Granny-
I notice that you dodged my main claim (self-interest is built in to biology, and we ignore this at our peril) and you also avoided answering my suggestion that you buy a four-plex from a hated scumbag slumlord during the downturn in order to avoid any moral dilemma. I can understand why you avoided these two points - they are basically unassailable - and instead started talking about war, slavery, child labor, and robber barons.
So I’ll go there for a moment.
[1] For the record - I’m against war, slavery, child labor, and robber barons. If you appointed me ruler I’d reintroduce most of the post-depression laws that restricted the financialization of the economy, and I’d also provide government-funded healthcare, I’d get out of our foreign wars, I’d break up the big cartels that run things - starting with the banks - I’d restructure NSA and CIA to stop the spying on Americans - and they’d all get together and have me shot in my first two weeks in office. But I’d try nevertheless. Smaller is better in capitalism. “Profit” results in an apparently inexorable move into cartels & monopolies, and this tendency needs to be restrained by law.
So with that digression out of the way, back to the main point: human self-interest.
Self-interest is part of the inner nature of every creature on the planet. Interestingly, cooperation is also built into many other creatures on the planet - including humans. [Note: this isn’t my belief system - it is generally accepted science in the field of evolutionary biology]. In a tribal grouping, the drives of self-interest and cooperation play out in one way, in a larger more anonymous civilization, the built-in self-interest and cooperation plays out in a different way.
Regardless of the manifestation, self-interest and cooperation are both unchangeable features of our nature. And as you pointed out, civilizations that do the best job of channeling these core pieces of our inner nature into civilizationally-productive ends, end up on top.
[c.f. related - SPQR - why did Rome end up ruling the western world?]
So that brings me to ask this question: how can we most effectively channel the creative aspects of self-interest, while reining in the civilization-destructive aspects? See [1] above for my answer in our current situation.
You claim “profit” is a learned behavior. I completely disagree. Profit is just the manifestation of built-in self-interest in our current civilizational context. Therefore, attempts to suppress or get rid of “profit” in our current context is doomed to failure. Small scale? That’s another matter. Communism can work fine on a small scale. But we don’t live on a small scale any longer.
So in our individual cases, how do we do our best to help our tribe in the coming storm, while also helping our community to move forward at the same time?
That brings me back to my suggestion: buying a four-plex from a scumbag landlord after the bubble pop, and retrofitting it with the latest gear. Its a win-win for everyone involved.
You are working extremely hard to make the pursuit of profit sound positively rosy and appealing. I suspect you are on the PP payroll to counter posts that are not complementary and rosy.
Heh. "You're a shill for the banksters." Let's call that Hannah's Law: every conversation at PP, if it goes on long enough, will result in one person calling another a paid shill.
I am not paid by PP to keep people like you in line. I just have a strong opinion on some subjects. Just like you do. You are right that I'm motivated, however - I do strongly support Chris's vision overall - how to help his tribe weather the coming storm.
But not every subject here interests me. This one does - I really enjoy exploring the things that underpin how humanity functions. What works? What doesn't? How are we constructed? How does that constrain the approaches we can take?
ezlxq1949-
Interesting reference. I know very little about Australia.
Was it a monoculture, or were there significant differences across the different regions?
How did they manage conflict, and if there wasn’t enough land, how did they handle that? Or was the population relatively small so land wasn’t an issue?
The human desire for easy pickings and windfalls generally leads to raids, plunder, and slavery - I’m just guessing the Europeans weren’t unique in this sort of thing…
Re: Diamond and Germs, Guns & Steel: did Australia have any domesticated animals? I know horses make it much easier to travel long distances. And various other large domesticated mammals act as a multiplier effect - and also a source of treasure if you capture them.
Indigenous peoples were hunter-gatherers. Nature provided the profit – they didn’t have to. If the plants and animals that they harvested and the ecosystem in general wasn’t generating a profit – in terms of net energy – the entire ecosystem would simply die off and collapse. Profit is built into the very fabric of life.
