Why do you think socialism will work for America after multiple countries have failed under it?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

Corporations do not intend to sell tainted meat to people in the first place: it is bad for business. What the FDA actually does is it institutes very harsh standards and inspection rules that prevent smaller players from entering the market.

Extreme? Think about the narrative you are suggesting: no one has ever seen a corporation go rogue and threaten entire nations, yet this happens all the time with governments - and yet I am supposed to believe that governments are keeping corporations in check, and otherwise they will abuse entire nations? In any other field such an obvious discrepancy between the claim and the real world evidence would be almost instantly disqualifiable, yet in politics for some reason we are allowed to make up scenarios in our heads and claim that they somehow describe the reality.
I have never understood what is so extreme in the idea that people should be free to perform voluntary exchanges without being threatened by third parties. Are legalised violence and coercion somehow necessary and valuable aspects of society that must be treasured?

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar You are wrong to think companies are above selling tainted meat:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/world/americas/brazil-food-companies-bribe-scandal-salmonella.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13ecoli.html
https://patch.com/us/across-america/e-coli-tainted-ground-beef-sickens-177-across-10-states

You have made the dirty shameful little bureaucrat that lives in my head sad.

Do you really think they would not still be selling the meat even if it was bad for business? What if they first engaged in a scenario like the one I asked about above, where they are the only meat provider? Conversely, what if they are a very small company and can not afford to sell meat that isn't tainted?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

Obviously everything happens every now and then, but look at the backlash these scandals have caused. For that matter, again, on a free market there are rules against selling faulty products to customers, and you would have a very good court case on your hands if you got poisoned by the food you bought.
If someone cannot afford to sell meat that is not tainted, that is fine, but they should make it clear that the meat is tainted in their advertisement. Otherwise it is nothing but a fraud.

Look at Vietnam, where the street trade is essentially completely unrestricted. You can set up shop anywhere you want by just putting a chair and a few bags of goodies; no inspections, no rules, nothing. Yet the alleged horrors do not happen; people do not get poisoned all the time, customers are happy and return many times to their favorite partners.

In general, whenever someone says that regulation X is necessary, you look around the world and see that regulation lacking in many practical cases, with no alleged horrors occurring. This is a pretty interesting pattern. 
Again, having lived in many different countries, I have heard these "We cannot do away with X without serious repercussions" so many times... I live in one country, and something cannot be done away with. I move to a different country, and there it has been done away with and everything is fine - but now they have some other regulation they cannot do away with, which is lacking in the first country... This is getting tiresome, honestly.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar What if the company doesn't know the meat is tainted?

People get sick from eating food from street vendors all the time, we don't hear about it a lot because the effects are usually limited by scale. A lot of these countries you can't even drink the water, or get a drink that has ice in it, even places that are more developed like the Philippines. The scale matters a lot, because in Vietnam the meat is sourced a lot differently than the more centralized system in the US where 4 companies own 75% of the market.

If we were to relax regulations, what would happen as these companies got rid of all their inspectors and let their safety equipment rust?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

If the company is managed so poorly that its owners do not know their own product, then I do not expect this company to last. And, regardless, customer complaints and private arbitration lawsuits will let it know.

It does happen, but it is not a risk serious enough for people to not buy their food there. They can, of course, go to Walmart and buy food that is 10 times more expensive, but more reliable - but most people decide that it is not worth it. Letting them decide is great!
Back when I lived in Russia, we would buy almost all fruits and vegetables from such vendors. For over 15 years, every week. Not a single issue, despite lack of any substantial regulation and overlook, and even despite the market being extremely corrupt and full of tricksters. We have noses and eyes, after all; it is not like spotting spoiled meat or rotten fruit is that hard with a bit of experience.

Do you assume that quality control only exists because of regulations? There are countless independent private inspector companies, for example, that are welcomed by the food selling companies and are even paid to inspect everything - getting a mark from a respectable inspector company is a solid advertisement tool, especially when all of your serious competitors already have this mark. There are countless customer review websites as well. Finally, there is personal experience: chances are most places you have shopped at were recommended to you by someone you know, and they would not recommend something that is known to poison customers.

Markets have countless means of making sure that the customers get what they want; that is the core function of the market, to make sure that people that want something can get in touch with those that can provide them with this something. While there are certain things to question, this is something that is so fundamental to the markets, that it almost should just be accepted as an axiom.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar I believe all of these private food inspection companies exist so that companies can get a benchmark of how they are doing so that they will pass federal safety standards.

If there is no federal safety standard, a private company that does this becomes an unnecessary expense because it serves no purpose beyond an auxiliary expense. Why would a company pay extra money when they can keep that money as profit?

Remember, the big 4 meat companies don't interact directly with the consumers who eat their products, they sell them to the stores who then sell them to the consumers. You might argue they will lose customers, however once they have no competition, that is unlikely to occur, because there will not be any other individual or company that can access the resources needed to feed everyone.

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

These companies though existed long before FDA and other similar organisations were created. In fact, they go back as far as to, at least, the Roman Republic times, when governmental food control was not even on a radar.
People want to be sure that the product they are getting is not going to harm their organisms, and the market, as always, provides supply of the respective product. Companies, in turn, want to advertise themselves, and getting an endorsement from a respectable inspector company is a huge plus. It goes far beyond just food; in all industries I know of such organisations exist, and their services are in high demand.

There is huge overabundance of food in modern developed countries; the biggest problem right now is not producing enough food, but not getting enough food ruined due to being unable to sell it in time (in Japan many grocery stores actually put a lot of food on a 50% discount in the evening, as the food expires on the next morning and they want to sell as much of it as possible). Worrying that food supply is going to be monopolised by a small number of companies is not something I would do.
It can happen, however, if the government keeps pushing for higher standards, and only a few large corporations at some point will be able to satisfy them without going bankrupt and losing goods. That is the real threat here.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar So what you are saying is that people should die so that we know which companies we can buy safe foods from then?

Plaffelvohfen

@MayCaesar

The core problem with both libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, is their deeply (I would say radical) individualistic nature... Humans are gregarious animals, to be human is to exist socially, and because both ideas (libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism) go against that biological drive, they're doomed to fail... Whenever and wherever human existed, unions always appeared in different forms (family, tribes, nations, etc) because 1; We are not created equal... 2: There are definite advantages in number... And so the lone individuals would also have to group or be disadvantaged... I understand you reject the societal "we", but it's like rejecting hunger, sure one can starve itself to death but it's a biologically ingrained drive and trying to go against this kind of drive is counterproductive...

Coercion is a part of existing, we are constantly coerced by reality so it's only a matter of degree right? Now to diminish coercion (it can never be eradicated), you can try to argue about protecting individual rights with laws, but rights, even "fundamental rights" are just ideas, cute ideas for sure and I like them, but they're still just ideas that have no consequences whatsoever unless you can actually enforce them through, coercion... To think that just having laws written somewhere would in any way actually prevent anything, would be beyond naive, correct? 

Who writes laws if not groups of people that agree on certain things? Now different groups have different laws obviously, because like minded people tend to group together of course, want to guess which group will be able to enforce their laws with the most ease? Yup, the most numerous group... At this point, those "fundamental rights" one may think he has, will be challenged and may well be denied by the force of numbers... You can die fighting for those insubstantial rights if that's your thing, I respect that, but that's how things have worked for thousands of years and I can't picture a future when it won't be the case considering human nature... 

