: : BS: A new contributor to the Debate Board has made a big noise of late. Using the language of Objectivism, 'capitalist pig' has forwarded classic Right-wing 'libertarian' views...: CP: If you are going to label me I supposed that will do.
You are the one who said that you were an Objectivist in this post. The label is yours.
: : BS: Objectivism was a popular undergraduate 'philosophy' during the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign...
: CP:Far from heading to the dustbin, free market capitalism is being shown to be the most successful form of economy...
I was putting Objectivism in its historic context, then and now. You do realize there will be historic 'later' I hope...For thousands of years slave economies were 'the most successful' etc., etc.
: You can become more than just a wage earner in a capitalist country. Have you ignored the small entrepreneurial companies that have sprung up in the U.S. over the past decade?
Promises, promises. Here's the facts:
1. Only 10% of Americans own a business or are involved in profit-bearing concerns.(1) The percentage was 20% in 1940.(2)
2. There are 10% less independently-owned businesses than there were a decade ago.(3)
3. Merger activity had increased four times since the Reagan years.(4)
4. Business failures have increased 10% in the last five years.(5)
5. The percentage of Americans now working full-time jobs---which pay an average of 30% less than full-time jobs hourly(6)---has risen to 25% of the workforce(7)
(compared with only 17% in 1985).(8)
6. Annual personal bankruptcies---a sure sign of an unhealthy economy---have doubled since 1985.(9)
New companies in general, like new restaurants specifically (many of which go 'belly up' in a year or two), are not the only gauge of an economyıs strength. What you may be describing are nothing more than phenomena related to business bankruptcies...
: I don't believe Ayn Rand ever called wage earners stupid.
[M]an can survive in only one of two ways---by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.
Any Rand, For The New Intellectual, (Signet, 1961). p. 79.
You know (from reading Atlas Shrugged) that it is the wage-earner who is 'facing nature through an intermediary,' and thus is a 'parasite.' Harsh words. Aristocratic words.
: ...[G]iven the Utopia 2000 take on the fact that you can make people happy by influencing their behavior.
Does not money influence yourbehavior---or are you some autonomous superman (from a paperback novel) who shapes the world around him like so much clay?
: : (Such distinctions [between labor and investment which also has labor in it], of course, are impossible to make---other than arbitrarily---because the industrial revolution irreversibly merged all relations of labor and technology. To treat them as if they could be separated for individual analysis---one potato for you, five potatoes for me---is as disingenuous as treating food and diamond earrings as being equally 'elastic' market components.)
CP: The free market does this automatically no need for heavy thinking on your part BS. This is the beauty of Capitalism you are paid what the market determines you are worth. Economically speaking of course.
This is CP's standard evasion. It demonstrates his* complete lack of any economic knowledge.
To say that an 'invisiblehand'governs all market interactions (when that pesky government gets 'off our backs,' of course) 'automatically,' you (a) are speculating about an 'unknown ideal' which you freely admit has never existed, (b) neglect that social struggle (strikes, supply and demand of labor, the relationship between the two) often 'determines' value regardless of ostensible material worth (in production or the circulation sphere), and (c) neglect the fact that exchange-value (affected strongly by the historically-established subsistence minimum of any given country) is at least as arbitrary as wages.
The 'invisible hand' you speak of neither invisible nor it it the 'impartial force' that the word invisible implies. All markets are planned---to wit, Veblen: '[A business concern] is a means of making money, not of making goods. The production of goods or services, wherever that sort of thing is included among the corporation's affairs, is incidental to the making of money and is carried only so far as will yield the largest net gain in terms of money...'** Supply (amount produced) controls demand (price determined by production time and scarcity), not vice versa (as Alan Greenspan would have you believe).
: CP: A very simplistic and incorrect synopsis of Atlas shrugged.
Forgive me. I don't usually cite paperback novels in economic discussions...
: : Therefore, through the mechanism of supply and demand, quality education is put out of the reach of most people, thus providing a low-skill workforce as well as an ideological justification for paying them so little.
: CP: In other words capitalists are intentionally keeping everyone dumb so we can have cheap labor???
Bingo, genius, you're catching on.
How else do you explain that only 25% of all American jobs require nothing more than a high school education (10) while your supposedly impartial 'invisible hand' gets only 23% of the population educated (11) through the mechanism of supply and demand?
: I will have to finish answering all your BS another time.
Do me a favor and don't bother. You're obviously not going to be swayed by facts, logic, or books you never heard of, and I would like to hear (and participate in) some fresh discussions...
__________________
* I suspect 'capitalist pig' is a he because Rand's antiquated sexism could not possibly attract any female partisans.
** Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times [1923], (Beacon, 1967), p. 85.
Sources:
1. Business Week, 28 November 1994, p. 34.
2. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford, 1956), p. 63.
3. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997, table 1218, p. 738.
4. Ibid., table 859, p. 550.
5. Ibid., table 854, p. 548.
6. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, table 668, p. 429.
7. Ibid., table 630, p. 402.
8. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1990, table 642, p. 387.
9. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, table 847, p. 545.
10. Business Week, op. cit.
11. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996, table 243, p. 160.
None.