This is not the usual concept of profit and not really relevant. Profit is to do with gain--to get ore than you put in. A HG would not be able to use more than they needed--they would get fat, which would make them more likely to die. Likewise possessions were notof value to HGs, as they would have to carry them around. There was no motivation to accumulate; more benefit to being lean and unencumbered. And more benefit to co-operation since every person in a tribal group relied on everyone else.
It wasn't until the agricultural revolution that ownership became possible and even desirable and that was only 11,000 years ago. For agrarian socisties, it was necessary to work out how food and other resources were divided. And for some individuals to own more than others, to accumulate, to dominate etc. this was also the start of the human population explosion.
So I don't agree that the "profit motive" is somehow intrinsic to being human.
@dabenham Thanks for your example illustrating my point. Perhaps that will help others to get the idea?
There are many investments options that will make some, even good, profit while helping rather than harming our future prospects. Consider the difference between putting your money into oil exploration or a solar farm.
I personally place a priority on actions and investments that make things better for my grandkids rather than worse. That’s one non-monetary form of profit.
Other examples include the “triple bottom line” for accounting.
And the latest budget by the New Zealand government which measures prosperity in terms of wellbeing rather than GDP.
These are all examples of having multiple axes on which to plot the value of an investment.
Profit is to do with gain–to get out more than you put in. A HG would not be able to use more than they needed–they would get fat, which would make them more likely to die.
We agree. Profit has to do with getting out more than you put in. So, if you put in 500 calories in hunting a sheep, and you get to eat the sheep which totals 2000 calories for each person involved, that's a net 1500 calories in profit. Calorie-profit, to be sure, but profit nonetheless, and arguably for a hunter-gatherer, the most important sort of profit there is. Eating 2000 calories of sheep leaves you 1500 calories in profit can be squandered doing all sorts of other activities.
This profit is nature-and-ecosystem-provided. If it didn't provide such a caloric-profit to almost every participant in the system, the ecosystem would lose a whole lot of participants in a big hurry.
The key point: profit doesn't imply accumulation - it is, as you said, simply getting out more than you put in. And humans are keenly optimized for recognizing any situation where they can extract a lot of "profit" (or calories, or value - whatever you want to call it) for relatively little effort.
And this is built in to our biology, honed through millions of years of evolution.
I entirely agree with you about accumulation; its tough for a hunter-gatherer to accumulate stuff, unless they have horses or other domesticated animals to carry things. But the discussion wasn't about accumulation - it was about profit, and my core claim that humans are hard-wired to recognize and exploit situations where they can get a lot out but put just a little in.
One obvious use for Hunter-Gatherer profit has long been the availability of more nutrition for one’s children – and the option of having more children.
And yes, archaeology seems to indicate that eating one’s family was something they did; but first they would want to eat non-family humans, which is something they did more often. It makes me wonder if racism might not be a protection against the second, which in turn was a protection against the first.
But in fact, the industrial revolution may have predated the agricultural revolution, such that ownership and property did exist back then.
You have the Clovis Point culture that developed from the Solutrean Point culture, as evidence by barbless clovis points in Maryland excavations. But what is interesting is that the artisans would go to great lengths to get valuable raw material rocks, then premanufacture the points 70% of the way, transport the good ones to a location near where they could trade, and then cache their stock, burying it in the ground. Moreover, they would sometimes travel over 500 miles by sea, to get to and from the source, fighting current and wind as they did so. So this doesn’t sound like a family culture, so much as a guild culture; and the economics don’t work out without the concept of property.
But property (and profit) are concepts that are by no means unique to humans, either. We see animals defend property; and trade; indeed, Penguins even steal and engage in prostitution to get ideal nesting stones.
So I don’t think HG cultures lacked the concepts of property or profit. They would be all about figuring out how to ppt a thing to use.
“I notice that you dodged my main claim (self-interest is built in to biology, and we ignore this at our peril) and you also avoided answering my suggestion that you buy a four-plex from a hated scumbag slumlord during the downturn in order to avoid any moral dilemma. I can understand why you avoided these two points – they are basically unassailable – and instead started talking about war, slavery, child labor, and robber barons.”