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

Why would people die? It takes a lot to ruin sold food to the point where it is dangerous for your health, yet looks fine. If someone wants to go this far, they likely have some dangerous motives and do not care much about the law anyway.

Once again, companies have a lot to lose from killing their customers, and the market already has countless means at providing quality control. It is not like in the lack of governmental regulations nobody is held responsible.


@Plaffelvohren ;

Individualism does not go against our biological drive. There is nothing in our nature suggesting collectivism; there is a lot suggesting cooperation, which individualism promotes. Individualism does not prohibit people from forming unions, it just prohibits the tyranny of the collective.
People in the past formed coercive collectives, because they could not survive the harsh outside world otherwise. We obviously are not living in such a world any more.

The ideas of human rights have pretty practical consequences, considering how different people's lives are in countries that have embraced them, compared to those that have not.

I have heard all these attributions to some immovable forces (biology, culture, tradition, etc.) many times. In Russia or Belarus a lot of people believe that they need a dictator, because that is in their culture and in their genes. In China, a lot of people believe that they need a harsh totalitarian system, otherwise they will not be able to figure out how to navigate life in the presence of so many freedoms.
Then, there are those who do not let it stop them. There was no reason to assume in 1945 that Japan, a historically totalitarian and collectivist society, can suddenly embrace the ideas of liberal democracy and thrive, yet it happened on the timeline of just one generation. 
Free markets to a large extent are implemented in all developed countries nowadays and are working awesomely, and yet we suddenly are to remember our biology and say, "You know, guys, the ideas of freedom are actually contrary to our nature?" I think not.

Your argument seems to logically lead to "If people wanted libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism, it would already have been implemented, yet it is not, which shows that your system is not to their liking". Does the same argument apply to North Korea or Syria: that people live the way they do there because they choose it? No, this is not how humanity works. We do not always make the right choices, and often our ideas are also wrong.
There are many reasons behind people ending up living in coercive systems, but their opposition to the ideas of freedom per se do not seem to be one of them, considering how all societies have countless dissidents and people wanting to be freer. Perhaps the reason is the same as the one of a drug addict getting hooked up on cocaine: it is not that they want to have such a miserable life, it is that the choices they have made brought them there, and now they lack the determination to make a change.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar ;

MayCaesar said:

@Happy_Killbot

Why would people die? It takes a lot to ruin sold food to the point where it is dangerous for your health, yet looks fine. If someone wants to go this far, they likely have some dangerous motives and do not care much about the law anyway.

Once again, companies have a lot to lose from killing their customers, and the market already has countless means at providing quality control. It is not like in the lack of governmental regulations nobody is held responsible.

People would die because that is what caused the FDA to be created in the first place. Canned foods basically allowed exactly this to happen, companies would sell spoiled meat or otherwise inedible products, which were artificially colored and flavored to be identical to unspoiled meat. In addition, a lot of medicines would contain little valuable medicine, sometimes being mostly cocaine, or using diethylene glycol as an anti-bacterial, what is now known as anti-freeze.
https://www.fdareview.org/issues/history-of-federal-regulation-1902-present/#p04

Why should a company care if some of their products kill people so long as they are making a quick profit? If someone engaged in shady business practices to make a profit, isn't it possible that they could get completely away with it and have a rich retirement before anyone knew what was up?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

First, instances of it still happen, despite FDA; it is not like people willing to poison customers care that much about the law. Second, like I said, poisoning customers is illegal even in the lack of FDA-like organisations, or even state as such. And third, poisoning customers is not a sustainable strategy.

How are you going to make a quick profit by selling a faulty product? The first day you poison a few customers, the next day the information about your practices is all over the news and an enraged crowd in front of your store demands justice, and you are getting hundreds lawsuits from the affected people. What are you going to do, grab your money and run away to Africa? You can do that regardless of any regulations if you really want to.

Finally, you are making the assumption that it is somehow very easy to trick people into buying and consuming dangerous products. We have noses, eyes, tongues... It takes a great deal of effort to make food dangerous for your health in a way that makes it hard to detect by superficial observation. I imagine someone willing to go this far probably has some insidious motives and, again, is not very much concerned with the legal consequences of doing so.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar When outbreaks and contamination do occur, how long do these problems persist?

In an ancap system, what makes this illegal, and how would those standards be enforced?

If poisoning customers isn't a sustainable model, then is selling cocaine, cigarettes, fatty food, sugary food, heroine, any other opiate, toys with lead based paints, or certain pesticides sustainable?

Does every kind of poison take effect immediately, and effect everyone?

If there was a way to cheaply reproduce the smell/taste/look of fresh meat, and/or mask the smell/taste/look of bad meat that was beyond the ability of any person to tell the difference, would you consider changing your stance on how difficult it was to do this?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

We have already covered this; there are many possible ways they can be enforced, but the most obvious way is through societal ostracizion, similar to how banks refuse to deal with clients with bad credit scores. If you somehow have tricked a few people by buying something they should not buy, and refused to pay any restitution private arbitration deems necessary, then you become blacklisted by all respectable individuals and organisations and become stuck with the "black market", which, considering that in anarcho-capitalism the regular market already allows for a lot of freedoms, means that you are stuck with interacting with the worst of the worst. That is a fate, in many ways, far worse than any incarceration.

It does not take too much to discourage undesirable behaviors. Many people are even afraid of asking a person out for a date in the fear of rejection, and it stops them from ever getting a partner - certainly threat of physical violence is not necessary to deter people. 
This is why in virtually all papers I have read on the subject there has been found no meaningful correlation between the strictness of the law and the amount of undesirable behavior - across countless very different fields.

Selling the things you have listed is sustainable because the buyers know what they are buying. Nobody buys cigarettes, thinking, "Oh, it is absolutely not harmful to my health". People buying these things are addicted to them and willingly accept being poisoned.
As for the lead-covered toys and pesticides, the health dangers from them are too negligible for most people to care about the risks.

Look, there are always ways to do something terrible, and there is always a possibility that you will get away with this. Madoff was pulling the legs of some of the savviest business people in the world for decades, in one of the most surveillance-heavy countries in the democratic world, and only got caught by an accident.
Does this mean that we should plug everyone into a matrix and force everything on them or something? Life contains risks. There are, however, ways to severely minimise those risks. If you are so paranoid about everything, then use the judgement of independent private quality control companies. Every time you want to buy something, look it up in the Internet, read the independent testimonies and make your decision; if you cannot find such testimonies, then do not buy the product. It is all about how far you personally are willing to go to assure your safety; this is not a reason to force harsh standards on everyone else. Not everyone wants a nanny sheltering them from the real world.

