[ExI] OWS Rolling in the Mud

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 8:57 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2011/11/12 Alfio Puglisi <alfio.puglisi at gmail.com>:
> > There is something that puzzles me, if no nation on Earth practices pure
> > capitalism (and this is obviously true), but instead "some awful hybrid"
> how
> > can the production of all those goods be ascribed to capitalism and not
> to
> > something else? How is the partition done, if possible at all?
>
> Alfio,
>
>  The government itself produces very little. Oh, it does produce a
> few things... security, a level of safety, environmental protection,
> law enforcement, fire protection, roads, infrastructure, and a
> relative pittance of research results. But by and large the government
> "taxes" the productive not just in money, but also in regulation.
>
>  If the government costs 15% of the economy... and produces less than
> 1% to 2% of the goods and services, then the portion of the economy
> that operates within the context of some freedom must be responsible
> for the rest. So I think it is quite fair to ascribe most of the
> available goods and services that are available to us today to the
> free capitalistic portions of our economy that remain. At the very
> least, you must admit that for every dollar spent by the free portion
> of the economy, we get more than for every dollar spent by the
> government.


I had a somewhat different angle in mind.  In an industrial context, a free
market will optimize the production of goods that satisfy the current or
projected demand. In our real world, demand is not just the product
of unadulterated human desires, but is also the result of regulations,
social norms, politics, exchange treaties, and so on. Such regulations and
limitations will define the shapes of available markets, that capitalistic
mechanisms will proceed to exploit. The trajectory of development is as
much a product of the social and regulatory context, as it is the result of
the increased efficiency brought around by markets.

Over this relatively simple scheme, the biggest layer of confusion is a
result of the multiple nature of power: while governing bodies have the
theoretical power of the law at their backs, the wealthy individuals or
corporations produced by markets have the practical power of simply having
lots of money, which is in the end a claim on labor from someone else, and
can thus control their behavior (of the 'someone else', which includes
lawmakers)  as much as the first group. This interdipendency arises quite
naturally from the way the system is set up, and I am not sure of how to
proceed from this point :-)

Alfio
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20111112/da1e18b2/attachment.html>