Firstly, I will address your second point. It was a snarky and silly suggestion so yes I ignored it.
Secondly, I tried to address the first point suggesting that individuals self interest is met when they lived in harmonious groups. No need for profit when needs are met and one lives in a cooperative society. Unfortunately these groups were easy pickings for profit driven more advanced societies.
Perhaps you can provide a specific example of your reference? I would like to see failed spectacularly.
“There have been a number of efforts in the past to develop human civilizations that didn’t involve profit. Each has failed spectacularly – with tens of millions of people killed”
“The love of profit (and/or a “windfall”) is a reproductive advantage – those humans who didn’t love windfalls and profit died out millions of years ago, leaving only our self-interested forefathers alive. As a result, any system that does not take advantage of (and/or use self interest as a basic motivating force) will end up failing spectacularly, because it attempts to go against inner nature, and as such, it is doomed to failure.”
One of my clients used to tell me - there are 2 kinds of people, the screwer and the screwee. He always tried to be the screwer and not be the screwee. Seems like that sums up the above argument.
“Self interest should be more regulated than it is now, for sure”
It seems to me you use self interest and greed interchangeably. But I agree self interest is glorified (here, this article and conversation) and society in general.
Ah, finally the meat and potatoes!
“You claim “profit” is a learned behavior. I completely disagree. Profit is just the manifestation of built-in self-interest in our current civilizational context. Therefore, attempts to suppress or get rid of “profit” in our current context is doomed to failure.”
Translation - profit, and all its extremes have been completely normalized. Message - profit = good. Hey, I know lets change the word, profit to slavery and see If that fits within the narrative. Slavery is just the manifestation of built-in self-interest in our current civilizational context. Yep, same logic could apply here.
So whats the result of our normal profit driven world. I refer you to Chris Hedges latest book, America, the Farewell Tour. He talks about the effects of the profit driven industry on places like Detroit. He also discusses how bitterness, hopelessness and malaise have resulted in a culture of sadism and hate. Our profit driven culture has created a severe state of decay. And again I refer you yo my last quote “
”The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to MOST people.” E.B. White” Therefore, attempts to suppress or get rid of “profit” in our current context is doomed to failure.”
Translation, any effort to change the system that is killing us and the planet is doomed to failure. But profit its not a learned trait or behavior its just a normal manifestation which may result in our species destruction but thats normal within our civilizational context? So we are a virus thats killing our host, each other and ourselves?
Anyway, I agree.
We are doomed to fail as long as profit is our goal. There has been a war every century for a long time and the likelihood we will have another world war in this century is very high. Driven by profit. The squabble over resources and power.
My fundamental complaint I have is the message this site and you and so many others promote seems to be - Profit is paramount which more often than not is an I win you lose scenario. The sad part is, we only win if its a win-win scenario. Yes battles are won but no one will win in the end.
And lastly I had to look up “shill”. Cant say I have seen that here before but I skip a lot of content. Glad your not but wouldn’t have made a difference. Just seems like you spend a lot of time contributing, which is good. Its nice though that you chose to debate with me rather than being paid to:)
AKGrannyWGrit
I like you both; I value both of your comments. I hat to see this devolve badly.
Could I ask what each of you mean by profit? It seems to me that Dave views profit in terms of EROEI; as such, it is neither good nor bad. It seems to me that Granny views profit in terms of positional gain. As such, the resounding majority of profit will be from theft, manipulation, and even outright destruction of neighbors.
Those two definitions are by no means equivalent – but they are both justified by various economic schools, management policies, and a wealth of literature.
So I could see how different definitions could drive rancor.
Could we clarify, then, and maybe come up with two new terms that will distinguish?
Firstly, I will address your second point. It was a snarky and silly suggestion so yes I ignored it.
Interesting. So, buying the fourplex from a slumlord, and retrofitting it is exactly what my Mom did with her rental units. The tenants never, ever moved out, because Mom would charge rents under market, and she fixed the place up after it had been neglected by the slumlord for so long.
Perhaps you can provide a specific example of your reference? I would like to see failed spectacularly.