Have you ever bought a cheap used car? What you usually do is hire an independent mechanic or two to do an inspection of the car and a test drive; this way you know that what you are buying is up to your expectations. That is how it is supposed to work on a free market: you take reasonable precautions and, depending on your risk tolerance, invest a certain amount of time, effort and money into addressing the safety concerns. What the free market is not supposed to do is provide a wall between you and the danger that takes away a lot of your freedoms, but allegedly shields you from consequences of miscalculated action.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar I really don't see how social ostracizion is supposed to solve anything, or credit scores for that matter, Trump is socially ostracized on an hourly basis. For that matter, what even would be the business model for a credit agency that deals with something like business trust worthiness? Regular credit bureaus make money by selling credit info to banks for taking out loans, but in this case the end user would be the general public, many of whom we have established will be too poor to afford anything having no land or production capability or anything to sell besides their time and labor.

Lets say that the meat (since that is what we are primarily talking about here, but it could apply universally) was tainted because one disgruntled employee decided it would be funny to defecate into the meat supply before it is packaged. No one sees this happen. Who would be held responsible? If it is the company itself, then then what happens if the company goes out of business, and new businesses form with the same disgruntled employee who repeats this offense.

Nobody buys cigarettes, thinking, "Oh, it is absolutely not harmful to my health". 

I guess you don't have any friends who smoke then. I know too many people who will say exactly that and will tell you all about their uncle who smoked a pack a day and lived to be 95.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/200000-die-year-pesticide-poisoning-170308140641105.html

What prevents private industry from being corrupt, i.e, lets say a drug company adds addictive substances to their product and then pays the independent quality control companies off?

I started this off trying to get to slavery but I kind of squirreled on the whole meat thing.

Before we talked about how it is more than likely that some businesses would become what I am calling hegemonic businesses, basically they would own all the everything in a region, and more or less supplant themselves as a regional government and collect a pseudo-tax that would basically be a commission on all profits made by other hyper-businesses (independent businesses operating within a business). These hegemonic businesses would of course be the local law and provide safety, stability, and infrastructure.

Should one of these hegemons achieve a high degree of military power, they might engage in aggressive actions that would be carefully planned to appear justified. What would stop one of these powers from taking over a competing region and committing all the abuses that are normally associated with governments?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

Well, look at what happens on Amazon or eBay, which use user rating systems. Individuals who sell poor quality products quickly go out of business, because the costs of producing those products are too big compared to the gain they get by selling a small fraction of those products and wasting the rest that nobody wants to buy.
Add to this more direct social ostracizion, such as, say, all grocery stores in your area being closed to you due to your poor reputation - and you will get a pretty terrible predicament nobody wants to be in.

I do not know who would be responsible in that particular case. Who is responsible in the current system? When there is lack of sufficient evidence, generally everyone walks free, and the company management agrees to settle the dispute with money and a public apology.

Well, people who think that cigarettes are not harmful to their health have only themselves to blame; all cigarette packs nowadays have a lot of information about the harm written right on them.

Competition prevents the industry from being corrupt. If a drug company adds additive substances to its product and another company does not, then the latter company has a lot to gain by paying a lot of money to a quality control company to do an inspection and make the situation public. Unless the drug company can somehow buy off the entire market (which, in light of what was talked about earlier, is impossible in practice), they are not going to get away with this.
The government, on the other hand, faces no competition. So which entity is more likely to end up corrupt, in your opinion?

What would aggressive actions by a private company accomplish? On a competitive market, companies fighting each other are at a severe disadvantage, when other companies instead put their resources together into mutually beneficial projects.
If some company does initiate such actions, I imagine there will be a severe backlash from the rest of the market, and the company will quickly go bankrupt.
In any case, this has never happened in human history, while it happens all the time with governments. Why fear phantoms, when there are pretty real and obvious villains out there?

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar How exactly would a rating system like that work when there might only be one super-vendor of a given product in a region such as what Walmart actually does, or say a hegemonic business only allows one particular vendor (most likely the one they already own) thus preventing any regional competition. Would it matter if that business had bad service or high prices, or bad reviews if there are no other options available?

I'm no legal expert, but I but looking at some actual cases it seems  a chain of suing ensues. The consumer sues the store, the store sues the packager, the packager sues the farm. Kind of puts everyone in a bad spot but I guess it works to put the blame on who was ultimately guilty. Even without evidence of who contaminated the food the company might investigate and increase internal surveillance or something, IDK this is all speculative.

Why is the label on cigarettes, there, or what happened that makes it a requirement?

I kind of ask this already, but this question is very similar to the first. In the context of a hegemonic business having a regional monopoly, would it matter that a company was selling bad products if the consumers will have no other practical options?

To answer your question about which will be more corrupt, the best answer I can think of is "yes". Suppose you take your philosophy of individualism and apply it to this situation. Is it the government, the business, or individuals which are corrupt?

What would they accomplish through violence you ask? Why would they do anything but cooperate you suggest?

I really shouldn't have to answer these questions because they are so basic that I am having trouble understanding how someone of your intellect could not already understand this. Literally pick the "why" of any war in history and you have a potential answer. Resource acquisition, power, control, people, slaves, threats, you caught your wife in bed with your competition, etc.

I mentioned before about how there may be hyper-businesses, ones that operate within the jurisdiction of another business. Suppose in a world where anar-capitalism is the norm, a hyper-anar-capitalist started making the same arguments that you were right now in support of replacing all businesses with hyper-businesses who have never committed any crimes.

If your argument is that governments do the damage and businesses do not, except for all the exceptions that I or most other people can make, then why are you not a hyper-anar-capitalist, since those (by necessity of not existing) have never done anything wrong?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

In a free competitive market monopoly will almost never be the case, nor is it ever the case now (Walmart is not a monopoly, and there are always countless smaller stores near any Walmart).
Assuming there is a local monopoly somehow, people are never restricted to local options alone. Companies like Amazon deliver goods across the entire country, and even if you live in a village with just one store and nothing else, you always have options to shop at countless other places.

Most cases seem to just be the consumer suing the company and getting a quick payoff. It usually is easier for a large profitable company to pay a settlement fee than go through a lengthy process of endless lawsuits, having their reputation suffer as a result due to constantly being mentioned in the news.

The label on cigarettes is mainly caused by the need of companies to defend themselves against consumer right company lawsuits: the more potential dangers they mention on the pack, the fewer opportunities for a valid lawsuit there will be.

Wars are caused by governments and various rebel groups, coercive entities. Coercive entities have very different motives and incentives from voluntary profit-based organisations. 
I will ask again: what does a private company on a free competitive market have to gain from initiating violence against, say, a rival company? Companies do not have to constantly cooperate, but intentionally damaging each other through violence drains their resources and ruins their reputation and makes them less competitive.

I am not saying that businesses never do damage. My point in distinction between businesses and governments in not in how some hard physical laws governing them differ; I am talking instead about incentives. A government or any other legalised coercive monopoly has every incentive to trample on people's rights and exploit them by taking from them and never giving back. A business existing in a competitive environment has very different incentives: to please its customers, so they choose to trade with it and not with its competitors.
The theoretical scenario in which one company becomes a sizeable monopoly to the point at which its incentives change to the ones similar to those of the government is highly unlikely, but, I suppose, is not entirely ruled out. Considering that it has never happened throughout over 6 thousand years across countless systems, cultures and locations, however, tells me that this is not something to seriously worry about - certainly not nearly as much as the possibility of the government abusing its power, which, interestingly enough, occupies the opposite extreme: it has happened in every single system in every single culture in every single location.

