Economic systems and morality: should mixed economies be the norm?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 minutes ago, sologdin said:

scot--

the premises of this thread are pre-capitalist, to the extent that the morality of an economics is a pre-capitalist inquiry, almost gemeinschafty.   some seed in the pre-capitalist order permitted the supersession of this question--that is, what once were ethical relationships between community members became market relations between citizens. it's a cool question--how the pre-capitalist mind transformed--but what permitted it to stop thinking feudal and start thinking liberal?

that said, the last unmixed economy was in the dark ages. am accordingly invoking cloture.

We cannot allow a gemeinschaft gap!

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Are you arguing against mixed economies?

That would depend on how you define "mixed economy."
Ideally, I think a considerable amount of democracy and socialism (which go hand in hand) is required to offset the negative aspects of capitalism. It's at least theoretically possible, and lots of research has been done on the topic, not to mention the fact that it worked in most Western nations for about 30 years.
Thing is, I'm not certain this is desirable today, when the excesses of capitalism literally threaten human civilization as a whole, and special interests resist the smallest changes to the current socio-economic structure.
I would in fact be personally inclined to simply go back to Keynesian policies, since they were largely effective (they worked for me after all). But that would only be possible if the 1% were willing to go back to the "grand bargain," and said bargain also rested on unlimited growth, which is now impossible.
And time is of the essence. I don't think you negotiate with terrorists, and the people who rule us must surely now be seen as such.

I can only conclude that, in order for another bargain to be struck, it will be necessary to first come up with something far more radical than a "mixed economy" in order to break both the neo-liberal ideology and the power of the 1%. Only once this is done will it be possible to develop a different kind of mixed economy, one that would of necessity be different from what you probably have in mind.

Let's remember that you and I start from considerably different premises, with significant cultural and ideological divides. I no longer believe in "the market" for instance, which I view as a form of superstition deriving from the protestant ethos. Therefore I see all wealth not coming from labor as a form of theft, and entire sectors of our "economy" as being elaborate fictions that do not actually produce anything of value to our societies.
I increasingly tend to think that what is desirable is freedom of enterprise rather than capitalism, the latter hurting the former. But freedom of enterprise can never again be absolute: in the future it will at least be constrained by the material limits of our world ("planetary boundaries" as some say).
Some form of "capital" will always be necessary of course, but a democratic-socialist version would hardly be "capitalism" as we understand it today. What I have in mind is cooperative banking and/or democratic control of monetary creation for investment purposes using models based on the MMT, a completely decentralized system of allocation based on absolute transparency when it comes to resource management (to prevent inflation), combined with yearly democratic consultations on most public affairs. Blah...

Anyway, I don't think what I have in mind qualifies as a "mixed economy" as you would define it.

[Winterfell is Burning]

To answer the OP question, depends a lot of what you mean. One can argue that every country in the world is already a mixed economy system, since there's no "pure" capitalism- meaning, one without any government interference in the economy whatsoever (and praise Beebo! for that). 

Of course defenders of socialism and/or communism would argue that there's no real socialism too, but I guess the point is that people should stop trying to adopt economic theories of the 19th and 20th centuries as gospel (whether it's Marx, Hayek, Keynes, or whatever) and gamble people's lives on that, but rather see things from a more nuanced perspective.

So, to try to give as much of an answer I can give in one post to issues that better men than me wrote books about, any attempts from governments to have control or nearly complete control of the economy (whether it's Marx inspired or not) are doomed to fail because no plan or economic idea can account for the variety of factors that influence the economy and people's lives, and also because it gives too many power to too few individuals, which inevitably use that power to enrich themselves and/or becoming despots even if they were honest to begin with (and they usually are not).

At the same time, relinquishing any or almost any control of the economy also inevitably fails because people inevitably bend or break the rules, even if there's very few of them, to get ahead. Unregulated capitalism sooner or later leads to monopolies or oligopolies, because companies that can usually break the legs of the competition (sometimes literally) to get more money and control of the market, and tend to not care about things like the environment or workers' rights unless they are forced to.

So, I'd say generally speaking, government's role in the economy usually should be to protect those that have few power to protect themselves, like workers, environment and small businesses, while at the same time breaking monopolies and oligopolies to avoid any company or group of companies becoming a shadow government on their own able to dictate policies. And of course punishing people that break the law.

