Thread: Capitalism isn't working ?

Really, the point I was trying to make is that in a true, untainted, capitalist economy, the government or anyone else for that matter would have no outside influence on what happened to the money earned. It would be reinvested in the business and the business would continue to grow. Also in my example, if the customer thought the price of the oranges was too high, they could go and buy oranges from another vendor. Doing so would cause the first vendor to adjust his prices to be in line with their true market value. That is how capitalism functions.

Actually, no, there doesn't even have to be money to start the Grove. It could simply be that the farmer is given a piece of land, or just finds an orange tree growing in the wild and harvests the yield, sells it, and invests his profits back into himself. Eventually, and over enough time, he could afford to buy the Grove. That's what makes capitalism great... The fact you can start with nothing and still wind up successful.

Originally Posted by crouton976

Actually, no, there doesn't even have to be money to start the Grove. It could simply be that the farmer is given a piece of land, or just finds an orange tree growing in the wild and harvests the yield, sells it, and invests his profits back into himself. Eventually, and over enough time, he could afford to buy the Grove. That's what makes capitalism great... The fact you can start with nothing and still wind up successful.

That's not a business plan, that's LUCK!

It is what it is and it is working exactly as it is supposed to be working. Much discussion seems to be around minutiae and misses the big picture (in my opinion anyway).
The gap between rich & poor, exploitation of resources (natural, human), etc are simply par for the course.
The ones making the money, the laws and have the power to make the decisions are doing so as they have since the advent of Capitalism.

Because the masses are feeling some expected effects of capitalism's logical progression is irrelevant. To help control the masses, who now see it as obvious that there is something not right/equitable with the current situation, the news outlets will frame the discussion at the lowest levels, purposefully neglecting the reality of the situation. Capitalism doesn't take into account morals or human intangibles of any kind.

And while we argue about what Obama or Bush should do to improve economy, protect our freedoms, care for populace or whatever is on the day's menu the money, power and influence stays exactly where it has been all along.

I am not anti-capitalist. I was born and raised here. I like making and spending money as much as anyone. This is not some doomsday or extremely cynical view of things.
I'm having a great day!

I am a realist and to think this could/would go any other way (or will go any other way with some tweaks) is misplaced faith in my estimation.
Many times we are actually discussing why we no longer believe in the American Dream under the guise of 'capitalism is not working.' (in general, not necessarily the article specifically)

It is working as planned. Go ask the same 1% that have been calling the shots since the whole rigmarole started.

The length to which it is sustainable in its current form to those 1% is another discussion entirely.
We would not be part of that discussion as we would like to think we would be involved. We would be placed in the bucket of 'resources' along with oil, natural gas, etc.

Originally Posted by Bruno

I haven't read the article.

However, it should be obivous that absolutes never work. Pure caitalism is as bad as pure socialism.
It's only when the extremes are tempered by compomise that things seem to work.

Yeah, I was going to say, 'a little bit of this, a little bit of that' might make a good form of society...

Originally Posted by DarthLord

Sorry. I do take this too seriously; if you look in my first post in this thread you'll see why: seeing investors running scared makes making my dreams come true harder to do. I hate seeing investors treated poorly because "they're the 1%" when I need them as do a lot of people with big schemes and no money to spare.

Sadly, most people blaming capitalism for all our ills are doing so by oversimplifying WHAT capitalism is.

And yes, the farmer could indeed reinvest and that would be capitalism... but without some means to buy the farm in the first place he'd have never gotten started. That's where I am and why I take this so seriously and get so frustrated by people blaming a system that works for all their problems when in fact the issues were caused by things entirely tangential to the problem (even Soviet Russia had a banking system, central banking is not capitalism!).

I apologize for ruining your joke. I CAN see the humor in it.

You see its funny because even though admittedly I haven't read the book, the reviews imply that those 1% you're talking about who you claim you need, indeed aren't funding their share. Matter a fact, if I read the reviews right its so lopsided, the author claims capitalism is broken!

So there you go lol!?

Ivan Illich on Cars

excerpts from Energy and Equity

also collected in Toward a History of Needs

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC

People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors -- most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.

People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality, restricted mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers...

More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.

The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around vehicles rather than around people.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION

Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.

The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, subways, and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport.

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.


DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel -- probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions -- finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.


Also see this follow-up by André Gorz, The Social Ideology of the Motorcar.

Originally Posted by earcutter

You see its funny because even though admittedly I haven't read the book, the reviews imply that those 1% you're talking about who you claim you need, indeed aren't funding their share. Matter a fact, if I read the reviews right its so lopsided, the author claims capitalism is broken!

So there you go lol!?

I wasn't discussing the article; I was discussing the opinions that capitalism itself is the problem, rather than the ways in which we've twisted it.

In my opinion, there is a vast difference between capitalism and free enterprise.

Capitalism, gives special government-supported benefits to capital and those with capital , the wealthy individuals, families and business entities. This results in the rich getting richer, the simple fact that they have capital makes them richer. A stock broker produces nothing, contributes nothing to society other than artificially inflate prices of items as they are traded back and forth that result in profit for them. No one benefits from this practice but the elite few, yet it's impact on others in inflation, and the constant artificial rise in prices.

On the other hand, free enterprise seeks to establish laws and government policies that treat the upper, middle and lower classes the same. That is, the dream that hard work and study, dedication, all the now mythical, "American Dream" will result in prosperity.

Free enterprise no longer exists essentially, the system isn't designed that way any longer, instead, there is a whole parasitical class that produces nothing, contributes nothing, yet hoards the vast majority of the wealth without in fact really ever earning it.

Originally Posted by Phrank

In my opinion, there is a vast difference between capitalism and free enterprise.

Capitalism, gives special government-supported benefits to capital and those with capital , the wealthy individuals, families and business entities. This results in the rich getting richer, the simple fact that they have capital makes them richer. A stock broker produces nothing, contributes nothing to society other than artificially inflate prices of items as they are traded back and forth that result in profit for them. No one benefits from this practice but the elite few, yet it's impact on others in inflation, and the constant artificial rise in prices.

On the other hand, free enterprise seeks to establish laws and government policies that treat the upper, middle and lower classes the same. That is, the dream that hard work and study, dedication, all the now mythical, "American Dream" will result in prosperity.

Free enterprise no longer exists essentially, the system isn't designed that way any longer, instead, there is a whole parasitical class that produces nothing, contributes nothing, yet hoards the vast majority of the wealth without in fact really ever earning it.

I must disagree, friend. What you're describing is corporatism; capitalism is a very simple concept: I take capital (either from an investor in return for a share of the profits, or from my own resources) and use it to build or grow my enterprise. Capital is, by its very definition, wealth used to grow or start an enterprise. Capitalism, as an economic concept, has no relationship between companies and stockholders and inflation and dividends; those are governmental structures created in an attempt to provide a framework for capitalism; and I think we can all agree that framework has failed us.

A stock broker, as you said produces nothing; an investor, on the other hand, produces opportunity.