Your question of who is corrupt is quite rhetorical. Corruption is not a dot, it is a cloud, if you will. Individuals and organisations become corrupt not independently from each other. However, some types of societal organisation beg for corruption to occur due to perverse incentives they create, while other types, instead, provide hard and natural means of fighting that corruption.
I am not naive; corruption and abuse will always exist to some degree, in any system, in any culture, in any society. The question is: are people incentivised to be corrupt, or are they incentivised to fight corruption? Corruption has few benefits when people interact with mutual interest in mind; corruption arises when some individuals want to get something from other individuals by not giving anything in return. And the free market highly discourages such behavior, making it mostly unsustainable, while the government is pretty much based on this model, and the only competition there exists between various parties and candidates - as an organisation, the government is monolithic, and features no mechanisms to fight corruption. Literally the only way a government is ever going to fight its own corruption is if suddenly a large fraction of highly moral individuals gets into it and, against all the incentives, starts fighting against the rules that benefit them - and how likely is such a group of people to ever come to power in a corrupt system in the first place? I hope you see the problem here.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar What exactly would guarantee that there would be other places to shop, since a large enough hegemonic business (it wouldn't have to be that big really) could stop trade at other places?

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2000/highlights/labels/index.htm

I'm going to answer your question the same way again. In the context of waring nations, why would they do so since it drains the countries resources and makes them less survivable, through damage to the country? The reasons are exactly the same, sometimes it is as simple as they can. Not everyone is completely rational all the time you know, In fact mostly people are not rational at all, and as I argue, can not be rational ever.

You should read up on the East India company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_rule_in_India

What are the motivations for corruptions within a business?

MayCaesar

@Happy_Killbot

There are no guarantees in life, but, once again, on a free market the barrier for entry is very low, so even if someone has managed to literally buy off everything in a certain market field (hard to imagine how it can happen with billions people able to produce it, in principle, but suppose it does somehow), competitors can always arise easily. The business will not get away with selling lousy products for long.

Nations war not because it makes them richer; they war because of the whims of the ruling class. Dictators are not interested in profit, as they already own the whole country; they can now indulge in their personal desires with no regard to how bad it can be for the country.
This is not the case in companies which depend on the profit to survive in the world of competitive free market, which exist on the investments from shareholders and purchases from customers, etc.
The incentives are very-very different, and so are the outcomes. Incentives do not depend on the person's rationality, they depend on what taking various actions gains the individual. Take the most irrational person in the world and put them in conditions of extremely strong incentives to succeed, and they will have to try really hard to self-sabotage.

British incursions in India were a result of mercantilist governmental policies and are not an example of a free market company running amok. In fact, it is now consensus among the historians that the entire venture was actually a net loss, that is the Britain invested more money into the Indian companies than got back. For a business on a market competitive enough it would be a suicide; for the government, it does not matter that much, because civilians pay the price, not the leaders.

Motivations for any corruption are pretty obvious: people want to take shortcuts and have easy gains. Corruption has adverse effects on productivity, however. Again, for the government it does not matter, as its leaders are going to be well off no matter how inefficient it is. For a business on a competitive market, it is a death sentence.
Which is why you see actual corporations fight corruption inside them so vigorously. Even the most minor transgressions are not tolerated. You made a decision and it cost the company a lot of money? You are going to resign tomorrow. And how often do politicians resign when their policies fail or their promises go broken? Usually it takes, at least, mass country-wide demonstrations for weeks for the government to even consider firing any of its high-ranked officials.

piloteer

Happy_Killbot said:

@MayCaesar So if we were to model the wealth of individuals, we would find that it should be exponential. However this comes with a caveat, because the amount of resources available is finite.

Would we therefore expect all resources to gradually move into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and what does this imply for those who do not have access to those resources?

Since when has the amount of resources become finite? Wealth is something that can be created by little means, and there is no end to how much of it can be created. Beyond that there's also the fact that resources are not necessarily the prime ingredient for creating wealth. The US economy is now a service based economy, and many of those services do not need any resources whatsoever to create wealth. Wealth can be created by tailoring someone else's investments (liquid assets like property) to become more valuable. It takes no resources at all to have the knowledge to know how to make someone else's investments more valuable in the long run. By offering wealth management services, someone can create wealth without any material resources going into their investment at all.

You also leave out the potential of any kind of labor intensive services that take little resources to be able to build wealth. Hardscapes for new buildings, and the maintaining of those landscapes do not take resources other than whatever equipment is needed to complete the job, but the most important thing in this kind of scenario is the labor itself. Labor is not a finite resource. If there are areas where resources are draining, either the knowhow of the service based industries, or the hard labor of the labor industry, or both of those things can be combined to create solutions to the problem of dwindling resources.          

Your idea that since resources are finite (which is not necessarily true) that means the possible creation of wealth itself is also finite is incomplete and not accurate at all. Wealth can be created by anybody who is free to create it, and there is no end to the amount of wealth that person can create, just as there is no end to how much others in society are able to create as well. So long as a system of economic freedom is in place where people are free to create wealth, wealth itself is not a finite resource. Just because only a few people become vastly wealthy, it doesn't mean there is only so much money to be had and the rest of society must now share the meager leftovers of the super rich. All others do have the ability to create wealth of their own, and how rich someone else becomes does not affect how rich other people can become. Wealth is not a pie that everybody must share. Wealth can be created, and sometimes without any material resources.   

You also seem to project an unfair representation of wealth distribution. Just because there are a very small few who are able to become unspeakably wealthy (and I know that Bernie is correct about the top 1% owning more that the bottom 90%) that doesn't mean the bottom 90% are actually impoverished. They are only impoverished in comparison to the ultra rich in that same society. In a free economic system, there is obviously going to be a vast wealth gap between the top 1% and the bottom 1%. But your idea of the the poorest people in a free market system is based on your idea of the richest people in that very same system. For a more genuine representation of the poor people in that specific economic system, it would be prudent to consider the poorest portions of society in the poorest nations on earth as well. It is also not a fair representation of "poor" because you also do not take into consideration the poorest people in society throughout what information we can gather from history.

 It's worth noting here that the largest wealth gap probably took place during the industrial revolution. But it's also worth noting that because of the industrial revolution there were more people taken out of poverty then in any other time in the past. They were put into an economic place where they could spend money on things they wanted instead of only things they needed, and this was done on a scale that dwarfs any other comparable circumstances in history. Not only did the bulk of industrialized nations come into a place of economic comfort, their quality of life, the quality of their food, and their life expectancy also went up, and those figures also do not have any comparative circumstances in history because the industrial revolution dwarfs all other social, political, and economic events throughout history.

I'm certainly not arguing that free markets make poverty go away. And I do have an understanding of the disadvantage of being really poor because I grew up poor. I won't get into the social structures that I believe are put into place that exacerbates those disadvantages and who I feel is the biggest of culprits because I do not believe this is the particular forum for that discussion.  I will say that I believe the structures in place that enforce those disadvantages are social constructions alone. I think you are capable of giving us a more fair representation of the ultra poor and ultra rich and still have the ability to make a persuasive case for us. I'm just saying that I haven't seen that truly genuine representation from you here as of yet. 

