Capitalism vs. Statism

[ProHypster]

Thatsmartguy, was your first video an attempt to show me how capitalism is bad? All it did was convince me that capitalism is the best system. The only thing with which I disagree with Mr. Friedman is why capitalism is the best system. He says that capitalism is the best system because it "benefits all"; I side with Ayn Rand, when she says that capitalism is the only system consonant with man's rational nature.

 

I got about half way through the second video that I realized that you're pulling the old Guilt By Association fallacy. Just because I share my opinion for the best system with some retard religious redneck (ooh, nice alliteration) does not make the idea any worse. His reasons for it are horrible; I think he's more of a disservice to capitalism than the statists.

 

Man, I loved that third video. Thanks for sharing! I always thought of Reagan as a uneducated redneck; you sure proved me wrong! All these years, I just realized what a great message The Little Red Hen had! If I ever have children, I'll read that to them; right after I'm done reading them Atlas Shrugged .

 

If it's greedy to want to own a private jet, two yachts, my own island, and a couple of multi-billion dollar corporations, then yes, I'm greedy. In what universe is that a bad thing?

 

Now watch some videos of my own please:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k (Yeah, she sounds like communist with the accent at all; she couldn't be farther than that)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7CjdJ1QyxI (Same person.)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8y6DJAeolo (Gecko is a great character. That's why Wall Street 2 was so bad: not enough Gecko. This video is just for entertainment, mostly.)

 

If you can watch these videos and still be a statist, then I consider you on the same moral level as slaveholders and people who support government taxes.

 

1. In 1959 Social Democracy didn't exist yet so I didn't bother to watch.

 

2. In 1959 Social Democracy didn't exist yet so I didn't bother to watch.

 

3. Ok.... greed is good. Nice motto.

 

I do support government taxes anyway thanks, I'm not a slaveholder though, I tell my government what I want and they will do it because they're scared of the people. We will fight our president the day he will stop being loyal to the people

 

Now to my videos:

 

1. Just showing you what capitalism is. I found his opinion pretty horrific but sure, if you like it.

 

2. There is two types of capitalists, that is one type and the other is the higher medium to rich guys which prioritize the well being of themselves first.

 

3. Reagan is an asshole in my opinion. I found his story extremely dumb and inaccurate also fine with you liking him.

 

Ok so I didn't get you converted I guess....

 

Ok stick to your idea and defend "Capitalism" in USA, I don't live in the Us anyways.

But just try to put capitalism as a human interaction system in Europe again and we will kick you out like with walmart:

U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart failed to get a foothold on the German market - first and foremost because management didn't take into account German consumer habits.

 

German retailers could have been forgiven for panicking when Wal-Mart first arrived in Germany. They probably felt like ants about to be trodden on by an angry giant. But nine years on, the giant turned on its heel and disappeared. "TextilWirtschaft," Europe's leading trade publications for textiles and clothing, described the fiasco as "Wal-Mart's Waterloo" in a reference to Napoleon's bitter defeat against Prussia and Britain in 1815.

 

But what on earth made the giant capitulate? When Wal-Mart decided to expand in 1996, its managers saw Germany as a promising market. Europe's largest market is home to 82 million - far more than in England, France and Italy which each have a population of 60 million. Germany enjoys a healthy pro capita income, so consumer spending is robust. The country has good transport infrastructure, which is good when stocks need to be replenished. Given these excellent conditions, Wal-Mart must have thought success was guaranteed.

 

It wasn't to be. Its German venture ended disastrously, with the retreat costing the company $1 billion.

 

Just why did Wal-Mart Germany end so badly in Germany, just like before in South Korea? The answer is simple but banal, and can be encapsulated by a line once sung by David Bowie: "This is not America."

 

Management's mistake was to implement a successful U.S. business formula in Germany without paying any attention to local idiosyncrasies.