It should also provide public services the market can't or shouldn't be entirely responsible for; it's fine for private healthcare, fire prevention, security systems, etc, to exist, but to depend entirely on them it's basically suicide (see Crassus' monopoly of Rome fire department for an example). But it as a rule shouldn't be controlling prices or nationalizing companies, for example.

So, does that make it a capitalist, socialist, mixed economy? Probably depends on who you ask. 

 

[Myshkin]

2 hours ago, 1066 Larry said:

Lol.  Could even do one of those body swap movies.  I nominate @Myshkin to write it

No please. I’m still not entirely certain that I am currently my actual self. There is a non-negligible possibility that I am still @JaimeL playing the long game.

[Liffguard]

12 hours ago, Ran said:

I don't think there's any real economic system that does not define growth as a goal. Economic stagnation is rarely good. 

Like @DMC said, actors in other systems may or may not pursue growth, but capitalism absolutely requires growth. Actors within capitalism that choose not to pursue growth quickly cease to be actors.

In any case, economic stagnation is not what degrowth proponents are after. Rather, it's about an end to growth as a goal in and of itself rather than just a means. Some countries still need to grow economically. Some sectors still need to grow. Other countries and sectors can be reduced, with existing wealth distributed more equitably, without reducing the well-being of the population.

They're also pointing out the big problem with growth as its own goal; it's the classic critical thinking mistake of measuring a proxy (GDP), because you can't measure the actual desired result (human well-being), but then pursuing only the proxy because it's the thing that can be measured.

[gruff one]

Honest question, does capitalism rely on constant growth or constant innovation?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

22 minutes ago, gruff one said:

Honest question, does capitalism rely on constant growth or constant innovation?

I think that is an excellent question.  I think a little of both?  A lot depends on the definitions of those terms.

[Winterfell is Burning]

34 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think that is an excellent question.  I think a little of both?  A lot depends on the definitions of those terms.

I agree.

I'd say a well-functioning capitalist system depends on both. Innovation particularly drives competition and society forward.

The problem is that, without the government interfering to avoid monopolies, the companies that initially innovated often end up avoiding new technologies and/or ways of doing business for fear of losing their position, setting everyone back years or decades (a good example is Kodak burying the digital camera for decades because they made too much money selling film).

 

[sologdin]

capitalism is interfering with the ability to solve the global warming threat because of its entrenched interests

standard market failure. less an ethics than a pragmatics, though. retrograde beneficiaries of capitalism might summon some moralizing to state that they are able to weather climate change because of their superior virtue, whereas those who were born into poverty are obviously being punished for their defaults.  

 

does that make it a capitalist, socialist, mixed economy?

yeah, at what point does a system tip from a merely quantitative accounting into a qualitative distinction? the US has a current GDP of ~$21T and a federal budget of $4.8T for FY 2020--something like 22% of the economic activity is that budget, which doesn't include emergency appropriations (CARES act, say--which pushed federal share of GDP over 40%). that doesn't include other public entities.  

fair to say that this is mixed in some way as contemplated by the thread?  when does it stop being capitalist or start being socialist?  objectivists think that any partial adulteration fatally corrupts the whole, say--so progressive income tax or worker safety regulation or the sherman act means socialism, period.  a stalinist might think--despite 99% GDP as public activity, more or less total worker ownership & employee democratic control, and only 1% GDP remaining in informal underground market in blue jeans and rock music--somehow capitalism still remains. i can't imagine what an unmixed socialism looks like--are we supposed to imprison people as obvious kulak wreckers if they engage in household handicrafts for barter, and do we send people for re-education if they engage in second-hand trades because of their manifest petit-bourgeois opportunism? 

[Zorral]

BTW, for those who don't wish to believe that modern slavery = capitalism (i.e. slavery post the 15th C, the entrance to the new world of both territory and economy), coincidentally today, Howard French explains in the Guardian, why African slavery in the New World was NOT feudalism, but is indeed both the fuel of capitalism, locally and globally, and international capitalism itself. Like us, he's been studying and researching these matters for his adult lifetime.

"Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world
The creation of the modern, interconnected world is generally credited to European pioneers. But Africa was the wellspring for almost everything they achieved – and African lives were the terrible cost" 
By Howard W French
[Long Read]" (adapted from his forthcoming book)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/12/africa-slaves-erased-from-history-modern-world

Quote

 

.... The long thread that leads us to the present began in those three decades at the end of the 15th century, when commerce blossomed between Portugal and Africa, sending a newfound prosperity washing over what had previously been a marginal European country. It drove urbanisation in Portugal on an unprecedented scale, and created new identities that gradually freed many people from feudal ties to the land. One of these novel identities was nationhood, whose origins were bound up in questing for wealth in faraway lands, and soon thereafter in emigration and colonisation in the tropics. ....

... Malachy Postlethwayt, a leading 18th-century British expert on commerce, called the rents and revenues of plantation slave labour “the fundamental prop and support” of his country’s prosperity. He described the British empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power [built] on an African foundation”. Around the same time, an equally prominent French thinker, Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, described Europe’s plantations worked by African enslaved people as “the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe”. Daniel Defoe, the English author of Robinson Crusoe, but also a trader, pamphleteer and spy, bested both when he wrote: “No African trade, no negroes; no negroes, no sugars, gingers, indicoes [sic] etc; no sugar etc, no islands, no continent; no continent, no trade.”

,,,More than any other part of the world, Africa has been the linchpin of the machine of modernity. Without African peoples trafficked from its shores, the Americas would have counted for little in the ascendance of the west. African labour, in the form of enslaved people, was what made the very development of the Americas possible. Without it, Europe’s colonial projects in the New World are unimaginable.

Through the development of plantation agriculture and a succession of history-altering commercial crops – tobacco, coffee, cacao, indigo, rice and, above all, sugar – Europe’s deep and often brutal ties with Africa drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy. Slave-grown sugar hastened the coming together of the processes we call industrialisation. It radically transformed diets, making possible much higher worker productivity. And in doing so, sugar revolutionised European society. ....

.... Amid this story of military struggles for control of land and slaves, and of the economic miracles they produced, another kind of conflict is visible: a war on Black people themselves. This involved the consistent pursuit of strategies for beating Africans into submission, for making them enslave one another, and for recruiting Black people as proxies and auxiliaries, whether to secure territories from native populations of the New World or joust with European rivals in the Americas. ....

.... It is often remarked that Africans themselves sold enslaved people to Europeans. What is less well known is that in many parts of Africa, such as the Kingdom of Kongo and Benin, Africans fought to end the trade in human beings once they understood its full impact on their own societies. ...

To say this is not to deprive Africans of agency. The impact of this warfare on Africa’s subsequent development, however, has been immeasurable. ...

 

 

[sologdin]

i equivocate as to whether capitalism was born from elizabethan theatre or transatlantic human trafficking.

[Hereward]

I would have thought it was spice trading with the east, see the Dutch. Slave trading was also a major feature of early anti-capitalist regimes such as France, the Ottoman Empire and Spain, though clearly it was “perfected” by capitalist regimes such as England/the UK already made rich by control of the spice trade.

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Hereward said:

I would have thought it was spice trading with the east, see the Dutch. Slave trading was also a major feature of early anti-capitalist regimes such as France, the Ottoman Empire and Spain, though clearly it was “perfected” by capitalist regimes such as England/the UK already made rich by control of the spice trade.

What are you tryin to say?  The Dutch were the major slave traders for some decades -- taking it from the Portuguese -- as they scooped captives from the same regions that Portugal (and Spain, due to marriages, etc.) controlled. In many years in the 1600's they brought tens and tens of thousands to Brasil -- despite the lengthy trip, and the relative smallness of the ships at the time.  This doesn't include all those who were killed in the process, both in Africa itself, and  during the African captivity and the voyage.  In return their slave sugar plantations sent thousands of tons to sugar to market in Flanders and London.

As for France, gimme a break -- See: the most infamous slave colony, the richest spot on earth for producing capitalist profit, San Domingue, later, after that massive slave revolution, now called Haiti.

Spain squandered all it's incredible wealth extracted from the New World in European wars. After all, being crowned the Holy Roman Emperor by the pope was very expensive and needed many wars as France's king -- and even the Ottoman emperor -- thought the title belonged to them.