My fundamental complaint I have is the message this site and you and so many others promote seems to be – Profit is paramount...
Well, your assessment of what I'm promoting is wrong. I don't believe profit is paramount. I believe it is just one aspect of humanity. It does happen to be a built-in drive, and efforts to completely suppress it by force have required industrial-scale murder, so I'm suggesting we try and channel it instead of using suppression, since suppression has been proven not to work. And just the attempt requires killing a whole lot of people too, which I assume you're against.
profit, and all its extremes have been completely normalized
I agree that the extremes have been normalized. To me, profit is fine, making profit a God is not fine. It needs to be channeled, otherwise if it becomes God, all sorts of bad things happen. So I'm with you. It has certainly been progressively over-glorified over the past 40 years, to the point where there needs to be some serious changes for us to get back to a more balanced civilization.
Speaking of which, it sure feels like you blew right past that list of things I provided where I was advocating for exactly that - a set of changes that would bring us back to something more reasonable.
If you did notice my list, and you understood what it meant, and you still persist in pretending I'm this person who worships only profit - I have to ask you, why are you doing that? Why are you working so hard to make me into someone I'm not?
Firstly, kudos to your Mom, she sounds like a clever woman.
Secondly,
There have been a number of efforts in the past to develop human civilizations that didn’t involve profit. Each has failed spectacularly – with tens of millions of people killed.
Perhaps you can provide a specific example of your reference? I would like to see failed spectacularly.
Communist Russia: Stalin killed from 20-6o million Russians. 20 million is the “conservative” number. https://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kill-1111789
Communist China. Mao killed 45 million people in the “Great Leap Forward.” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
Gosh I still don't get it. It seems the effort to create a civilization that didn't involve profit didn't really fail, rather the people were murdered. Its like saying Mr. Global dropped a bomb on all democracies world wide and so democracy failed spectacularly. In order for a financial system to fail wouldn't that involve the system and not just the murder of the people who use the system? Seems like two different but related issues.
“Speaking of which, it sure feels like you blew right past that list of things I provided where I was advocating for exactly that – a set of changes that would bring us back to something more reasonable.”
[1] For the record – I’m against war, slavery, child labor, and robber barons. If you appointed me ruler I’d reintroduce most of the post-depression laws that restricted the financialization of the economy, and I’d also provide government-funded healthcare, I’d get out of our foreign wars, I’d break up the big cartels that run things – starting with the banks – I’d restructure NSA and CIA to stop the spying on Americans – and they’d all get together and have me shot in my first two weeks in office. But I’d try nevertheless. Smaller is better in capitalism. “Profit” results in an apparently inexorable move into cartels & monopolies, and this tendency needs to be restrained by law.
Oh dear, my faux-pau, certainly I am not proficient in proper posting practices. Okay Dave I nominate you ruler, well if you are going to be shot in two weeks I think I will choose someone from my “ignore” list, lol, just kidding.
“If you did notice my list, and you understood what it meant, and you still persist in pretending I’m this person who worships only profit – I have to ask you, why are you doing that? Why are you working so hard to make me into someone I’m not?”
Oh my gosh, I ruffled your feathers and bruised your ego. Or just pissed you off. Here is the reality Dave, you are trying to get your point across which you always do successfully. It is very difficult for me to get my point across. You see you are articulate, a professional and I suspect very well educated. I struggle to try to be fluent and comprehensible, but I keep trying. I believe that I am one if the EXTREME few on this site that does not have a college degree, a white collar job or fit into the predominate tax bracket of the majority of members here. My situation gives me insight and perspective others don't have. I ask myself why would anyone want to listen to my opinion and a voice tells me because my message represents a cohort and demographic that isn't often represented here. (Poor and a curmudgeon) Besides I am the point in my life where being a pain in the ass can be quite satisfying at times. So if you feel unheard and not understood....... lol, welcome to my world. Though just to be clear please don't mistake my efforts for malicious intent.
To close I have a video for you to enjoy. It has the answer on how to deal with greedy profit-mongers.
https://youtu.be/xMnx_3BC7EM
Still looking forward to sharing that wine with you!