 

"The problem was the company's business philosophy, which had always worked so well," wrote Frankfurt's Börsenzeitung in what pretty much amounted to an obituary. "It's people-centered - but that doesn't actually work when the people aren't American."

 

The problems added up. The company gave the job of masterminding Wal-Mart Germany to an American who didn't speak a word of German. This should surely have been indispensable to finding out what the German salespersons would need to know about local shopping habits.

 

The second problem was that Wal-Mart initially bought up a chain of 21 stores, then another 74, which included sites previous owners had failed to make profitable.

 

The third problem was bad press. The media reported that shoppers were turned off by Wal-Mart staff hired to greet them at the door and bag their groceries. This sort of thing was and still is unusual practice in Germany, so it was done away with. The company also scrapped the staff warm-up sessions scheduled at the start of every day, on the grounds that German employees found them ridiculous.

 

The authorities also kept a close eye on Wal-Mart. Anti-trust lawyers banned its practice of luring consumers with price-dumping, while Germany's stringent laws governing opening hours meant stores couldn't stay open too long. German labor law prevented the easy-come, easy-go hiring and firing common in the U.S., and the unions and the public alike were outraged by what Germans saw as an absurd ban on flirting in the workplace. All in all, Wal-Mart operated what the newspaper Handelsblatt described as a "bizarre company culture."

 

Another fatal flaw was that Germany's retail market is already saturated with discounters such as Aldi and Lidl, meaning that any new arrival inevitably finds itself in the midst of a cutthroat price war. Germany has the cheapest groceries in Europe. Moreover, real incomes have barely grown in recent years, which has dampened consumer spending. Retailers are vying for customers by cutting back profit margins. In the foods sector, the yield returns in Germany are less than 2 percent, often even only at 1.5 percent. Against this backdrop, presenting German consumers with unfamiliar U.S. brands was doomed to failure.

 

With just 95 outlets, Wal-Mart also remained too small. Originally, it had wanted to build 50 superstores as quickly as possible, but while Germany has one-third of the population of the U.S., it doesn't have one-third of its surface area. It is only about as big as Oregon - and consequently, every square foot is either developed, or about to be. German planning law therefore has a lot of obstacles when someone wants to construct stores on the Wal-Mart scale. So instead of increasing its number of stores, Wal-Mart actually had to close a few down - some of which were taken over by Wal-Mart's rivals once its leases ran out.

 

But the full extent of Germany's strategic retaliation against Wal-Mart only became clear when the local competition - primarily the Metro Group - snatched a number of chains up for sale from under Wal-Mart's nose. The bottom line: the American company had to abandon its expansion plans.

 

Paradoxically, the U.S. giant ended up terminally dwarfed in Germany. Experts estimated that a turnover of ?8 billion ($10 billion) would have been needed to reduce each store's logistics costs to a sensible size, but Wal-Mart barely managed to scrape together a turnover of ?2 billion ($2.5 billion), a result expected to get even worse. One consequence was less competitive prices than those of their rivals.

 

These weren't management's only mistakes. Germany is a country that loves stability, even on the executive floor. Chaotic leadership and frequent personnel changes make a frivolous impression and suggest company problems. "American management methods are often primitive," said Aldi's former CEO Dieter Brandes in the weekly magazine Stern. "It's all about budgets, not customers. When the figures look bad, no one looks for the roots of the problem; they just replace the CEO."

 

And soon enough, Wal-Mart did indeed replace its CEO in Germany - with a Brit. Unfortunately, cultural differences between Britain and Germany are even greater than those between the U.S. and Germany. Based as he was in England, he too failed to grasp what makes German consumers tick, and after a few months at the helm, he too had to go. The German who took over had plenty of experience with kiosks and gas stations, but not with superstores.

 

It may be some comfort to Wal-Mart to know it's not the only foreign retail chain that has failed in Germany. A similar fate befell Intermarché, Castorama and Prénatal from France, Marks & Spencer from England, and Oviesse from Italy. Even the Metro Group, which bought all of Germany's 85 Wal-Marts, is unhappy with the Real chain which the stores will be merged with. Real also chalked up losses in 2005.

