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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (151211)	9/10/2002 1:14:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1586690

Capitalism isn't anywhere close to 100%. True but if its 40% all the alternatives are more like 5%. That makes it efficient. Free market is a misnomer in a modern, technological society. Some systems are just more controlled than others. Not at all. You can have a very free market in a modern technological society. True we don't have a hundred percent free market but no one ever has. But our market is relatively free compared to the rest of the world, or in terms of how much of the economy is controlled by the government so it still makes sense to talk about the US as a free market economy. It is even less problematic to talk about free market ideas abstractly or hypothetically. And that's why capitalism is inefficient. When the economy's complexity shifts too greatly, the capitalist economy falters and sputters and then some times konks out. Millions or billions of people with trillions of dollars and modern technology are going to want many different things. This will be true whatever type of economic system you have. No person or committee can cope with this complexity as well as a free market. The economy doesn't "konk out" it shifts or sputters then it recovers and drives on normally better then it was before. You're like the guy who said a car can never be better than the Model T. And yes, the analogy is apt. No it is not. Things improve with technology. The cars that are better then the Model T would be like better examples of a free market system. Yes things will get better, but your still driving cars. Replacing it with a socialist system would be like replacing cars with 15 seat bicycles with the steering controlled from a remote central location. They bikes might get better over time, sleeker, more gears, better radio links for the remote controls, less friction in the gears, but they still will be worse then a decent car for most trips. How? There are a million ways......cut down on the maintenance requirements of plant equipment to boost profits.....workers get physically hurt; cut corners on a residential development in order to bring project in early and boost profits.......homeowners end up having greater maintenance expenses; plant cuts corners and does not install proper environmental controls on a chemical plant and dumps noxious chemicals into the local drinking water in order to boost profits......community, domestic animals, wildlife suffer. The list is endless. None of these are strongly connected to the idea of allowing a profit motivation. Most people who are motivated by the desire for profit do not do these things and they happen even worse in socialist or communist systems. There will always be evil people in any system. Your blaming 9/11 on air travel again. Resources are not limited to energy.......there is iron, nickel, copper, aluminum, the rare metals, the rare gases etc. Do you not conceive of a time we run out? Iron is abundant, most of these type of resources can be reused or substititutes can be used (either directly substituting or coming up with a whole new process to do things with different materials if it is needed). If we have enough energy we can grab materials from the asteroids, the moon, mars, the bottom of the ocean, from solids dissolved in the ocean or from 200 miles deep in the earth. Energy is the real long term limit. Tim, don't you understand that the central authority sucked up all the wealth. No I don't understand that because it isn't true. Sure they grabbed tons of it, but a lot of resources where also put towards consumer goods (yes less then here but enough that the people should have had it better then they did) but those resources where largely wasted through inefficiency and through the fact that the resources often went to produce goods and services that where not what people really needed or wanted. You would get far too much of some goods and not nearly enough of most goods, other goods where produced in adequate numbers but where so shoddy that people didn't want to use them or that they quickly broke down and needed to be replaced. Production was not focused on demand, that was an enormous problem. I don't try to do the best stock trades simply for the money although that's part of it. You might be motivated by desire to learn and perfect your skill , or by enjoyment or by other factors but I doubt you would be trading if you knew you could not make any money from it. More good is done by the desire to make money then by any other single factor. The farmer doesn't grow grain, the backer doesn't make bread, and the store doesn't stock it in their bakery section out of their desire to help people. Because of their self interested desire to make money you can have toast or make a sandwich. In Russia, the central authority around the dictator allowed only enough wealth to remain on the lower levels to keep operations at a minimal level. So not only was the Russia worker underpaid but he was given little to work with.....equipment broke down 24/7.....everything was held together with bubble gum. He wasn't encouraged to innovate nor to ask questions. The products they turned out were noticably inferior because the materials and designs they used were noticeably inferior.....consequently, they broke down quickly. How could anyone take pride in their work in that kind of scenario. It might have helped if they had more resources but the main reason that the equipment was shoddy was that the equipment providers did not have to meet the demand for good produce, the designs where inferior because the designer didn't get any benefit from making the effort to produce good designs and he had no way of knowing what type of design people really needed anyway. Everything was to meet a plan which even if created by the wisest and most enlightened minds in history (and of course the commissars where anything but that) could never be close to being right. ours is a capitalist system.....the Japanese and Germans have more socialistic roots than we do. For years now, the Germans and Japanese have turned out better cars and other products then we have. How can that be? Why is the capitalist incentive not enough? The Germans and Japanese produce good cars because of the capitalist incentives. So I don't see your point. If you want to see what Germans produced without capitalist incentives look to East Germany. Their goods tended to be better then what was produced in most of Eastern Europe when it was behind the iron curtain but they where still (with only a few exceptions) inferior to the goods produced in the west. BS......any economic model that's better would have to be somewhat complex and would require some work to develop. Frankly, I am not about to do that just for our amusement. The details would take shiploads worth of documents but the basis can be a sentence or at most a paragraph. Capitalism is a free market where people can buy and sell goods however they want. Socialism is when the government controls the production of goods or otherwise controls the majority of the economy. If you have another choice besides people acting freely, or the government controlling things just list it. It can be a one word answer to the question "Who makes the economic decisions?" Norway and Sweden to name a couple......Canada too I wouldn't call any of them command and control economies. They are more socialist then we are but they are basically capitalist. Tim