AKGrannyWGrit
Was it a monoculture, or were there significant differences across the different regions?
Many, many groups and tribes with many different languages, mostly mutually unintelligible. Overall they shared a belief in good land management, both of vegetation, fish and land animals. Much of the culture was based on local natural resources. Someone from the far south, e.g. Tasmania, had different ideas and beliefs as compared with someone from the far north. Here's a tribal map.
Their oral / aural culture can be astonishing; some groups preserve accurate accounts of how the sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age. They can still describe topographic features which are now below sea level.
How did they manage conflict, and if there wasn’t enough land, how did they handle that? Or was the population relatively small so land wasn’t an issue?
Plenty of land and the people usually respected boundaries, although boundary disputes have led to murder. "To the Aboriginal People, the social organisation in their system was known to every member of every tribe, but to outsiders it is often extremely complicated and riddled with hidden difficulties and contradictions, making it difficult to master. Yet another indication that these were not simple primitive savages." [Source] And yet they never developed a writing system.
The human desire for easy pickings and windfalls generally leads to raids, plunder, and slavery – I’m just guessing the Europeans weren’t unique in this sort of thing…
Sadly, tragically, no, they're (we're) not unique. It's usually a matter of degree, not of difference. The British came here impelled by a number of motives, one of which was to stop the French from extending their empire in the southern Pacific. Another was extension of their own Empire.
Re: Diamond and Germs, Guns & Steel: did Australia have any domesticated animals? I know horses make it much easier to travel long distances. And various other large domesticated mammals act as a multiplier effect – and also a source of treasure if you capture them.
No, no domesticated animals. Hard to do in a continent where no large quadrupeds existed. macropods (kangaroos etc.) are totally useless as beast of burden. The horse, donkey, camel, water buffalo are all comparatively recent introductions. So is the wheel. The people went everywhere on foot, and sometimes they travelled huge distances. A well-established network of paths and tracks was available.
Obviously a lot of what I have written above is greatly simplified and incomplete!
Thank you Michael Rudman, Good insight! Yes definitions matter and make comprehension easier.
A retired Sociologist told me today she was on a conference call with one of our State Legislators. The topic was healthcare and the Legislator made the statement that Alaska has the highest healthcare costs in the world. I know that insurance companies are often opting to send a patient out of state for surgery because costs are so high instate.
The reason why all this collectivst/communist/ socialist utopian nonsense wont work is because it would have to rely on the benevolence of the human race. The idea that people are all share and share alike, hippy-dippy communists. Its the same reason why any other utopian ideology simply does not work.
What works best is that you have a 95% free market, capitalistic, laissez-faire system in which government is kept very constrained. Some constraints on private enterprise are nedded to the extent that you’re preventing monopolies and victimization. Thats pretty much it. The redistributionist system that we currently have is very very inefficient.
The problem is with each step, with person involved in transfering funds you lose a little bit of efficiency. Its just like in a machine, the more simplistic it is the more efficient. You can fine tune it, oil it up and keep it looking sleak but the more convoluted it becomes, the more you add to it the more likely it is to break down AND the more effort and energy required to maintain it.
That is why socialism doesnt work for purely structural reasons. It relies on humna benevolence and it becomes too complex. it requires too much bureaucracy. The only way you can successfully have a redistributionist system would be in an anarcho-capitalist system where everybody just decided to share with one another BUT [ Barbara, Granny, and Mr Sanders pay attention ] THAT IS SIMPLY NOT THE WAY HUMAN BEINGS ARE.
Thats why we have separation of powers, thats why we have a bicameral legislature, thats why we have a 2nd amendment [ the people balancing the power of their own government ] all of these things were created to make balance and to work within the realities of human nature.
Gosh I still don’t get it. It seems the effort to create a civilization that didn’t involve profit didn’t really fail, rather the people were murdered.
The people in Russia and China who were murdered were killed by the very people trying to impose the profit-free system - Stalin and Mao. It wasn't Mr Global who did it, it was the Communist organization that did it - to their own people. And then Communism-the-system basically failed, even after all that murder, for exactly the reason Brushhog says - it went against a basic principle of human nature.