 

Wal-Mart's German failure could be summed up by a German proverb - translated, it means: "A nightmarish end is better than a nightmare that doesn't end."

 

- Harald Schultz is a senior editor at the Handelsblatt.

[Koockaburra101]

[Are you implying certainty is not possible and that we can't know anything?

 

No, I am saying that in a court case where both people claim to have been wronged by the other person certainty is often not possible. If you bring me to court because you feel I've infringed on your freedom in some way and I claim that you are the one who did it to me and there is no really substantial evidence to suggest that either of us is obviously lying, how can the court then claim objectivity? It's easy to say that it's possible but in legal matters it very often becomes a question of interpretation and as soon as that happens any objectivity goes out the window. And besides, by what system will it be determined who runs courts and passes out judgments?

 

I was taking issue with the example of murder you provided where it was obvious who was in the wrong. Surely you realize that it's often more complicated and obscure than that and that the system you propose would have to be able to deal with such situations without contradicting itself.

 

So what I'm saying isn't that we can't know anything, but that we often don't know things, which is very hard to reconcile with your claim to objectivity.

[Brakeu]

I voted for communism. The way I see it, the entire way people currently structure their relationship to each other nad the world is one of the main reasons that the world is so messed up these days. We do not think in the long-term, and we allow our silly ideas of nationalism to control us.

 

Capitalism is powerful, but it lacks the ability to effectively prevent itself from corrupting and going crazy with weird financial schemes and the destruction of the environment and burning up resources at a craaaaaaaaaazy rate. We need people to start thinking and working together to confront the issues of inequality and resources in a way the prioritizes the needs of human beings over the profits of corporations, to that end, the democratic will of the working class should be represented across the world by a united political movement that usurps all governments, either via elections or by revolutions, and begins the long, slow task of creating a world that offers opportunity and freedom for all, both on paper and in practice, rather than a system that sets up and reinforces inequalities as the current system does.

 

For the record, not an authoritarian, don't want a single-party state, don't want censorship, want freedom of religion, etc.

[ProHypster]

For the record, not an authoritarian, don't want a single-party state, don't want censorship, want freedom of religion, etc.

 

Well, yeah that's not part of modern communism of course and is one of those more personal Karl Marx beliefs.

 

I was communist for a long time too, but well, there's this major problem,

for communism to work though we need either smart and ready people actually willing to sacrifice their own lives for the wealth of their offsprings or we need a huge amount of cash invested in the government before-hand and we don't have those kind of people or countries ready to do that especially if it's investment/trade with another country.

 

What I'm saying is that communism doesn't pump money fast, it's a stable government but it will take 100 years with todays technology without any investment to get to the range were today's capitalist countries are and too many people would just not accept that even if it means their own offsprings will live better and that will just bring to corruption. As I said an investment or at least trade could reduce those years.

 

So, I came to the conclusion there is only one way for communism/socialism to work so far:

It would work on the municipal level in a small town or city with people who aren't corrupt, we should try that once as a scientific experiment, maybe it will show some good results.

[Koockaburra101]

Words

 

Brave of you to admit that, have some rep

 

Do you see communism as just an hypothetical ideal or as something that can actually be achieved? If the latter, how do you think the transition would work?

[ProHypster]

I can answer that for him.

 

There is only two ways for a transition to communism.

 

A very slow voting transition through education and an established social democracy like in the EU or a military coup d'etat.

I don't know which he prefers.

[Brakeu]

To get an idea of what I think, look at the ideaology and practice of communism in Nepal-they had a revolution, threw out a monarch, and now they have multi-party democracy, free-speech, power sharing agreements etc.

