Quote from: droog;222566No, I can't accept those as examples. You said 'societies'. Within a broader society it's possible to have smaller examples of almost any form of organisation.

Then no, I can't provide any examples I guess.

Quote from: Engine;222555I think there are some differing ideas of what constitutes a "free market" here. If perhaps someone would offer a definition of the term as they're using it, it might aid those using the term in different ways.

I took it to mean the most basic concept - an exchange of goods and services free from regulation.  Everyone is free to produce whatever they want, sell to whomever they want, and for whatever price they want.

Which is why I think Jackalope's idea is a paradox, as the only way to prevent any accumulation of wealth and power would be massive oversight and regulations (which would become overtaken by corruption and therefore lead to wealth and power by the few anyway).  As long as some people are better off than others (either physically able to do more work, or mentally able to do smarter work), some people would always be able to take advantage of others and thus ultimately gain wealth and power (hence my argument that we would all need to be genetically equal for it to even be hypothetically possible).

Look at it this way - let's say Jackalope manages to pull off some Fight Club-esque plot tomorrow and we all start over at square one.  Anyone smart will save up their money.  Anyone hard-working will be able to produce more and make more money.  Lazy people will make less money and stupid people will spend too much of their money.  Pretty soon, the people with less money start to not have enough money to get everything they need, and the people with money are more than ready to lend them money, with usury fees, to help them out.  The people with money then notice they are making enough money to hire out their work so they don't have to do it themselves.  Again, the newly-emerging worker class will take low-paying jobs out of necessity or because they are unable to do something productive themselves. We would very quickly be back where we started.

But let's say the Neo-Anarchy movement sets up just enough government to prohibit usury and employment.  Of course, all the people with money will have an easier time getting elected to government, so pretty soon they will just change the laws or insert little loopholes.  And if they aren't elected, they are probably smart enough to figure out ways to get around the laws, or hire better lawyers, or use their money for bribes, etc.  It just wouldn't be sustainable.

Quote from: Spike;222346Its not immigrant or non-immigrant, but a simple, verifiable fact that the US is one of a very tiny handful of nations that exist... or ever existed, where the dream of attaining wealth is not only available, but viable for anyone willing to work for it.

For anyone, but not everyone.

The US has one million legal migrants a year. I do not imagine you seriously propose that all 1,000,000 can become wealthy. How many, then? 100,000? 10,000? 1,000? Shall we be generous beyond the realms of economic reason, and say it's 0.1%, and thus 1,000?

So, 1 in 1,000 people beginning with nothing can become wealthy. But 999 can't.

Surely those other 999 aren't all lazy and undeserving? So is it not true that for most people, hard work, ingenuity and effort are rewarded but poorly?

As others have observed, this is true of most Western countries. Anyone can be rich, but not everyone can be rich. And many people who work hard and honestly, far from becoming rich, receive little or no reward for it. Whereas a number of people who are lazy and dishonest exploit others and find great rewards for it - for example, the people whose actions began this thread. Most people enslaving or exploiting others receive no punishment at all.

Working hard and honestly and being creative give you a tiny chance of great prosperity. Being lazy and dishonest and exploiting others greatly enhances that chance of prosperity. If you don't have to pay people proper wages it's a lot easier for your company to win contracts and be very profitable.

Which is the problem with the system we have: it rewards laziness, dishonesty and exploitation more reliably than it rewards hard work, honesty and creativity. Of course no system is immune from exploitation, but our current system seems to be particularly prone to it.

Quote from: jgants;222455One of the UK Kitchen Nightmares episodes showed a situation exactly like that.  Some chick (spoiled 30-something brat) used her father's retirement money to start a vegetarian restaurant in France.

I saw that episode. A tragic waste of potential. I was glad that at least Ramsay took on the competent, hard-working chef in his own restaurant.

That's the tragic thing about idiots in business, often they don't only take themselves down, but others with them. It's harder to get a job when the last place you worked for went bust.

If you want to fuck up your own life, go for it, but don't drag everyone else with you. Have some integrity.

Quote from: HinterWelt;222462education is the key to helping the poor and creating opportunity thus showing them they have choices. The US has programs for the poor and the unemployed that do just this. I happen to have been the recipient in the past of those programs.

Okay, so your success wasn't entirely due to your own efforts. Your community, your country, other people's taxes helped you.