Here is the reality Dave, you are trying to get your point across which you always do successfully. It is very difficult for me to get my point across. You see you are articulate, a professional and I suspect very well educated. I struggle to try to be fluent and comprehensible, but I keep trying. I believe that I am one if the EXTREME few on this site that does not have a college degree, a white collar job or fit into the predominate tax bracket of the majority of members here. My situation gives me insight and perspective others don’t have. I ask myself why would anyone want to listen to my opinion and a voice tells me because my message represents a cohort and demographic that isn’t often represented here. (Poor and a curmudgeon) Besides I am the point in my life where being a pain in the ass can be quite satisfying at times.
Perfect! I'm happy you noticed my paragraph.
I definitely graduated from university, although my grades were unspectacular. My mom was always a bit frustrated. "Would you just please study just a little bit?" My best grades were in history and political science, mostly because I found both subjects really fascinating, and so studying was fun. I liked writing even then.
Regarding your disabilities: the great thing about the Internet is that people are judged by what they produce. I look at what you say, if your posts are intellectually honest, if your points make sense, if they match up with what I have found to be true. You have your experience, I have mine, and they meet and we see what comes out the other side.
And hopefully we are civil when we do it.
So going back to the subject at hand: profit.
Do we still have a disagreement as to whether the desire for profit (or as M. Rudmin says, maximizing "EROEI") is a built-in feature of every creature on earth?
From observation, organisms try to spend as little effort as possible to get the maximum number of calories possible. This built-in optimization mechanism is a strong reproductive and biological advantage. Organisms who don't do this, well, they die off during the bad times, so the ones that are left to pass a copy of their genes along are the lazy optimizers.
I claim that this built-in EROEI optimization mechanism has evolved into a reflex to obtain as much profit as possible and accumulate as much as possible in today's society.
But that is only 1/3 of the picture. Both cooperation and fairness are also built-in pro-survival mechanisms, so the tension between cooperation, fairness, and self-interest (EROEI optimization) is the eternal struggle, both within the organism and society in general.
We are seeing it play out today writ large.
Granny, I recommend you watch to Sapolsky's lecture series in Human Behavioral Biology [link below]. It was probably the most interesting series of lectures I have ever seen, and it informs my opinion on this entire matter. I think you'd find it interesting. To me, it was as if I had suddenly discovered the manual for how humans operate.
And it is entirely non-political. And non-economic. I suspect Sapolsky is liberal, but the matter just doesn't come up. In his first lecture, he asks the question, "how many of you believe in Free Will?" Related question: how much does biology drive us? Sapolsky spends the next 25 lectures answering this question.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpXaCv0b7h12LpVunZ361VfCBQSwi_2e8
So in what alternate universe is the opposite of crony capitalism socialism?
Communism failed because asking the producers to continue to produce while the shiftless continue to consume all the fruits of their labors is, indeed, stupid. If I don’t have enough left to be comfortable, why should I continue to produce so others can take?
Unfortunately, we have exactly the same system with crony capitalism. Just as the commissars skimmed what little excess remained in Stalin’s Russia [you don’t think the poor were EVER better off], so overpaid CEOs and Wall Street manipulators skim off the profit from productivity gains leaving the workers losing actual purchasing power.
We have this myth that the battles are between the rich and the poor, but consider the other possibility. The battle is actually between producers and skimmers. The poor have always picked up the crumbs. The spurt of GI education post-WW2 let a lot of backwoods GI’s join the middle classes and they saw it was education and opportunity, not accidents of birth that had held them back before. The women who had been running the war factories and the black soldiers who had done things like build the Alcan suddenly asked why the same wasn’t true for them. We had a boom as the 2/3 of the population that had been denied access to the capitalist economy suddenly began to add their ability to the other producers.
Now we came to a misunderstanding of human nature. Those of us who are natural producers like producing. It is hard for many of us to think that the remaining poor wouldn’t be just like us and start producing if they were less disadvantaged. brushhog is right, some can’t produce and some won’t, so helping them survive is pure charity.
