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Cross posting my last response on this topic:Rainbow Knight posted:It's all just power grabs. Everyone wants to have power. Money only comes into play when it can be traded for power. It’s hard to separate money from power though. The ability to acquire resources other people want and then use those resources to fuel your own influence in society is the foundation of power. Even if we roll back time to when we had tri functional societies consisting of nobility, clergy and commoners you had this effect playing out. Pre capitalist societies had a limited resource (security) which the nobility traded for taxes, labor, serfdom and eventually forms of rent extracted from peasants working the land. Under a rigid trifunctional system where power was decided by the decree of clergy and nobility and you had strict laws deciding everything from what kinds of colours and clothing commoners were allowed to wear to protect the status of upper classes. Even under a system like this money ultimately put the clergy and nobility in the back seat and the rich, mercantile classes were instrumental in driving the French Revolution. The Catholic Church itself could be thought of as one of the first corporations because prior to its existence, wealthy family dynasties transferred wealth through inheritance. Your family name was everything and it’s perpetuation and growth of wealth required things like strategic marriages with other wealthy families that let you grow your share of the pie and preserve your family’s position and prestige. When the church showed up, wealthy Roman families sought to find ways to feel good about themselves under their new Christian beliefs and part of that involved donating chunks of their wealth to the church. The church gradually became super wealthy because it took 25% of every inheritance from wealthy influential families that wanted influence or assurances they were good christians. Eventually - a lot of the bishops, cardinals and other influential people in the Catholic Church were members of the very same Roman old money families that were patrons of the church. With no way to have children of their own the Catholic Church needed a way to sustain itself so ipso facto you have a de facto corporation whose financial resources and holdings amounted to something like 25% of European land assets and a political entity that could bring proud kings to stand outside the pope’s window barefoot in contrition on a cold winter day. Ultimately, money is a measurement of your potential to acquire resources and as long as people want your resources in exchange for other resources you will have power and influence. The best we can do is try to curb that. The Romans plunged into an empire because legionnaires were personally loyal to their generals who allowed them a share of the proceeds of their campaigns (plunder). By comparison the United States is remarkable in that they built an army thats loyal to the nation’s civic religion (the flag, the constitution etc) as opposed to any one individual with despotic ambitions. America’s security apparatus may often get used in foreign conflicts to secure resources for the capital class but within its own borders it’s my belief the military cannot be used this way which is why the police who lack federal control do it instead. So yes, it’s power, but ultimately all the power is fueled by money. When people declared power in tri functional societies, money quickly subverted and sidelined them. On a side note, one can argue that the modern corporation occupies the same role in society that the clergy did in tri functional societies like Anciens France. While the government has somewhat replaced the educational, healthcare and social services aspect of the church, it’s the corporation that manages everything else. Where once you had priests telling you what to think, now you have news media and advertising. Most land is owned by corporations and the media helps self reinforce those rights. In many ways the Catholic Church behaved the same way in the past. You were told of the divine right of kings and any inconsistencies and weirdness with the Catholic Church owning land or doing corrupt things were explained to you as godly things and immutable way of the universe. Are we really so different now in our media bubbles reinforcing contradictory beliefs to fuel support for the rights of the rich to exploit the poor? It’s just a new divine right of kings. And the priests and bishops who support it are the Murdoch’s and Koch’s of the world.
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May 2, 2021 17:57
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May 4, 2021 00:47
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posted:
Top down regulations that prevent tragedies of the commons are an unequivocal case where capitalism must be checked both for moral and for efficiency reasons. To take another example, stopping pollution is a moral good, but a baseline high level of pollution regulation also creates more efficient markets in the aggregate, because people are more productive when they're not sick or dead.
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Ardennes posted:(Also, I would say stuff like East Germany producing too many chandeliers could easily happen (and it does) in a free-market economy all the time. If anything it is arguably easier to fix in a command economy.) I believe this was the problem with pre 2008 (and perhaps present) General Motors. They needed to keep producing cars to post on paper fiscal solvency, even though there weren't enough customers to absorb said cars.
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May 4, 2021 23:01
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