Dude, if you and Baldur want to keep arguing back and forth about economics with me tooth and nail, I'll go as long as either of you go, because I think it's important to refute these points to whoever may be reading. I'm always happy to go up against a system I do not believe in when the stakes are as high as they are. However, it seems very few are likely to be doing that reading, and it is simply amounting to a personal little pissing match between Baldur and you with me (there are more libertarians on this board than socialists by a good margin, yet none of the others are joining in with you and Baldur here!). So, is this the proper place for us to continually put so much energy into this particular topic and discussion thread, when we have something many of us could actually unite against that is very on-topic and also important, such as Ethan's recent post "alternatives" (I don't feel like opening another browser and linking it directly; don't be too lazy to look for the subject line, as it was only made tonight). Just something to think about, since I cannot help but wonder how many relevant, on-topic things we can stand united on which are not getting addressed by us because so much energy is being put into this pissing match for days on end.

You have a right to a job. You do not have a right to any specific job.

Everyone should have a right to a specific job that compliments their talents and interests. That not only leads to more efficient work overall, but a happier citizen population and far more psychological stability.

Jobs do not exist to fulfill the workers' right. They exist to perform tasks which need to be performed.

The problem is, you can match up jobs that need to be performed with workers whose interests and talents cohere to those jobs. If you can only employ so many at a time for what amounts to fiscal reasons, and constantly force workers to take jobs they are not good at or suited for because capitalists are only willing to pay a limited number of workers or automating for the purpose of not cutting into their profit margins too much, then you have a system that is not fulfilling the needs of workers or society as a whole, but just those who can afford to have their products manufactured or sold.

You'd hire 100 people to change a lightbulb, just because they all are out of a job.

No. You hire as many people who are good at it, and send a different one to change each lightbulb that needs to be fixed, rather than hiring just a few and sending only those few to change every lightbulb that needs fixing. That is why a capitalist system fails on this measure; it cannot and will not hire everyone who can do the job, but only a few and paychecks are dependent upon hours worked rather than sufficient work from each person in their chosen vocation as required. Access to the full fruit of their labor would not require everyone to work a certain number of hours, but would allow everyone to share the work in areas where they had a natural talent.

The capitalists fail.

Why is that a bad thing?

Because the entire economy still depends on them to give us jobs, and when they fail, the working class tends to pay for it (often literally!), not them.

Come on, not all companies are Apple.

But enough of them are.

If you buy an iPhone at the expense of food and housing, your problem isn't your salary. It's your priorities.

Under capitalism, yes. The crux of the problem, however, is the fact that we live under a system where money rules, and thus most people are stuck with a salary that entitles them to a fraction of what they would receive under a socially owned system.

It isn't out of the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner.

But it could be out of the benevolence and collective cooperation of those three and billions of others that we can all expect to have a fine dinner every day of our lives.

In order to have a profit, you need customers. How hard is it to understand this?

How hard is it to understand my point that without a need for profit, we wouldn't need to make working consumers into "customers"? And how hard is to understand that the less capitalists pay workers under their system, the less disposable income they will have to buy their products?

The lives of others are benefited not because the capitalist gave away the money made,

If you have a system with no money, and the social product is freely shared among all the workers with no boss class to keep enriched, then no one is "giving away" anything, but sharing in what rightfully belongs to every producer/laborer.

but because the pursuit of profit forces the capitalist to keep producing so others buy their products. Nobody gets a profit from not producing.

But only if capitalists can sell enough of a product to keep it profitable, which is why many medical cures that may only require a single injection will be changed to a treatment plan of a lifetime of monthly injections to simply manage the illness, so that profits will be maintained. And capitalists do not produce on their own, they hire those to do the work for them, with the requirement of making profits preventing them from giving the full value of that produce back to labor.

Homelessness is the default state. We're not mollusks. Further, having homes is a cultural feature. Other cultures are nomadic.

This is just silly, and you know what I meant. There is no good reason not to give a house to every person in the world who wants and needs one, because there are 22 empty homes for every homeless person. Arguing about the "default state" of human beings is a very technical excuse to ignore both compassion and what modern productivity is capable of providing.

No. At odds with how human nature works. This is true and observed and proven under all sorts of social and economic systems.

All sorts of economic systems that were class-divided, where an abundance was not produced for the majority, and where acquisitiveness, greed, currency, and inequality were regular features. So yes, human behavior was similar in these systems.

Even if you didn't want to acknowledge the rest of nature.

Humans have a capacity for reason and thinking beyond the base instinctual behavior of other members of the animal kingdom, who are entirely geared towards survival and reproduction, and nothing much beyond that. The advanced human brain is capable of compassion and making major changes in our environment, and thus are naturally evolving in a social direction that other animal species are not capable of. This means we do not have to live in a system based upon a "survival of the fittest" edict once we've reached the technological capacity to move beyond it. This type of advance can lead to a social advances that other species are not able to achieve and thus cannot be held accountable for not displaying. With humans, it's different.

There is a reason why kapitalism alone is a social system not requiring a New Man, unlike not only socialism, but also things like fascism and theocracy.

