What the left gets wrong about economics that annoys the shit out of me

[Berkut]

Sure, everyone has become mathematically less poor in the last couple of centuries. On the other hand, current poverty, as in "you have to decide whether to eat or pay rent this month, and you cannot get sick", is also a result of free market capitalism.

Here you go Zoupa.

[Zoupa]

That doesn't say to abolish capitalism 

[grumbler]

Zoupiepoo does love to move the goalposts, doesn't he? 

[Jacob]

Why do we now have two threads about your views on what different sides of the political spectrum get wrong on economics? What was the goal here?

[Eddie Teach]

I think the goal was to kill time at work. Success!

[Zoupa]

Zoupiepoo does love to move the goalposts, doesn't he? 

How so?

[Syt]

Why do we now have two threads about your views on what different sides of the political spectrum get wrong on economics? What was the goal here?

*snip*

No, I think this is the *left* room.

[Admiral Yi]

Employees, no. Consumers, yes.

Employees don't look out for their own self interest? 

[Solmyr]

I can guarantee you that the solution to climate change is at least partly going to be "consume less stuff" which likely leads to producing less stuff as well.

I think the solution will include producing less particular stuff. Like coal power. But it will be because we transition to producing some other stuff to replace it.

I would be willing to bet my entire salary that the only way actual human production in aggregate ever declines is some catastrophe. It will never happen voluntarily. That catastrophe could very well be mis-managing the climate crisis.

Well, probably we would also need to produce less stuff like plastic crap made in China and the like. Which will probably never happen, at least fast enough to avert the climate crisis. So you are probably right that it will be the catastrophe that will cause human production to decline.

[crazy canuck]

Sure, everyone has become mathematically less poor in the last couple of centuries. On the other hand, current poverty, as in "you have to decide whether to eat or pay rent this month, and you cannot get sick", is also a result of free market capitalism.

Here you go Zoupa.

Everyone is saying they are in favour of properly regulated capitalism.  Somehow you keep missing the distinction. 

[crazy canuck]

Why do we now have two threads about your views on what different sides of the political spectrum get wrong on economics? What was the goal here?

You get the choose - left or right room.

[Jacob]

Why do we now have two threads about your views on what different sides of the political spectrum get wrong on economics? What was the goal here?

*snip*

No, I think this is the *left* room.

[The Minsky Moment]

Markets are just a metaphor - borrowing the image of the agora to conceptualize an otherwise unimaginable flow of activity.  It's an obvious point that everyone knows and yet at some points everyone makes the mistake of blurring the metaphor into reality (I include myself).

Capitalism and the state are not antithetical; they go hand in hand. The "night watchman" state of libertarian fantasy is that just; it has never existed and never will. If you want to get an idea of what "anarcho-capitalism" might look like, see Somalia c. mid-1990s.

Capitalism does not merely need the state; it needs, wants and creates strong and effective states.  It needs strong state authority to suppress political competition from old landed elites - to smash up traditional forms of land tenure and create the strange concept of freely tradable complex bundles of rights relating to land.  It needs strong state authority to create a vast and complex legal and social infrastructure to support complex commercial transactions and the complex forms of organizations used to engage in them.  It needs the state to foster and where needed build the physical infrastructure to link hinterlands to cities and cities to the outside world.  It needs armies and security forces and diplomats.  It needs national currencies and a banking system to circulate it.  And once the system is up and running and experiences the unavoidable boom-bust cycles, it needs the state to safeguard credit, which inevitably and unavoidable leads to the the growth of a welfare state and the fiscal stabilization that follows.  The welfare state is not the anthesis of capitalism; it is the handmaiden of capitalism and necessary as the system reaches for maturity.  EVERY successful capitalist system follows this pattern.  there are no exceptions.

If we can say that the state has evolved from the 18th century to the present to become vastly larger, more complex, more intrusive, more effective, more insightful (in the seeing as a state sense), these are all byproducts of capitalist driven imperatives.  Not communism, not Marx.  Capitalism.

[Razgovory]

I've just been waiting for an opportunity to change the subject to the American Civil War.

[Valmy]

I've just been waiting for an opportunity to change the subject to the American Civil War.

Oh so you think the Civil War started because of economic systems rather than slavery eh? Typical pro-Confederate propaganda from Missouri. Send in the Jayhawks!