Thanx                              

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar You suggest that companies would be able to spring up in response to abuses by larger ones, however you already know that this is false, because we have talked about the company mining towns in the past. You defend the selling of a product or service as being something that can not last forever, but why don't you defend the buying of a lousy product or service? Selling is only half of the equation isn't it?

In the example of company mining towns, the workers sell labor and buy private currency, which can only be spent at company stores, effectively creating a small internal economy. Doe this example violate the potential for consumers to purchase from competitors, since they will be unlikely to accept the internal currency generated by the private industry on account of it is not regulated and could be printed infinitely to acquire all of a competitor's stock?

If I gave an example or you found evidence of a dictator who engaged in conquest for the purpose of gaining profit, would you change your mind about countries being uninterested in profit?

Conversely, If I gave an example or you found evidence of a company acting not to gain profit but to gain power, would you change your mind about companies always acting to gain wealth?

I am not saying that businesses never do damage. My point in distinction between businesses and governments in not in how some hard physical laws governing them differ; I am talking instead about incentives. A government or any other legalised coercive monopoly has every incentive to trample on people's rights and exploit them by taking from them and never giving back. A business existing in a competitive environment has very different incentives: to please its customers, so they choose to trade with it and not with its competitors.
The theoretical scenario in which one company becomes a sizeable monopoly to the point at which its incentives change to the ones similar to those of the government is highly unlikely, but, I suppose, is not entirely ruled out. Considering that it has never happened throughout over 6 thousand years across countless systems, cultures and locations, however, tells me that this is not something to seriously worry about - certainly not nearly as much as the possibility of the government abusing its power, which, interestingly enough, occupies the opposite extreme: it has happened in every single system in every single culture in every single location.

Can you find no evidence that the East India company disproves your position by having incentive to commit atrocities typically associated with governments?

Motivations for any corruption are pretty obvious: people want to take shortcuts and have easy gains. Corruption has adverse effects on productivity, however. Again, for the government it does not matter, as its leaders are going to be well off no matter how inefficient it is. For a business on a competitive market, it is a death sentence.
Which is why you see actual corporations fight corruption inside them so vigorously. Even the most minor transgressions are not tolerated. You made a decision and it cost the company a lot of money? You are going to resign tomorrow. And how often do politicians resign when their policies fail or their promises go broken? Usually it takes, at least, mass country-wide demonstrations for weeks for the government to even consider firing any of its high-ranked officials.

Can you find no evidence that companies ever take shortcuts to get easy gains, and that these gains are always a death sentence for the company?

Happy_Killbot

@piloteer ;

Since when has the amount of resources become finite?

Since the beginning of the universe. The Universe is finite, the planet is finite, it's resources finite, the amount of information is finite, the amount of energy is finite, the amount entropy can raise is finite, it is basic cosmology. Even services have a max limit because entropy will make it finite, at some point there will be no energy differential to run calculations necessary to do this.

piloteer

@Plaffelvohfen

The economic aspect of this discussion is minor compared to your argument because you have truly come to the heart of the difference between capitalism and socialism. It's really individualism vs collectivism. I personally feel your assessment of libertarianism is incomplete. We are social creatures, but who's to say society is not a mass of individuals rather than individuals just being a tiny piece in a giant collective?

Consider individualism and whether it actually means to be so self centered that we don't even consider others existence to be of any importance. For someone to be genuinely righteous when it comes to being charitable, do we not need some greed to be involved in wanting to help others? If donating makes someone feel better about themself, they are not immoral for feeling better about themself for knowing they helped others. But the end result of that donation is the want to feel better about themselves. Being truly righteous in acts of charity is greedy in and of itself, but it still is righteous and charitable.

 Individualism doesn't mean everybody becomes Nietzsche's ubermensch asshat who is ready to take everybody out who gets in their way. Individualism is just a realization that it's impossible to expect someone to care more about all of society than they care about their own families, or friends, or coworkers, or anybody who gives their life meaning. If there are people in our lives that we truly love, is it wrong to care more about them than other people that we may or may not even know? It's a truly righteous act to be charitable, and as I've claimed, it's also greedy, and that greed does nothing to diminish that righteousness. But to expect others to be as readily charitable, to the point that we believe they should be forced to be charitable, is that really righteous or charitable? Those kind of sentiments do not even approach righteousness, and seem more akin to corruption.                         

piloteer

@Happy_Killbot

I'm sorry, but I believe you can do better than that when demonstrating the finite nature of resources. Especially since none of that overcomes my point about how creating wealth doesn't necessarily need any material resources in advance. Hard labor, and intellectual knowhow are also ingredients that can be used to create wealth, and entropy is not a factor that will diminish those things. It doesn't take computational conversion to make someone's investment more valuable over time. It just takes knowhow, and that is not a finite resource. Once there is a business problem that arises, then a solution is something that can be learned by at least somebody. And as soon as that solution is learned by somebody, it can be learned by anybody.

Perhaps the universe is finite, but our lifetimes, and the entire span of human existence is very unlikely to be able to outlast the span of the existence of our entire universe. As far as we're concerned, when it comes to the universe as a whole, from our point of view, it is infinite (infinite doesn't necessarily mean endless, it just means it's to much for us to comprehend).      

I'm saddened by the fact that you didn't even address the point I made about your comparison of the poor from the rich is a relative comparison at best. You also didn't address the point I made about how an extreme wealth gap is not indicative of a failed economic system, and how the industrial revolution brought more people out of poverty than any other social, economic, or political event in human history, and it dwarves any potential comparisons by leaps and bounds. Yet, the largest wealth gap in human existence took place because of that same circumstance.   

Happy_Killbot

@piloteer I actually did cover your concerns, maybe you just don't know it.

I don't have time to give an in depth explanation of how entropy works, but needless to say that calculations cause entropy to rise. This is why your CPU gets hot, all the energy used gets converted into waste heat as the CPU does calculations. You brain does the same thing, just much more efficiently. After the heat death of the universe, there can be no useful calculation done thus no investing can happen.

Besides that, human lifetime and thinking ability is finite in and of itself. Therefore there are fundamental limits on what we as humans can comprehend and accomplish.

Anyways, this fundamental truth isn't important if I ask the question differently. I ask:

"So if we were to model the wealth of individuals, we would find that it should be exponential. However this comes with a caveat, because the amount of resources available is finite.

Would we therefore expect all resources to gradually move into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and what does this imply for those who do not have access to those resources?"

If we assume that resources are infinite, I can ask a similar question:

"We could assume that resources are infinite and that rate of resource acquisition is based on how much resources you have to devote to obtaining new resources.

Would we therefore expect that most resources exploited be in the hands of a few people, or in the hands of many people? and new resources yet to be exploited be found in the hands of a few people or many people?"

piloteer

@Happy_Killbot

If you haven't got the time right now, I will wait for you to have more time available for saturation coverage of my argument. 

Happy_Killbot

@piloteer I do not intend to make any arguments in this thread. I am just asking questions, and when necessary making statement of fact, because my goal is to make MayCaesar recognize the flaws in his own stance, particularly that of anarcho-capitalism.

piloteer

@Happy_Killbot

I cannot attest to MayCaesars stance on anarcho-capitalism, as I do not prefer that economic system myself. I'm more of a laissez faire capitalist myself. But given that, I do adamantly reject the fundamental philosophy of socialism, especially collectivism. It was my intention to try and infuse a different perspective on the issue of socialism in the hopes it would give us a clearer picture than simple comparisons between the rich and the poor that are relative. I'm not trying to argue against socialism directly, but instead attack the issue of collectivism. 