Something to bear in mind next time you want to go on a "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, I did!" rant.

Quote from: jgants;222693I took it to mean the most basic concept - an exchange of goods and services free from regulation.  Everyone is free to produce whatever they want, sell to whomever they want, and for whatever price they want.

Yep, that's a free market.

QuoteAs long as some people are better off than others (either physically able to do more work, or mentally able to do smarter work), some people would always be able to take advantage of others and thus ultimately gain wealth and power (hence my argument that we would all need to be genetically equal for it to even be hypothetically possible).

You have confused the system I advocate with a system that attempts to achieve some sort of perfect equality, which is a straw man.

QuoteLook at it this way - let's say Jackalope manages to pull off some Fight Club-esque plot tomorrow and we all start over at square one.  Anyone smart will save up their money.  Anyone hard-working will be able to produce more and make more money.  Lazy people will make less money and stupid people will spend too much of their money.  Pretty soon, the people with less money start to not have enough money to get everything they need, and the people with money are more than ready to lend them money, with usury fees, to help them out.  The people with money then notice they are making enough money to hire out their work so they don't have to do it themselves.  Again, the newly-emerging worker class will take low-paying jobs out of necessity or because they are unable to do something productive themselves. We would very quickly be back where we started.

You have a very dismal view of humanity.  I counter by asserting the smart people will form collectives so they can make money faster..

QuoteBut let's say the Neo-Anarchy movement sets up just enough government to prohibit usury and employment.  Of course, all the people with money will have an easier time getting elected to government, so pretty soon they will just change the laws or insert little loopholes.  And if they aren't elected, they are probably smart enough to figure out ways to get around the laws, or hire better lawyers, or use their money for bribes, etc.  It just wouldn't be sustainable.

The goal isn't to prevent employment.  The goal is to have so many people working in non-hierarchical democratic workplaces that those who would engage in an authoritarian top-down exploitation model will be forced to provide a living wage to compete with the collectives for employees.

Quote from: jgants;222693I took it to mean the most basic concept - an exchange of goods and services free from regulation.  Everyone is free to produce whatever they want, sell to whomever they want, and for whatever price they want.

Well, that's a really, really free market, sort of the ideal, I suppose, of the concept. I don't know that this has been achieved since government was invented, except in those places in which governments have had no jurisdiction. Some aspect of legislation always touches trade a little bit; I think probably the important factor is "how much."

Ultimately, you have to decide what you want, and what you're willing to do in order to get it. For many people, the goal of economic reform is to more equally distribute wealth throughout the society; one way of doing so is to legislate this distribution, either directly, or through proxies [such as maximum differences between highest- and lowest-paid employees, or by graduated taxation]. Redistribution of wealth is not my goal in economics; rather, I seek to establish a system which maximizes individual liberty, which may come at the expense of wealth redistribution. I'm not willing to legislate economics beyond that which is necessary to establish a civilization, preferring instead to leave the greatest level of responsibilities and rights in the hands of the individual.

Quote from: jgants;222693Look at it this way - let's say Jackalope manages to pull off some Fight Club-esque plot tomorrow and we all start over at square one.  Anyone smart will save up their money.  Anyone hard-working will be able to produce more and make more money.  Lazy people will make less money and stupid people will spend too much of their money.

The natural result of freedom is that some people will not choose to succeed. Others may succeed despite themselves, and some will fail despite their efforts, but mostly, those who are most capable of thriving will do so, and those less capable will not. The new natural selection, which we call artificial because we don't think of ourselves as products of nature.

I should have known that a deconstructionist moral relativist would turn out to have a Social Darwinist heart.

Quote from: Jackalope;222576Then no, I can't provide any examples I guess.

Let's posit then that there is no natural order in human culture, and that man makes himself. What do you think?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;222776I should have known that a deconstructionist moral relativist would turn out to have a Social Darwinist heart.

Looks like common-or-garden libertarianism to me.

QuoteWorking hard and honestly and being creative give you a tiny chance of great prosperity. Being lazy and dishonest and exploiting others greatly enhances that chance of prosperity. If you don't have to pay people proper wages it's a lot easier for your company to win contracts and be very profitable.