It requires more of the Same Old Man, which is the problem.

And more intellectual dishonesty, by posing a false dichotomy by which if you don't support it, it has to be Leninist / Stalinist / Maoist.

If I don't support it, and you're inferring that I do by judging what I support on the basis of that other system--no matter what else "it" may be--is intellectual dishonesty, plain and simple.

Attempts at having a community where everyone shared all the production are not limited to Eastern bloc states. They have existed since forever.

Isolated communities that did not have the technological capacity for mass production/transportation/communication/etc. or organized type of working class, and thus were not capable of creating a true global Marxian socialist system. Again, Marx and Engels were explicit that these conditions were necessary for what they formulated and promoted.

Some have been persecuted, but those who weren't failed on their own. From Greek philosophical schools to early Christians to Maitreya uprisings to utopian socialists. And then even after Marx and even after Lenin, they continued to be tried outside the takeovers in the Soviet Union and other places; say, in Catalonia during the 2nd Republic.

Oh, sure, you're going to say "the conditions weren't ready".

Because that is a fact, and an extremely important one, not just a red herring statement that actually means nothing. These other things you describe have nothing to do with the system promoted by Marx and Engels, and are nothing I have ever supported.

If a company comes crashing down for not saving where expenses could be saved, then nobody will get anything of it. Not the capitalist, not the workers and not the customers.

Which is why under capitalism, the capitalist can always hold that over workers and consumers: "we have to lay you off and outsource, because we'll lose money if we don't", "we have to charge you this much, or we can't afford to produce it any longer," respectively. This type of extortionist measure would not exist in a system where the industries were socially owned, and all workers produced for everyone else without the need to make a profit for a small handful of owners.

Nobody. What you're defending is the absolute right to crash down any company regardless of what it does to any people who benefit from the continued existence of the company.

What I'm defending, plain and simple, is the right for all workers to socially/collectively/communally own all the industries and services, and run them for the benefit of all rather than the profit interests of a few.

You spelled "union bosses" wrong.

Shit. Sorry. I was going to mention that I was making this post in haste, but I don't want to make any excuses for myself.

And exactly why this is supposed to be wrong?

Because it's personal gain of a single individual or a handful done at the expense of millions of other people who are working hard or involuntarily unemployed, in a world where we have the technological capacity to produce an abundance for all rather than just opulent privilege and comfort for a few while consigning the rest to live in varying degrees of less comfort, from barely comfortable to totally impoverished. It's not necessary, and there is no longer an ethical justification for it.

Would you give 500 dollars to the guy who will use it to fix their car so they can go to more work gigs; or to the guy who goes to drink and gamble everyday?

I'd prefer to give everyone the full fruit of their labor so that there is no need to gamble and no need for the psychological escape of incessant drinking.

You don't have to attribute compassionate motives (and I'm not a telepath, as I've told Ethan more times than I can count).

This seems to suggest Ethan has told you that you would have to be literally able to read his mind in order to be able to discern his motives, as opposed to just keeping a close eye on what he says and what he does.

All you have to do is realize businesses don't make more profits by screwing their customers over.

Unless the customers have no choice but to purchase from them, since they have a monopoly, or there is no other business that gives them too much of a better deal. Ask anyone in America with cable TV.

If you think Randian corporate heroes are cartoonish, the boss who just thinks over ever more creative ways to screw people off is even more cartoonish.

Only if he is portrayed as screwing over customers in a manner that would be immediately obvious to them, and then brags about it openly. It's well known that producers of tobacco products in America weren't openly bragging about how they were sneaking the addictive drug nicotine into their products. Nor has any capitalist manufacturer of DVD players or automobiles boasted about planned obsolescence. And capitalists do not screw customers over for the mere sake of doing so; they do it to benefit themselves and their profit margins.

A thing that only happens in the presence of government.

Yup, no doubt capitalists in a fully unregulated version of the system would only have just a few dollars more in their pockets than every worker, and would have no interest in power and the increase of it.

Oh, no, I hate bureaucrats.

Yup, always the bureaucrats, never the medical insurance companies that charge $400.00 for bare bones coverage, never the air travel provider that insists on $500.00 for a plane ticket to travel a few hundred miles, never the private college that demands $20,000.00 tuition per semester, and most certainly not the credit card company with a 5.5% interest rate. In the libertarian belief system it can only be the bureaucrat, because they tax, and no exorbitant amount of money charged directly out of pocket or via excessive insurance policies by private capitalists is every an example of power accruing into the hands of the few... not even when it's so well known that it's the capitalists who pour millions into the campaign coffers of the two major U.S. political parties to purchase their loyalty and lower their share of the taxes, rather than bureaucrats paying corporate executives to manufacture bureaucrat-friendly products. Yup, this belief system ignores the power of money and insists it's the chair of the politician that bequeaths the real power.

You may have seen and experienced, but you have failed to identify the causality chains involved.

Sorry, but as someone who has worked both for big business in small businesses, I totally beg to differ. I instead conclude you have too much of a form of hero worship for those in power that you instead identify your interests with those whom you see as impeding that power rather than being the biggest enablers of it.