightly due to the owners of capital but goes to labor."
IN Chapter 6 of "The Capitalist Manifesto: A Revolutionary Plan for a CAPITALISTIC Distribution of Wealth - to Preserve Our Free Society" http://kelsoinstitute.org |
E-mail Gina Liggett
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