As far as your claim that we as humans have an end point to our comprehensive ability, that's not yet been seen, nor is there any idea of such a point insight. That claim is really just speculation at best, but a type of speculation that is very flirtatious with falsity. We have created computers that have the ability to store vast amounts of information beyond what we can, and there's no proof that they won't be able to do so with less space and energy than we use for us to store information. There is also no proof that the ability of computers won't be able to possess computational abilities beyond what we have, and do so with minimal space and energy as well. Your claim that our comprehensive and laborious abilities are also finite is mere speculation as there is no end to any of those abilities in sight.

 The pattern for human comprehension seems to be on my side here, because whenever we have thought that we have reached the limits of our abilities, we've been able to push the outside of the envelope even further. This is also true with the ends of what we thought was our space. We used to believe that the earth was the only place that existed and they skies were messages from the Gods, or our dead ancestors that were sent to us. Then we found that we live in an entire solar system and all the other planets within it are places we could conceivably go to. Then we found that our solar system is just a single solar system in a huge galaxy, and that all those other solar systems makeup our entire galaxy. We thought that was the span of our entire space. But of course we've since found that our galaxy is just a single galaxy in a universe made up of billions of other galaxies, and our comprehension of our space is now much much larger. The pattern would suggest that there is no proof that we've finally realized the outer limits of our space, and it could be vastly larger than that. Soon we may realize our universe is just a single universe in a multiverse. But your claim that we will reach the limits of our comprehension is merely conjecture.

When it comes to your comparison of the economic classes, it seems you haven't really shhed any light on that point. You also didn't discuss my claim that the industrial revolution brought more people out of poverty than any other human endeavor in history.                

Happy_Killbot

@piloteer Nobody knows everything, nobody can know everything, everyone can not know everything, and if anyone thinks they know everything, they most likely know nothing.

If our knowledge were unlimited, we wouldn't need computers to store information for us. All I am saying is that humans are not gods, and we can never be.

The fact that our limits are expanding doesn't have any bearing on my position whatsoever, because it is just a fundamental truth. Our positions are perfectly compatible, I am just analyzing it at t = n where you are analyzing at t = inf.

I do not claim that we have reached our limit, I do not claim we will reach a limit, I am just saying that our knowledge is fundamentally limited in the sense that it is quantifiable and not infinite.

I never make any claims or comparisons of economic classes, and I still don't intend to.

Happy_Killbot

@MayCaesar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lcFPdkBXhk

Plaffelvohfen

piloteer said:

@Plaffelvohfen ;

The economic aspect of this discussion is minor compared to your argument because you have truly come to the heart of the difference between capitalism and socialism. It's really individualism vs collectivism. I personally feel your assessment of libertarianism is incomplete. We are social creatures, but who's to say society is not a mass of individuals rather than individuals just being a tiny piece in a giant collective?

Consider individualism and whether it actually means to be so self centered that we don't even consider others existence to be of any importance. For someone to be genuinely righteous when it comes to being charitable, do we not need some greed to be involved in wanting to help others? If donating makes someone feel better about themself, they are not immoral for feeling better about themself for knowing they helped others. But the end result of that donation is the want to feel better about themselves. Being truly righteous in acts of charity is greedy in and of itself, but it still is righteous and charitable.

 Individualism doesn't mean everybody becomes Nietzsche's ubermensch asshat who is ready to take everybody out who gets in their way. Individualism is just a realization that it's impossible to expect someone to care more about all of society than they care about their own families, or friends, or coworkers, or anybody who gives their life meaning. If there are people in our lives that we truly love, is it wrong to care more about them than other people that we may or may not even know? It's a truly righteous act to be charitable, and as I've claimed, it's also greedy, and that greed does nothing to diminish that righteousness. But to expect others to be as readily charitable, to the point that we believe they should be forced to be charitable, is that really righteous or charitable? Those kind of sentiments do not even approach righteousness, and seem more akin to corruption.        

I was not making a point against capitalism nor one favoring socialism... My point was that there will always be governments (a bigger group that will have the means/numbers to impose its laws whatever they are), regardless of what that government form may take (full blown communism or anarchy and anything in between), and moreover, these forms of governments (regardless of what they are) always rise and fall, empires come and go, we are not static beings in a static universe... 

Libertarianism comes down to belief that the principles that drive a free market economy can be applied to how humans govern themselves... It’s the idea that an invisible hand that guides the free market will also drive human interaction with social order. Well humans are not numbers or a commodity, humans are unpredictable and fundamentally not rational (even if capable of rationality most of the time).

The ideas of "righteousness", "charity", "greed" are emotional impulses and are irrelevant here really, I'm being quite pragmatic in the point I'm trying to make which would be that the best we can hope to achieve is a measure of balance. Life is experienced individually and we exist socially... It's a form of paradox really, and we must come to terms with it like we do with Free Will... To refuse to acknowledge the existence and pertinence of the "collective" (whatever that group may be, small or big, etc) is to deny one's humanity, yes it's paradoxical, like so many other things... Existence is full of paradoxes... 

Ampersand

The socialism (democratic socialism) being advocated is nothing like the socialism put in place historically in other countries (totalitarian socialism) and the USA (technologically advanced country with long history of democracy and democratic institutions) is nothing like the countries which tried to adopt socialism previously (Economically backwards holes with no history of democracy or democratic institutions).

So with that in mind, the question this debate is actually "Why don't you assume that radically different situations will have exactly the same outcome just because of a meaningless semantic point".

MayCaesar

Happy_Killbot said:

@MayCaesar You suggest that companies would be able to spring up in response to abuses by larger ones, however you already know that this is false, because we have talked about the company mining towns in the past. You defend the selling of a product or service as being something that can not last forever, but why don't you defend the buying of a lousy product or service? Selling is only half of the equation isn't it?

In the example of company mining towns, the workers sell labor and buy private currency, which can only be spent at company stores, effectively creating a small internal economy. Doe this example violate the potential for consumers to purchase from competitors, since they will be unlikely to accept the internal currency generated by the private industry on account of it is not regulated and could be printed infinitely to acquire all of a competitor's stock?

If I gave an example or you found evidence of a dictator who engaged in conquest for the purpose of gaining profit, would you change your mind about countries being uninterested in profit?

Conversely, If I gave an example or you found evidence of a company acting not to gain profit but to gain power, would you change your mind about companies always acting to gain wealth?


Can you find no evidence that the East India company disproves your position by having incentive to commit atrocities typically associated with governments?


Can you find no evidence that companies ever take shortcuts to get easy gains, and that these gains are always a death sentence for the company?

Company mining towns do not really refute my point; bear in mind that the standards at that time were very different than they are now, and most workers had to work under conditions that nowadays no one in the developed world would accept. Poverty, even extreme poverty, was the norm back then, and people did not expect much from life; what company mining towns did was not very different from what any other employers did.
I am not really defending anything; I am just saying that selling lousy products has serious repercussions, and people are not going to buy lousy products for long if there are better alternatives on the market (and there will be if the market is free).