 

The transition may very well involve protracted, bloody, and at times quite merciless war. Revolution is not a dinner party. But neither should it become a blood bath, or the playground of power-mad dictators like Pol Pot. The working class must have authentic democratic power over the means of production, only then, after we have become conscious of our collective destiny, can we create, not a perfect world, not a utopia, but a better world,a world that isn't fundamentally unsound in its policy and in the attitudes it creates. We can find the thing this species so lacks-balance.

[Doom Shepherd]

I presume you all are familiar with the fable of the ant and the grasshopper?

 

Well, as an ant, I support any system wherein the ants keep the food and the grasshoppers die.

 

Unfortunately, none of the above systems seem to be entirely in-line with that. Let me know when you come up with one.

[Brakeu]

Capitalism has the unfortunate habit of encouraging the practice of externalization of negative consequences-we see this in the often sociopathic aspects of modern businesses, who dump toxic waste in Africa or into the ocean, and who have stalled efforts to reduce carbon emissions by citing negative economic effects, even as rising ocean levels and worsened storms threaten millions in low coastal areas.

 

Capitalism enshrines a type of thoughtless greed and materialism that has caused us to live beyond our means, and that has gotten us used to doing so even as exploitative business practices keep millions of people in near slavery, working in dingy factories for criminally low wages, allowing the corporations that maintain the factories to make higher levels of profits. We have built a world that is grotesque, where the majority are worked and oppressed to produce cheap goods for a powerful minority. The USA is a parasitic entity, a drain on resources that has proven by its international conduct to be a bullying and murderous aberration. The sooner the internal contradictions of its debt-ridden, financialized state capitalist system explosively fail, the better. My hope is that this can happen without the rise of some psychotic new nationalist movement within our husk.

[Michael Archer]

I just got to the part in Atlas Shrugged when Francisco delivered his "So you think money is evil?" speech and James Taggart's wedding reception...

 

I've been mindfucked.

 

You guys should read it too. No propaganda, no lies, just honest facts:

 

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/579185/posts

 

Actually, the reason I'm posting this is that I want some people to refute these points. If you haven't read the book, shortly after Francisco delivered this speech, a woman came up to him and said you're wrong. Francisco responded, "If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully." She sputtered, "I don't have any answers...but I don't feel that you're right so I know that you're wrong." Francisco said, "How do you know it?" To which she responded, "because I feel it." I'm posting this speech, because I'm hoping the denizens of the Accursed Farms forum are smarter than James Taggart's dinner guests.

 

Also, Bullseye, if you're still reading this, I want you to know that "Rational Anarchist" is a contradiction in terms. You're trying to combine reason i.e. the primary tool of man's survival with Anarchy i.e. a system where the defining principle is the use of force, which is the polar opposite of reason.

 

Now, let's address some of the naaaaaaysayers. Smartguy, it's you're first:

 

In 1959 Social Democracy didn't exist yet so I didn't bother to watch.

 

What? She's not talking about that. She's talking about capitalism and why it's the ideal system and why any forms of statism are evil. Please watch them.

 

I watched yours...

 

Also, Democracy is another form of statism, but that's for another time. If you want to discuss it now, I'll go first: Democracy is evil and it's incompatible with capitalism.

 

Now, keep in mind I said "Democracy", not "republic". The two things are very different. Democracy is what the ancient greeks had, a republic is what the United States is.

 

I do support government taxes anyway thanks, I'm not a slaveholder though, I tell my government what I want and they will do it because they're scared of the people. We will fight our president the day he will stop being loyal to the people

 

You are a slaveholder and you're using the government as your whip.

 

But I guess you can claim an iota of moral high ground, since you support the idea of yourself being a slave.

 

Ok stick to your idea and defend "Capitalism" in USA, I don't live in the Us anyways.

But just try to put capitalism as a human interaction system in Europe again and we will kick you out like with walmart:

 

Poor walmart! They didn't go out of business because they lost to their superior competitors, they went out of business because the government outlawed their existence. Antitrust laws are probably one of the first things I would repeal, if I was president; all they do is punish business' for being successful.