Something like this happened in my home town a few years ago. The owners of a  chain of restaurants had hired illegal immigrants, housed them in quarters above the restaurant, paid them substandard wages in the "company store" fashion, and even went so far as to steal their tips! Meanwhile, the owners were living in Clarksville, the wealthiest section of the wealthiest county in Maryland, with several late model cars, Mercedes, etc. in the garage.

Here's a link.

In this case, thankfully, the culprits were arrested and punished.

edit: Bugger. The links don't work. The restaurant was Kawasaki. Google can take you the rest of the way.

Quote from: Spike;222502If you wish, like Balbinus and others to tear apart my statement (note for the record: I never said only, and yes history must be considered) by all means, do so. If all you want to do is quote and 'lol', I assure you that I am well versed in dealing with small children.  Your mocking laughter does not threaten me, for it is hollow and without weight.

I intended to challenge, even seek to rebut, but not to tear apart.

Just to be clear.

Quote from: John Morrow;222548I'm well aware that being born into money provides (sometimes quite significant) advantages but the advantage comes more from the culture of the class, in my opinion, than from the money itself, and that culture can be learned from and copied or adapted by those not born to it.  The problem with resenting the rich and successful is that it discourages people from learning from them.

Nothing there I particularly disagree with, although I think the money itself also provides some very real advantages, just less so than the cultural attitudes themselves bring.

That said, I don't think it's an adequate response to say, as the right often does, a change of outlook could change your situation and leave it at that - clearly people are struggling to achieve that change and it may be that we should help them and it may be that we should look to see why they are struggling.  IMO it's too easy to sit in a position of comfort and judge others.

Equally, I don't think it's adequate to ignore the fact that some do succeed despite societal disadvantages, and therefore to blame every individual's failure on a societal failing.

As is often the case, I don't actually think ideology  helps us much.  I think rather one has to look at particular programs, does this GI bill help people out of poverty?  Does this type of primary school spending help give children skills they can use to work themselves out of poverty?  Do these business grants help those who are trying to achieve but struggling for starting capital?  Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no, sometimes it's not clear.

Overall, I don't think ideology does much except give grounds for argument.  I tend to be less interested in say whether positive discrimination is in theory a good thing or not than whether positive discrimination program X has led to a measurable benefit for its targetted recipients and if so has it led to a measurable detriment for another group or groups and if so how do those balance out.

Ideology is fine, but solutions are rarely pure.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;222776I should have known that a deconstructionist moral relativist would turn out to have a Social Darwinist heart.

I'm also a determinist, a strict materialist, and a weak atheist, tendencies of mine which are moderated by my nihilism. I am also a rationalist, which means that if you are able to show via reason or evidence that my views are incorrect, I will change them. [This is, in fact, how I came to have these views in the first place, through the reasoning of other persons with whom I have had conversations regarding these issues in the past.]

Are there any other pigeonholes you'd like to place me in so that you conveniently don't have to discuss anything I've said, but simply dismiss it as not worth discussing?

Quote from: Jackalope;222709You have confused the system I advocate with a system that attempts to achieve some sort of perfect equality, which is a straw man.

No, I get what you are saying.  I'm saying that human nature being what it is, a system of perfect equality is the only hope of your proposed system slipping back into our current system.  My argument is that inequality will inevitably breed exploitation, regardless of the system in place.

Quote from: Jackalope;222709You have a very dismal view of humanity.  I counter by asserting the smart people will form collectives so they can make money faster..

And you have a rather naive view of humanity.  History is on my side - how do you think we got where we are today?  Money-lending was the foundation of the merchant class and economic exploitation - the evils of which were talked about as far back as the time of Christ.

Quote from: Jackalope;222709The goal isn't to prevent employment.  The goal is to have so many people working in non-hierarchical democratic workplaces that those who would engage in an authoritarian top-down exploitation model will be forced to provide a living wage to compete with the collectives for employees.

The problem you have there is that the democratic workplaces will be less economically efficient than the authoritarian workplaces (paying employees less = lower prices = more purchases from consumers = Wal*Mart).  They will have a difficult time competing with the authoritarian workplaces, except for tiny niche markets (see grocery co-ops).

Again, human nature being what it is, the authoritarian model businesses will drive the democratic ones out of business, by capturing the majority of the market share and/or simply using their profits to buy out the democratic competition (see grocery co-ops, organic farms, independent film studios, etc).

Thus, my argument that the only way your ideal would actually have a chance is if employment was outlawed.