I do not think paying with private currency for labor is problematic, assuming people voluntarily accept such conditions. Again (not sure if I made this argument before), if someone is unhappy with the offerings at the mining town, they can just relocate. It may have been difficult back then, but it is not nowadays. I can hop in my car right now and be in a different town in 10 minutes. I can hop on a plane and be in a different country in 2 hours. I can hop on a plane and be on a different continent in 5. People have choices nowadays.

Dictators are interested in personal profit, but countries as a whole rarely profit from wars; it requires quite unique circumstances, such as the opposing country having unique resources not available anywhere else - and even then it is usually better to just buy those resources by means of trade.
Companies have to serve interests of shareholders, management, low level employees - if someone's interests are not served, they will leave the company and the company will suffer.
This is not the case in a dictatorship, where the dictator owns everyone and often closes the borders, not even allowing people out. There is no competition between the dictator and anyone else, aside from other pretenders and, perhaps, dictators in the neighboring nations - and that competition is much less direct. A dictator can get away with unbelievable human right violations, and it takes a lot for people to rebel against it. People in North Korea have been suffering under one of the most totalitarian regimes in the history of mankind for 75 years now, and the dictator is as happy as ever.

A company certainly can pursue power versus wealth, but on a free market such pursuit is unlikely to be viable, considering how few power outlets there actually are. Companies that pursue power in the real world do it by gaining influence in the government, but if the government is absent, then whose influence is the company going to fight for? There are no legalised coercive entities, hence abstract power does not translate into the ability to shape the way the market works.

But again, East India company is mercantilist, funded and directed heavily by the government, with fairly little independence - that was the colonial model in the British Empire in general and it was the same in Hong Kong, North America or Australia, albeit India had it harder as there the goals were more direct extraction of resources, while in other mentioned cases the British crown put much more importance in building cities and trading with rivals.
What did East India company compete against? Local Indian warlords? That is mostly a military competition, not a market one.

Of course companies take shortcuts to get easy gains all the time. These shortcuts, however, tend to be surgically precise: companies know how much they can get away with. Shortcuts may regard various things, but they very rarely regard, for example, competence at the top of the corporate ladder. It is one thing for Ford to accidentally hire a bad car salesman in one of the thousands branches; it is another to hire an incompetent CEO, or a CEO who does not have good public speaking skills and accidentally embarrasses the company by making a deeply false financial claim bordering fraud. Such cases are dealt with with extreme prejudice.

MayCaesar

Happy_Killbot said:

@MayCaesar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lcFPdkBXhk

That is a pretty lazy criticism; he got virtually everything wrong about the system. Anarcho-capitalism is not a system where all the power lays with money; anarcho-capitalism is not an oligarchy. For that matter, the system does not even have to have a single currency: when some guy owns virtually all instances of a given currency, people will just stop valuing this currency and move on to different ones.

The guy is right that, for anarcho-capitalism to work, people must have certain mentality - obviously. Hypothetically, for example, if people think that it is okay to kill and eat others, then the free market will cater to these urges, and the resulting societal organisation will be very brutal and animalistic.
I fail to see how that means that it can "never work", however. Cultures and mainstream views change over time, and a lot of things we believed in 1,000 years ago nowadays are considered barbarism. Who is to say that a lot of things we believe in today 1,000 years later will not be? The overall trend so far has been towards the liberalisation of the individual and erosion of collectivist institutions; the individual today is much freer than, virtually, at any other point in time in human history. I fail to see why this trend would not move forward.
It is different for communism, as it runs against historical progress. Communism actually is closer to the systems of societal organisation in primal tribes; communism could work in the past, but cannot work nowadays.
Now if we somehow self-destruct and send humanity back to the stone age, then communism will be viable again. I do not advocate for it, however.

No one denies that, like any other system, voluntarism has issues, possibly ones making its unfiltered version impossible in principle. We in our voluntarist community debate these issues constantly. The threat from foreign governments, for example, is certainly a concern.

I will just mention one thing, a logical issue with the type of arguments people usually make, including the guy in this video: they come down to one or another variation of "There are some dangerous people who cannot be allowed too much freedom, as they tend to gravitate to the positions of power and will get this power in a free society".
If this is the argument against anarchy, then it should be even more of an argument against state. If people are so dangerous, then how in the world can you justify given them legal coercive power to control other people's lives?
This is an argument for anarchy, not against it.

I do not know if anarcho-capitalism can work in practice or not; I just think that it is a good ideal to have, a much better one than any of the collectivist ideas, such as Sharia state, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc. Maybe it is unviable, maybe it is viable conditionally, and may be it can be approached closely, but never achieved. I have no idea.
I would like to have a bit more logically consistent criticisms, however. Hearing the same "Who will build the roads in the absence of state?" or "What if a corporation becomes a new government?" arguments gets old eventually.

Here are two amazing lectures on the topic from David Friedman, a stout advocate for unrestricted free markets. Here he outlines the system and answers many hard questions people tend to have:
https://youtu.be/IcxGXcmr4ig
And here he addresses some possible issues that might undermine it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5HNPUwnuH8
I recommend that you listen to them with an open mind. I personally do not agree with quite a lot of things he says, but the lectures are quite thought-provoking.

A lot of opposition to these ideas, unfortunately, is based on some people's unwillingness to think a few steps ahead. For example, when using the word "money", one has to have a clear idea of what exactly money is and how money can work differently in different systems. In the current system national currencies are heavily controlled and issued by the central government; in a free market system, it does not have to be the case, and different currencies can just as much compete for influence, much like various cryptocurrencies do nowadays. So when we are talking about concentration of wealth, it is not the same as concentration of money, and there are quite interesting implications of this dichotomy. That is not to say that the concentration of wealth issues should not be addressed, but there is much more at play here than one might think.

all4actt

@halem11
To your question. I don't think Bernie Saunders is power hungry.  I just think his policies are wrong.  If implemented it would destroy our economy and instead of improving our lives the policies would make life harder fot most.

piloteer

@Plaffelvohfen

My apologies to you for not addressing a proper retort made by you to me in a none so swift manner. I allowed myself to be bogged down in less interesting discussions while forgetting some of the more robust ones like this. 

Plaffelvohfen said:

piloteer said:

@Plaffelvohfen ;

The economic aspect of this discussion is minor compared to your argument because you have truly come to the heart of the difference between capitalism and socialism. It's really individualism vs collectivism. I personally feel your assessment of libertarianism is incomplete. We are social creatures, but who's to say society is not a mass of individuals rather than individuals just being a tiny piece in a giant collective?

Consider individualism and whether it actually means to be so self centered that we don't even consider others existence to be of any importance. For someone to be genuinely righteous when it comes to being charitable, do we not need some greed to be involved in wanting to help others? If donating makes someone feel better about themself, they are not immoral for feeling better about themself for knowing they helped others. But the end result of that donation is the want to feel better about themselves. Being truly righteous in acts of charity is greedy in and of itself, but it still is righteous and charitable.