 

To set up an establishment and to live by your own effort is a right; I would hate to live in Germany where those things are permissions granted to you by the government.

 

for communism to work though we need either smart and ready people actually willing to sacrifice their own lives for the wealth of their offsprings or we need a huge amount of cash invested in the government before-hand

 

Which won't happen.

 

I think that maybe 99% of people would willingly give 5%-10% of their incomes to fund a government that protects rights i.e. to fund the military, courts and police. Only the other one percent would give 90% of their income to make your communist state.

 

Which is why the only way for communism to "work" is if the government forcibly took the income of the 99% of the producers-the men who created that wealth to begin with.

 

What I'm saying is that communism doesn't pump money fast

 

No government does.

 

Money is only "pumped" through production and trade. The only system that caters to that is capitalism.

 

____________________________________

 

Koockaburra101:

 

No, I am saying that in a court case where both people claim to have been wronged by the other person certainty is often not possible. If you bring me to court because you feel I've infringed on your freedom in some way and I claim that you are the one who did it to me and there is no really substantial evidence to suggest that either of us is obviously lying, how can the court then claim objectivity?

 

That's why the burden of proof is always put on the plaintiff. If the plaintiff cannot prove his case, the issue is dropped. Even if the judge feels that the case was proven, judges are not perfect despite the process in which they're picked.

 

And that's why we have an appeal system.

 

____________

 

Brakeu:

 

Are you a real communist? Wow! I've only read about you guys! Anyway...

 

Capitalism is powerful, but it lacks the ability to effectively prevent itself from corrupting and going crazy with weird financial schemes and the destruction of the environment and burning up resources at a craaaaaaaaaazy rate.

 

Corrupting? What do you mean by that exactly? In capitalism, the government holds a monopoly on the use of physical force and they're bound by a constitution. In communism, the government is really only limited to the limits they place on themselves. The government is much more easily corrupted if it holds unlimited power.

 

We need people to start thinking and working together to confront the issues of inequality and resources in a way the prioritizes the needs of human beings over the profits of corporations

 

Excuse me? Corporations are human beings. All of corporation is is a collection of human beings. All human beings need to be able to own property and pursue their own values; corporations need those things protected just like any other human being.

 

the democratic will of the working class should be represented across the world by a united political movement that usurps all governments, either via elections or by revolutions, and begins the long, slow task of creating a world that offers opportunity and freedom for all, both on paper and in practice, rather than a system that sets up and reinforces inequalities as the current system does.

 

What do you mean by "inequalities?"

 

And this is why democracy is bad; it is essentially mob rule.

 

Here's a question: does an individual have the right to rape, rob and murder another?

 

Capitalism/Individualism says no, under no circumstances. Democracy says, yes, if it's the will of the majority.

 

I imagine the working class would somehow feel entitled to money that isn't theirs, so they would use democracy to make the government take the money away. And like in the speech I posted earlier, this is an egregious double standard; they live by force, but they depend on people who create the value of their looted money by nothing but their own effort.

 

The working class must have authentic democratic power over the means of production

 

Despite what you've read, there is no such thing as "public ownership." That just means no one owns anything.

 

How do they get the means of production? They forcibly take it out of the hands of those who's work produced these things.

 

See, the difference between communism and capitalism is apparent. In capitalism, men deal with each other with dollars and by peacefully trading. In communism, men deal with each other through the government which holds the barrel of a gun to anyone that would try to oppose it.

 

Capitalism has the unfortunate habit of encouraging the practice of externalization of negative consequences-we see this in the often sociopathic aspects of modern businesses, who dump toxic waste in Africa or into the ocean, and who have stalled efforts to reduce carbon emissions by citing negative economic effects, even as rising ocean levels and worsened storms threaten millions in low coastal areas.

 

I'm going to assume that everything you just said about the sociopaths business' is true (I'm not sure if it is or not).

