The Capitalist System Is Decaying Because Of Its Own Contradictions

What is wrong with mandating the private sector to pay $100-200 dollars an hour?

 

Social services cost around fourteen dollars an hour. Mandating a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage would compete with social services and motivate persons to enter the labor market.

It is that simple.

one hundred to two hundred dollars an hour is your red herring that you need to justify.

 

easy to justify why only be a little nice when you could be really nice at $100-200 /hour

 

What ?? What's the source of that ^^ ??

 

you whine too much about taxes already.

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it is a self-evident Truth; it is why we don't call it Barterism.

 

This becomes a serious problem. Marxists will often claim that Soviet government wasn't truly communist, but a form of state capitalism. Free-marketeers claim that crony capitalism is not the 'real' capitalism they advocate.

They are both wrong.

You can't just subtract crony from capitalism. This is related to human nature, which always trumps ideological pretension. Capitalism evolved organically in tandem with the modern state over many centuries. Capitalism was one of the major forces leading to centralization of state power.

Communism falls to a similar critique. State communism was not a 'transitional' system on the way to a classless society. The dictatorship of the proletariat was an inevitable compromise to the realities of human nature and predictably it became an ossified structure. Since Marxists did not provide for an alternative method of dealing with change, it eventually failed.

This is not, at its basis, about competing ideologies. If we take "capitalism" as a descriptive term, rather than a normative one, we get a much more realistic view. Capitalism is not an -ism, it is just the current description of a constantly changing entity. It has no fixed character. In the West, capitalism has integrated various aspects of Fabianism, and moved on.

 

Maybe we're saying the same thing, but there are no large 'capitalist' corporations or industries out there without huge contingents of lawyers and lobbyists. And what do those lawyers and lobbyists do? Advance free markets? Not on your life. Don't tell me about Econ 101 unless you've taken it.

 

Money is a basic requirement for any large & modern economic system. It is not an exclusive requirement of capitalism.

There is a lot more to free market capitalism than a monetary system. But it's actually very simple compared to socialism and communism where central command planning is used.

 

At least we're not confusing they type of capitalism we have in the USA with free markets anymore. Can we finally agree that free markets are a figment of someone's hash-pipe influenced master's thesis?

 

The (tax) lawyers and lobbyists are employed to deal with the corporate tax codes and regulations used by politicians to pick winners and losers. The winners will donate heavily to the respective politicians who favor them. This is crony capitalism which is the antithesis of free market capitalism. Pro business and pro market are not the same thing and are more close to being opposites. This is why a simple and small flat tax rate on corporate profits would be conducive to a more free market situation. And fundamentally we should not be taxing production but taxing consumption. Additionally corporations do not pay taxes, they collect taxes from their customers in the form of higher prices.

And I have taken Econ 101.

 

Absolutely not. Reforming the corporate tax code to a simple and small flat tax would help. Eliminating the corporate tax on profits would be better. There will always be lobbyists working for corporations to modify regulations. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with that nor did the founders.

 

not really. You know that example of a pencil-right?. No one has all the knowledge to make one but the free market can make one by making 1000's of decisions without govt. When the govt tries to make one it eventually finds it needs 1000's of bureaucrats to guess at what the free market decisions would have been but they guess wrong and the system collapses.

 

regardless, capital as a medium of exchange is useful.

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Just the cognitive dissonance of the right, no drugs required.

 

Yes, that is my point. There is no central planner who is in charge of manufacturing a pencil in what quantities to fill what demand. It is certainly complicated but happens "automatically" via the communication of the prices. None of the participants in the process understands the complete objective but the various pieces and parts come together in the end.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

 

Hoover Dam and our Space Race and landing on the Moon, happened due to command economics not markets finding markets for pencils.

 

Money is the medium of exchange. Capital is a resources available to use in the manufacture of products and can take the form of land, equipment, buildings, and human capital (labor and training).

Free markets are real. We, in the US, have been moving further away from that ideal as David Stockman shows in his recent book - "The Great Deformation - The Corruption of Capitalism in America" - 2013.

 

We have the best form of socialism in the world; why not have fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage law?

 

Those were gov projects too big for private industry. The first provides power and water management. The second was in response to the shellacking we took from the Soviets in the early stages of the space race. They have nothing to do with command economics for the entire nation.

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Becasue it's duma$$ economics.

 

I'm a liberal but I've never understood the concept of taxing corporate (or any kind of business) profits. Only distributions. Of course, we'd have to see about corporations buying resort memberships and retreats in the Alps for their executives.

 

Agreed. Production (including income) should not be taxed, only consumption. You sound more like a supply sider in that regard. If perks are negotiated into compensation agreements I have no problem with that especially if those are tied to company performance. The company I worked for had annual technical conferences in very nice locations and the upper management level had memberships to health clubs. The company also provided exercise facilities in various locations on the various campuses.

 

liberals have no intelligence whatsoever and so figure that corporations should pay their fair share. Liberals simply cant understand that corporations pass on all costs including tax costs to their customers in the form of higher prices. We now have the highest corporate tax in the world that has driven an estimated 20 million jobs off shore. Its insane but perfectly liberal.

 

I'm kind of against the idea of "perks". They should be taken as income/distributions to clear up accounting procedures. Only those items that lead directly to production should be taken as expenses. I'm even starting to come down on the idea of corporate transportation (Gulfstreams) with all of the vastly cheaper telecommunication options out there.

 

That's the multi thousand page tax code. If income were not taxed on only consumption was there would be no issue.

 

I always feel that I am at a distinct disadvantage because I cannot afford the lawyers and accountants who are familiar with the multi-thousand page tax code. Let's base it ALL on consumption rather than hiding it in perks.

 

No argument here. There are a few different takes - Fair Tax, Progressive Consumption Tax, and the Flat Tax (which is a much simplified income tax). The US as a nation spends ~ $200 billion each year on tax compliance costs. What a waste !!!