: Nice to see someone here who is considered a decidedly capitalist supporter. Also good to see you’ve survived the purge.: Now, to give you some grief (in the form of a commentary):
: : 'Competitors aim at excellence and pre-eminence in accomplishments within a system of mutual cooperation.
: Competitors aim at success. A cheetah wants to catch and eat a gazelle; the gazelle strives to avoid this eventuality. So also, the businessman wishes to accumulate wealth, the consumer to get the goods. Excellence, or even trade, is only incidental to this dynamic. So also, competition is only spuriously connected to excellence. If I can beat my competitor through skullduggery more cheaply than by producing superior quality products, that’s what I’ll do (barring ethics, itself a dynamic subject to competitive influences).
No arguments there. People, like kids, will be people. Some of the best skullduggerers in the world are Presidents who wag their index fingers at us and swear they never, never, ever did certain things. No, I make no claims that Capitalism produces angels. That is up to the individual and his conscience.
: Competition does seem to favor an increase in excellence, however.
: :The function of competition is to assign to every member of a social system that position in which he can best serve the whole of society and all its members. It is a method for selecting the most able man for each performance...
: Actually, what it does is allow people the niche best suited for their survival/prosperity. This is, after all, the whole point of ‘competing’ in the first place. If that niche happens to be professional murder, or bank robbery, then that niche will most eagerly be filled.
Again, no argument there. Some people are born losers. If this happened only in lands where Capitalism was practiced, we could all point our index fingers and say "Ah Ha! Capitalism is to blame!"
I wish it were that easy. I'd be a Commie tommorrow, assuming there were no murderers etc in Communist societies.
: : The pricing process is a social process. It is consummated by an interaction of all members of the society. All collaborate and cooperate, each in the particular role he has chosen for himself in the framework of the division of labor.
: Optimally, this is of course what happens. Optimally, socialism is supposed to do the same thing. The reason that capitalism succeeds so much better than socialism is that, in actual practice, it bears up better. Basically, that is because it can better punish ‘cheaters’, by more directly relating social displeasure with an economic response (i.e., if I sell substandard products, or engage in anti-social behaviors, I will be punished via a medium that allows for a quantification for that reaction - namely, money. So also, the reverse; if I make indispensable goods, or am overly charismatic, I will be rewarded proportionately. This contrasts with socialism, where the educated elite decide such things - a task which they have proved themselves ill-suited for).
Yeah, again. Money, wheather one wants to admit it's power over people or not, can be useful in producing this behavior or that. Like the old saying goes, "If you want to suppress a behavior, tax it." (Although this is not precisely what your point was, taxing may be viewed as a form of punishment)
: Competing in cooperation and cooperating in competition all people are instrumental in bringing about the result, viz., the price structure of the market, the allocation of the factors of production to the various lines of want-satisfaction, and the determination of the share of each individual.'
: If you see competition as ‘capitalism’, and cooperation as ‘socialism’, you start to approach my point - namely, that to get to a socialistic system (mutual trust and cooperation), you must first have an economic environment where those who invest in business enterprises and ventures feel comfortable, and in which profits and accumulated wealth are not arbitrarily seized simply by virtue of their de facto existence (a regulated competition, with established rules that are enforced equitably for all parties concerned).
This may be the stickiest point of all. I agree with you, in principle. I cannot understand the things that drives Bill Gates or Donald Trump to acquire the wealth that they possess. It's beyond my wildest dreams. But who is to say that this person, or that person, is not entitled to make that sort of obscene profit? If my magic wand were working (it's in the shop again, peice 'o crap...) I'd wave it over Billy and say, "Magic wand, ever so kind and gentle, please make Mr. Gates percieve the virtue of noblesse oblige. Let this youthful man, both wise and wiley, discard the role of Robber Baron and assume that of Robin Hood."
The next thing I'd ask of my wand would be to help improve my poetry.
: I would have thought the success of Western-style societies would have made this all empirically plain, but I have found some who can be found to disagree with even this claim. Thus the debate, I suppose.
: Thoughts?
Well Doc, the fix for man's shortcomings doesn't lie in this political/economic system or that one over there. Man is as much of a spiritual being as a physical one. IMHO I don't see how this can be overlooked in any system. I'm certainly not calling for a theocracy but at the same time a system that believes that man is the measure of all things cannot be meaningful, even if everyone is well cared for (remember 1984?).
: D.C.
: P.S. Thank you for your little bits of trivia. They certainly seemed to have enlivened the place up.
No problemo...