As for the Ottomans, they were not developing the New World as were Portugal, Spain, Portugal, France, England -- and even, when they could get in, Denmark and Sweden. Most of their enslaved were from the Balkans, were Slavs, which is why 'slaves' are called slaves. Previous to 1453, this trade was run mostly by the Italians, particularly from Genoa, which is C Columbus's city.  When the Turks took Constantinople and controlled the Mediterranean, they had to look elsewhere for 'product,' which was an initial objective for the push down the West African Coast by their Portuguese confreres, as was the desire to get to and control the source of West African gold, anciently the provider of Europe's gold (that changed too, with 1492).

One can go on and on but there's French's article (he's an economist, by the way) and many, many, many books on the subject that go into this in granular economic detail over decades and centuries.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"A libertarian ‘startup city’ in Honduras faces its biggest hurdle: the locals
Próspera was supposed to be a privatized, Silicon Valley-funded paradise — but it's a hard sell for the neighbors.
By IAN MACDOUGALL and ISABELLE SIMPSON
5 OCTOBER 2021"

https://restofworld.org/2021/honduran-islanders-push-back-libertarian-startup/

 

[Winterfell is Burning]

Of course slavery in the Americas wasn't part of a feudal economic, but rather a product of mercantilism (apparently, Americans don't learn about it in school and assume the majority of the world went straight from feudalism to capitalism).

[gruff one]

I don't know why every topic has to be sidetracked to slavery.

[sologdin]

every topic

wut

[ThinkerX]

On 10/11/2021 at 1:52 PM, DMC said:

Yeah I haven't caught up with the entirety of the thread blow up over the past 12 hours, but this is one aspect I wanted to mention because I don't think it was until now.  One of the bedrocks of capitalism is constant growth, and this ethos is directly at odds with combating climate change.

Anyway, I find it interesting that some of the discussion involved the "capitalist" Scandinavian systems.  The irony, from a US standpoint, is that the American right does not portray these as capitalist countries, but rather as Kal mentioned they are described as "Eurocommies" or at least socialist hellscapes whose policies would destroy the great capitalist beacon that is the United States.  This is why I tried to emphasize yesterday that "mixed economy" is a preferable way to avoid the intractable false dichotomy of the "capitalist vs. socialist" argument.

not always correct, going from the far right idiocy infesting my Facebook.

First, far right types insist that Scandinavian are ultra high tax nightmares. When the benefits are pointed out (universal health care and whatnot) they insist these countries are NOT socialist at all, but capitalist with a high tax rate and a good social net.  Then they dump in a whole slew of reasons (some of them fairly blatantly racist) as to why this system cannot even be partly done in the US.  The favored examples for socialist nightmares put forth by far right types are Venezuala and Cuba.  

That said, what seems to get left out of the pro-socialist/pro-communist arguments is 'individual gumption' for want of a better term - people who will put in the extra hours or engage in serious (usually) legitimate deal making to create/expand private businesses, thus becoming wealthier/more influential than others.  From what I recollect, such individuals and enterprises were pretty much absolutely necessary to keep the old USSR operating despite an official status ranging between 'heavily discouraged' and 'forbidden.'  Failure on the part of pro-socialist/pro-communist types to legitimize such individuals/enterprises leads to automatic total catastrophy.

[DMC]

10 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

The favored examples for socialist nightmares put forth by far right types are Venezuala and Cuba.  

Well, I would hope they aren't calling Venezuela and Cuba "eurocommies," although I wouldn't put it past em.

[ThinkerX]

5 hours ago, DMC said:

Well, I would hope they aren't calling Venezuela and Cuba "eurocommies," although I wouldn't put it past em.

no.  though they do insist that Bidens 'democratic-socialist-communist policies' lead directly to such states.  the ones infesting my Facebook do not use 'eurocommies' at all.  

 

What gets them irked is dictionary definitions of 'socialism' and 'communism' and ANY mention that Trump was in league with Russia - as far as they are concerned, that is all completely debunked 'fake news' and unjust persecution. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

7 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

no.  though they do insist that Bidens 'democratic-socialist-communist policies' lead directly to such states.  the ones infesting my Facebook do not use 'eurocommies' at all.  

 

What gets them irked is dictionary definitions of 'socialism' and 'communism' and ANY mention that Trump was in league with Russia - as far as they are concerned, that is all completely debunked 'fake news' and unjust persecution. 

They have the most skewed and ridiculous views of Marxism and Socialism.  In fairness, when you attempt to offer historically based criticism of Marxism and Socialism you get almost as much push back from its fans as when you offer apologia for Marxism and Socialism with Trumpanistas.