 Individualism doesn't mean everybody becomes Nietzsche's ubermensch asshat who is ready to take everybody out who gets in their way. Individualism is just a realization that it's impossible to expect someone to care more about all of society than they care about their own families, or friends, or coworkers, or anybody who gives their life meaning. If there are people in our lives that we truly love, is it wrong to care more about them than other people that we may or may not even know? It's a truly righteous act to be charitable, and as I've claimed, it's also greedy, and that greed does nothing to diminish that righteousness. But to expect others to be as readily charitable, to the point that we believe they should be forced to be charitable, is that really righteous or charitable? Those kind of sentiments do not even approach righteousness, and seem more akin to corruption.        

I was not making a point against capitalism nor one favoring socialism... My point was that there will always be governments (a bigger group that will have the means/numbers to impose its laws whatever they are), regardless of what that government form may take (full blown communism or anarchy and anything in between), and moreover, these forms of governments (regardless of what they are) always rise and fall, empires come and go, we are not static beings in a static universe... 

Libertarianism comes down to belief that the principles that drive a free market economy can be applied to how humans govern themselves... It’s the idea that an invisible hand that guides the free market will also drive human interaction with social order. Well humans are not numbers or a commodity, humans are unpredictable and fundamentally not rational (even if capable of rationality most of the time).

The ideas of "righteousness", "charity", "greed" are emotional impulses and are irrelevant here really, I'm being quite pragmatic in the point I'm trying to make which would be that the best we can hope to achieve is a measure of balance. Life is experienced individually and we exist socially... It's a form of paradox really, and we must come to terms with it like we do with Free Will... To refuse to acknowledge the existence and pertinence of the "collective" (whatever that group may be, small or big, etc) is to deny one's humanity, yes it's paradoxical, like so many other things... Existence is full of paradoxes... 

 I find no fault with your argument, because a fine argument it was, except one tiny detail that I think even you would understand that it may not have been properly thought through. However tiny the detail may be, unfortunately the ramifications of such an oversight saturates your entire argument with conjecture. 

"Life is experienced individually and we exist socially"?!?!? 

It would seem your reasoning is flawed here when I invoke the merits of solipsism. How is it we can truly even know if others actually exist, and we are not the only sentient beings in this experience? Admittedly, whatever evidence that can be used to question whether others do indeed exist, so to can that very same evidence be used to question their non-existence. But that just adds to the unreliability of using the only tools at our disposal to seek any answers on whether others exist, and those tools are our own senses. Our entire life is perceived and lived via information from our senses and no other facet of experience is a viable empirical fact. It is us as individuals alone who are perceiving and experiencing the information from our senses, and those experiences are not public domain. It is you and I as individuals who experience the data, so it's only logical to accept that life is experienced individually and we exist individually. The only paradox is the fact that the only way we could truly find empirical proof of the true nature of our existence would be to step outside our senses and experience for ourselves what is truly happening, but of course we would have no senses to experience anything if we stepped outside of our own. But there's no paradox in the fact that that paradox exists, and that is what solipsism is. It is my life, and I'm the one who's gonna have to live with that. Not you or the public at large.                 

MayCaesar

@piloteer

I agree with you, but one could make an argument here that there is some metaphorical truth hidden in this claim. 

To clarify, consider two possibilities (these by no means exhaust all the theoretical possibilities, of course, but let us for now assume that they do):
A: Both I and everyone else exist.
B: Only I exist, and everyone else is just a product of my imagination."

One could argue that, while we do not know whether A or B is true, people accepting A as an axiom have a competitive edge over those who accept B as an axiom or refuse to accept either: perhaps believing in A somehow fundamentally leads a person to action that is more effective at achieving their primary goals in life, than believing in the alternatives.

This is something I have been pondering recently: that our reality somewhat depends on beliefs we choose to hold about it, and if you firmly believe, for example, that you and everyone else exists, then you will act in a way as though that was true, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is one of the interesting ways to defend various ideologies fundamentally grounded in fantasies, such as religions. Perhaps there are religious interpretations possible that lead people to take better actions in life than, say, absence of any religious views. I am not convinced that this is the case, but, in theory, it could be.

Perhaps there are some serious practical downsides to solipsism. Or maybe there are serious upsides trumping everything else. That is up to us to explore.

piloteer

Ampersand said:

The socialism (democratic socialism) being advocated is nothing like the socialism put in place historically in other countries (totalitarian socialism) and the USA (technologically advanced country with long history of democracy and democratic institutions) is nothing like the countries which tried to adopt socialism previously (Economically backwards holes with no history of democracy or democratic institutions).

So with that in mind, the question this debate is actually "Why don't you assume that radically different situations will have exactly the same outcome just because of a meaningless semantic point".

@Ampersand

Way to set the bar low to be able to declare success for socialism. Are we really going to take it as a truth that if tens of millions of Americans don't die like they did in the Soviet Union, then socialism will be a success? And are we really supposed to believe that whatever kind of happiness that was achieved by the "Nordic economic system" is now the one size fits all standard for what should constitute happiness? What if wanting to amass vast amounts of wealth is what makes someone happy? Are they going to have to have their happiness shelved for the purpose of all of society? What if someone just wants to be able to rise up the economic ladder to a place of relative economic comfort? Will they also become the new social pariahs for not adhering to the Nordic standard of happiness? Some in the United States would say that policies that impede our economic individualism, and make it more difficult to rise up the economic ladder is in and of itself not a success, but a sheer disaster.    

This debate is not so much about Bernie Sanders, because if he were elected, that wouldn't automatically make our country a democratic socialism, it would just mean our President is one. Given that fact, it's safe to assume that this discussion is about the core values of democratic socialism vs constitutional democracy. Obviously the core value of socialism is collectivism which runs contrary to the values of the American constitution. As it stands, no social order is bound by any legal precedent in the US. So long as it doesn't violate the law, any social attitudes are legal, and that includes self serving greed. If that were to change in the slightest degree, many would consider it a disaster on an epic scale and among those you can count myself.

This is not a tirade against Bernie Sanders in any manner. He is the candidate that I disagree with least, which is the best I could ever hope for in my country. His stance on environmental issues is spot on, and his approach to gun rights is the most pragmatic out of anybody. I can even say that it's difficult for me to dispute his healthcare proposal. But when it comes to economics, he's no better than anybody else, which is somewhere close to dismal for the lot.

 The idea that billionaires shouldn't exist urks me endlessly because the idea of having to make sacrifices for others to live a little bit better makes no sense to me. Especially since a better method to deal with poverty would be to cut useless spending which absolutely no candidate is willing to do. Does the US really need to spend more on defense than the next thirteen countries on the defense spending list do combined? Not even the most leftists of democrats will stand up and say, so ya, we can just go ahead and cut that in half and still be the largest spender on defense. That money would be far better off back in the pockets of tax payers, and we wouldn't need to touch Medicare of welfare and we'd still save money. Does the US really need to house the largest prison population on earth, and be the country that has the highest percentage of it's own population incarcerated? If we passed laws that focused on rehabilitation rather than incarceration, it would be more effective at reducing crime rates, and it would also save more money for the taxpayers who don't need to house all those inmates. That money could also go to education or welfare without having to raise taxes. There are absolutely NO candidates in my country that are willing to take a truly pragmatic approach to the issues of poverty and government spending, and now our knee jerk reaction is to go full on socialist?!?!? That in and of itself is a disaster without the need for tens of millions of Americans having to die for it to still be a disaster. Socialism sucks!!!