Katy Perry in the aftermath of Manchester

[kandrathe]

Again, war and violence aren't the only problems of the capitalist system. Far from it. But you are right, the decrease in violent death, historically, has nothing to do with capitalism, I stated this earlier already. Capitalism is impervious to death or the human experience in general, its internal logic isn't guided by those things. It's guided by and in the direction of profit accumulation. People in the 3rd world get food and electricity? Great. Oh, they don't? Too bad. [u]The profit system is indifferent to human need at best,[/ul] in many cases though it is outright hostile towards it. Anything good that happens as a result is merely a footnote, and anything bad that happens is viewed as collateral damage, and then sold to us as our own enslavement under the guise "this is the best we got, there are no alternatives". You might buy it, but I don't.

Aha! So here is the crux of it. Commerce, and within that Capitalism is not empathetic to human needs, because it is not corporeal.

The people who operate within the economy, who can also choose to exhibit empathy, can make moral and immoral decisions. The immoral decisions can be both those of commission (e.g. selling/hooking kids on flavored tobacco products) or, those of omission (e.g. jacking up the price of life saving drugs because enough people will pay any price to not die.)

As a society, just like the rejection of what we consider immoral, we need to have laws to reject those things we cannot abide, like brothels filled with under aged sex slaves from Thailand. The morality of the overall society is reflected in its regulations. I'm not an anarchist, and so see an efficiently "well" regulated economy as crucial to protecting the common good, via the common laws, regulating what we hold in collectively common (e.g. air, water, land, roads, sewers, etc.)

Violence, also, is a rather broad and ambiguous term to use I think. Inequality, poverty, mass incarceration, private property, and exploitation of labor are all forms of violence - because these things would not exist without some entity that upholds them by force and violence (police, military), or at least the threat of violence thereof (bourgeois rule of law). So given that, there is no 'boogyman' here, I'm just calling it as it is: Capitalism is intrinsically a violent system whether you acknowledge this fact or not.

Each of these may require a treatise to analyze for root cause;

• Inequality,
• poverty,
• mass incarceration,
• private property, and
• exploitation of labor are all forms of violence

Where you lump them all up as horrors of your bogeyman, I see them as curable symptoms of the broader societal system, and also not intrinsically related to our economic semi free market. Much of the autocratic violence by government exists thru the neglect of citizens to hold their government account(abdication), or the willing assent to fascistic principles of using inappropriate force against its own citizens. If members of the police department are targeting and killing black people, it is because the general community is allowing it to happen. We are not so far gone down that road of authoritarianism where we couldn't reel this back to proper oversight and a community enforced equality.

Looking at just "Inequality", from whence does this originate? I believe many places, but I can enumerate some off the top of my head;

• Structural racism, or sexism
• Inheritance
• Educational
• Family cohesion
• Skills
• Personality types
• Ability

As we have discussed ad nausea, and agree that overall, it is unfair "socially" in the system to say favor "Pro Athletes" or even "Used Car Salesman" over "Public School Teacher". And, as a solution, I advocate the new social experiment of offering GUI (guaranteed basic income) going beyond the negative income tax (i.e. proposed by Milton Friedman and implemented by R. Reagan). This could easily be set at between $15000 to $22000 just using the meager percent of federal resources tossed inefficiently at poverty programs. If a person then chooses and is able to earn more their monthly stipend would be then reduced.

Obviously, Capitalism, being shut out of government run education, is not the issue when looking at the inadequacy of public school consistency, and pay equity. You can blame this on the authoritarianism, and inefficiency of our government, but it has zero to do with Capitalism.

Except, it will. Shortages, corruption and greed are result of capitalism ever endless pursuit of profit and global expansion (though in the case of greed, it is more a result of the cultural aspect of capitalism as explained in Marx's concept of 'Commodity Fetishism'). Besides, there aren't shortages per se in capitalism, because we have enough resources to feed, clothe, and shelter the entire planet's population many times over - and it can be done without exploitation and bosses. What you refer to is called 'artificial scarcity' or poverty in the midst of plenty. The reason this exists is because capitalist production is predicated upon capital accumulation, rather than human need and consumption. 'Shortages' of a particular good or service occur in certain places or in certain markets because it is not profitable to provide those things, regardless of the demand for them.

The third leg of the supply-demand triangle of is price. If demand is high, but supply is low, then price rises. You may stop there and see this as the tyranny of the "haves'. However, in a free economy, other providers (baring a monopoly on supply) can compete for the customers, thus lowering price and profit to a viability equilibrium. It also, inspires creative entrepreneurs to innovate to find substitutes for that commodity. This is only a partial explanation, as most companies take in raw materials as demand increases and transform them into more valuable end products to be made available as needed within the economy. This is, as I recall, a fatal flaw in all Marx work on commodity. He lived in a less moral time with unregulated industrialism where highly exploited workers toiled in mills making cloth out of raw materials, and his ideas thus make sense only in the simplest of models where one can directly apply classical economic principles, such as the Labor Theory of Value, or Commodity Fetishism. Marx knew perfectly well that the labor theory of value could not be a complete account of value, which is why, on the very first page of Capital, he adds the qualifier "socially necessary", so the value of commodities is determine by the amount of socially necessary labor value. Even, now, Marxists have no resolution to the "transformation problem", when prices (if ever) do not converge on labor values. And, as any person marginally familiar with manufacturing knows, timing is everything. Marx's theory of the capital and the declining rate of profit fails to account for risk and the timing of consumption.

Marxists are like physicists stuck in a Ptolematic model of planetary motion. The physics are just better now, as is our understanding of price theory in modern economics.

This is a pretty easy and logical concept to understand, is it not? One does not even need to be a Marxist to know that this is how the capitalist system objectively operates. This just comes from an objective understanding of capitalism's internal logic, and following it to its logical conclusion.

Right! Capitalism, and well regulated free market economy allows almost any person to improve there lot through the application of their wits and labor. There is in fact, then an excess of wealth, allowing social democracies to siphon off private wealth to re-distribute to those less able (or willing) to find success.

As China aptly demonstrated; in the absence of Capitalism, and a free market, the economic system stagnates. When Capitalism, and a free market is allowed to flourish, the people are more prosperous, lifting billions out of poverty.