 

If someone dumps waste in their own land, that's none of your business. The only time it becomes your business is if it negatively affects you and your property. The fact that the Africans can bring no legal claim against these business' is a criticism of the current state of the governments in Africa, not capitalism.

 

By "stalled efforts to reduce carbon emissions", you mean the same way a person pulls out a gun to defend himself against a murderer. The environmentalist movement always had its roots in anti-capitalism. Production, ownership of property and liberty are all things a human being must do in order to survive; this is what the enviromentalists hate.

 

Capitalism enshrines a type of thoughtless greed and materialism that has caused us to live beyond our means, and that has gotten us used to doing so even as exploitative business practices keep millions of people in near slavery, working in dingy factories for criminally low wages, allowing the corporations that maintain the factories to make higher levels of profits.

 

Live beyond our means? I invite you to look at a picture of New York City (preferably, during nighttime) and then immediately look at a picture of Pyongyang. Do you see the difference? New York City is a byproduct of capitalism and what man is capable of. Look at the pristine skyscrapers; all this is only possible by wealth and production. The skyscrapers are owned by billion dollar corporations-the people responsible for creating all this wealth in the first place. Now look at Pyongyang. The buildings are crumbling, there's a massive hotel that doesn't bring any customers since it's structurally unsafe (they lost funding), they're going into famine, and there are shrines so the masses can worship their great government-the government that made all this possible in the first place.

 

This is the key difference between USA and North Korea. USA is a (relatively) capitalist nation; it is a product of the ability to reason-it shows what happens when men are free to trade with one another and to produce. North Korea is a statist country; they can't produce anything. The only resources they have is what they can steal from other countries. Note that in the 20th century, all those wars were started by statist countries. Statism needs to steal the goods from others to survive; statism needs war.

 

We have built a world that is grotesque, where the majority are worked and oppressed to produce cheap goods for a powerful minority.

 

What do you mean "oppressed?" No one is being forced into anything. The only body that can opress people is the government.

 

The USA is a parasitic entity, a drain on resources that has proven by its international conduct to be a bullying and murderous aberration.

 

I've always thought that the fact that obesity is a problem in the USA is a testament to how great capitalism is. The system allows the Americans to produce so much, they're getting sick from it.

 

The capitalists are parasites? They're parasites for wanting to create as much as they can, to provide the best products they can, all so they can create the most amount of wealth they can? These people are parasites?

 

I want you to explain to me how this "working class" you speak of that you said should cry out for their own share in the means of production (which I remind you again, they took NO part in creating) are not parasites.

 

The sooner the internal contradictions of its debt-ridden, financialized state capitalist system explosively fail, the better.

 

And with a limited government, things like this wouldn't happen. The government is going outside their boundaries when they forcibly take money away from the creators to spend on things they can't afford with or without their consent.

 

United States is a mixed-economy, not capitalist.

 

Fail? Yes. Explosively? Maybe not; we don't want Anarchy, which I'm sure we both agree is a worst system.

 

When the system fails (i.e. the government goes bankrupt) the people will realize that government was usurping their money without their consent and then maybe, just maybe, we'll have the ideal, lassiez-faire capitalism.

 

_________________________

 

Doom Shepard:

 

The system you're looking for is called "lassiez-faire" capitalism. In that system, the Ant is entitled to work for his own effort and choose how he uses it.

 

In Anarchy, the grasshopper would get a bunch of his friends to go attack the Ants.

 

In Socialism and Communism and Mixed-Economy, the grasshopper would get his friend (an animal that easily overpowers the ant and for that matter, the grasshopper) to take it from the Ant.

[Doom Shepherd]

Doom Shepard:

 

The system you're looking for is called "lassiez-faire" capitalism. In that system, the Ant is entitled to work for his own effort and choose how he uses it.

