[ExI] Capitalism is like a poker game

[Joshua Job]

>
> Simple, Eh?
>
BillK
>

Yes, very simple, and completely wrong. Corporations cannot take everyone's
money. They have employees, and the only reason that anyone wants money is
to, ultimately, spend it on things, like private fleets of zeppelins, or a
solid gold toilet, or food, water, a new suit, a pair of boots, or an office
tower named after themselves. Money is only a medium of exchange and so its
acquisition, for 99.9999% of the people on the planet, is solely a means to
an end (and the rest die off or give it all away, putting their Scroogey
hoards back into circulation, so no problem there). Whatever money a
corporation makes, it spends somewhere, eventually, feeding the entire
economic system with its investment and purchases. More importantly, since
corporations can only acquire their wealth through voluntary exchanges (in a
free market), they are just owners of their money and all the transactions
in which they acquired that money were made to mutual benefit to both
corporation and consumer (people purchase goods of various kinds, called
such because they wanted them more then the money they spent, otherwise they
wouldn't have spent it). So the profit of corporations is good for everyone,
as it marks successful transactions to mutual benefit between consumers and
producers, and also is an avenue for new growth and the satisfaction of more
desires in the future via investment.

Government action is an entirely different beast. All the taxes and
regulations are only meaningful to the extent that they interfere with what
would have been free exchanges to maximum mutual benefit (as each party is
acting because it's the best thing he can do at the time). So any action by
the government necessarily makes people worse off than they were before
(actions above and beyond defense of property rights and personal
sovereignty that is). When government gets involved and starts taxing and
spending, things get thrown all out of whack, and you get problems where
some are getting rich without having done anything to the benefit of anyone
else, while others are being driven to the poorhouse for no reason other
than not being on the good side of some bureaucrat or elected official.
Government shouldn't intervene whatsoever in the free market, thereby
eliminating favoritism and benefiting everyone, in the long run, by putting
society back on the side of justice rather than whim and force.

I hate stealing from the poor to give to the rich equally as much as I hate
stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Don't people realize that
whichever way they go, they are still advocating stealing? What's up with
that? I say let's advocate, you know, not stealing, and punishing of
thieves. That seems like a far more rational option.
Joshua Job
nanite1018 at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100412/975c43d2/attachment.html>