But that is not the issue. In addition to producers, we need to consider the exploiters that are now manipulating our crony capitalism political system. In corporations, the economic gap between the people actually producing output and the top becomes larger and larger. As we try to plug the fraud-creating regulatory loopholes [oops, not technicallly fraud because the perpetrators got their bought congresspeople to drop that reg] the skimmers find new ways to get a bigger cut of what the producers create, aided and abetted by a US federal government whose election is funded by those benefiting from the new wealth transfer schemes.
So when we say if you are benefiting from a political/economic system that gives you tremendous advantages, you need to have the good sense to agree to keep the system from crashing by extracting more than you put in. We all understand there are externalities (carbon, pollution, infrastructure decay) that somebody has to be willing to deal with if our cushy lifestyle is to continue. It’s not socialist to suggest that those who benefit the most be willing to pay a paltry portion of their gains to keep the system afloat.
And those who point out that the upper middle class producers that keep the system running can indeed be called tax donkeys have a point. And statistics show that the economic position of the 60-95th has deteriorated since Reagan’s trickle down nonsense. That money has gone toward “bread and circuses” for the lower 1/3, and it has also gone to enrich the 1%, who, unlike those a little below them in the percentile ranking and orders of magnitude below them in actual value of both income and assets, are able to rig the system in their favor.
None of us are proposing continuing to shift money from the middle class producers to the poor in a futile attempt to prop up those who will never have the capacity to take care of themselves. We’re simply proposing that those who benefit the most from the system ante up to take care of more of the externalities that are rapidly coming to the forefront.
Barbara-
I agree with almost everything you said. You and I are on the same page. I could have written most of what you posted.
However…when you say this, I must disagree.
None of us are proposing continuing to shift money from the middle class producers to the poor in a futile attempt to prop up those who will never have the capacity to take care of themselves....
I do think someone was saying exactly this - or rather, that was the logical conclusion of what they were saying.
Granny said that a desire for profit (and/or a desire to maximize EROEI) was "learned behavior", while I claimed it was built in to human biology by evolution.
What's the implications of profit/maximizing EROEI being a "learned behavior?" Well, if "desire for profit/maximizing EROEI" is just learned behavior, and if it was something that the people in charge felt was disagreeable behavior, a few months (or years) in a re-education camp would probably fix that after enough "persuasion" is applied.
Of course if desire for profit/maximizing EROEI isn't learned behavior - if instead it is an emergent property of biology - well, you can kill tens of millions of people in your attempt to change behavior, and you still won't achieve a functioning profit-free civilization.
Again - I've said it again and again, and again, and I'm saying it again now - I'm all for legally restricting the predatory "legal-because-they control-Congress" financialization that has taken over modern society. Capitalism only works if the participants are individually small. It stops working when there are only a few big players and it turns to predatory oligarchy, which is where we are now.
But attempting to "unlearn" people of their built-in profit motive?
It will never work. But we would end up killing millions in the attempt. And, somewhat selfishly, I'd strongly prefer not to be one of those people.
Its much easier to be socialist when you have oil money.
Open borders & socialism don’t mix so well though. I’m very curious to see what happens to California when it starts providing free medical care to illegal aliens. My goodness. What could possibly go wrong?
“I have this expensive medical condition that Mexico won’t pay for. But there’s a fix…”
Its much easier to be socialist when you have oil money. ?
Too true. I wish they hadn't cited Norway but rather Sweden, Denmark or Germany, pretty sure none of those have much or any natural resources beyond some coal.
To my mind those are 3 countries that certainly show capitalism can go together with strong welfare policies, to my mind necessary to ensure society doesn't get ripped apart by inequality.
The Netherlands is another one to avoid as an example as up until recently they had plenty of natural gas to fund their strong welfare policies.
Of course Europe's 'capitalism' has devolved into a dangerous unfree and uncompetitive market capitalism just as in the US, with the ECB having just as much of a corporate welfare programme as the US treasury/FED in the cartoon above.