 

I'm afraid that, coming as I do from a coal town, I can't buy that. I'm too familiar with things like the "company store" and the many ways in which the owners of places like mines used that and similar methods to screw the working people over. The worker ants weren't getting to keep their food... it was all going back to the "queens."

 

Parasitism can come from both directions.

[Michael Archer]

I've yet to see one argument against capitalism that does not also include an argument for the notion that some men have the right to initiate force on other men i.e. that they have the right to their lives and effort and the right to hold them as slaves.

 

I'm afraid that, coming as I do from a coal town, I can't buy that. I'm too familiar with things like the "company store" and the many ways in which the owners of places like mines used that and similar methods to screw the working people over. The worker ants weren't getting to keep their food... it was all going back to the "queens."

 

Parasitism can come from both directions.

 

Heh, I never thought about it that way! I guess the ant was a poor animal choice, huh? I always thought ants were communists. They always seemed to be ok with the whole, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" thing. But I don't really think that was the point of the story.

 

Company store? Are you saying that the money wasn't yours that you earned from working in the mine? Are you saying that they forced you (with threats) to buy only from their store? But assuming you were always free to negotiate the terms of your employment and walk away, that's lassiez-faire.

[ProHypster]

Guess what Michael, I understand perfectly what you are saying. You got better at defining what capitalism is, it is now much closer to the true termin of capitalism.

 

I prefer democracy much to the republic and I know the differences perfectly.

 

Go ahead and think what you oughta think.

 

One question just so my prediction comes true?

 

You fascist in any way, Michael?

 

Agree to disagree and stay out of my lawn (Europe).

[ProHypster]

Company store? Are you saying that the money wasn't yours that you earned from working in the mine? Are you saying that they forced you (with threats) to buy only from their store? But assuming you were always free to negotiate the terms of your employment and walk away, that's lassiez-faire.

 

Assuming nobody wants to work in a coal mine.

 

Not much of an Adam Smith supporter, are you?

[Axeldeath]

More anarchists than capitalists on here.

[BTGBullseye]

Also, Bullseye, if you're still reading this, I want you to know that "Rational Anarchist" is a contradiction in terms. You're trying to combine reason i.e. the primary tool of man's survival with Anarchy i.e. a system where the defining principle is the use of force, which is the polar opposite of reason.

First off, Rational Anarchy is a title coined by Robert Heinlein. Read the article, not just the title.

 

Second, Anarchy is defined as "lack of government". Anything beyond that single fact is not covered in the term "Anarchy".

[ProHypster]

Second, Anarchy is defined as "lack of government". Anything beyond that single fact is not covered in the term "Anarchy".

He has a tendency defining governments with own terms about what he thinks of these governments.

 

Just like I can define True Capitalism is the government of greed and non supportiveness where everyone has to fight for his own life and the Government is an individual concentrating on themselves.

[Doom Shepherd]

Company store? Are you saying that the money wasn't yours that you earned from working in the mine? Are you saying that they forced you (with threats) to buy only from their store?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store

 

Workers were paid in "scrip," which was only usable at the company-owned stores. If the store charges high enough scrip prices in exchange, the workers can easily end up so in debt to their employers that they cannot afford to leave.

 

Often entire towns were owned by the companies, from the hospitals to the utilities, groceries, and gas stations. Before cars were widespread, this meant they could gouge whatever they wanted, because hey, wehere ya gonna go?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

 

But assuming you were always free to negotiate the terms of your employment and walk away, that's lassiez-faire

That doesn't sound like any definition I've heard of. It's certainly not what actually happened in the lasseiz-fair days before Unions.

[danielsangeo]

Michael Archer: You recently stated, "Corporations are human beings. All of corporation is is a collection of human beings."

 

Do you feel this way about a union?

 

How about a government?

 

Are they people?

 

Do you believe that people should be allowed to own other people?

[Doom Shepherd]

Do you believe that people should be allowed to own other people?

 

Only if they haven't been squeezed through a uterus yet.