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Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/23/2017 in all areas

  1. Forget IQ. Focus on your will, drive, and persistence. Pick a goal and move towards it. Work and success will help take you out of paralyzing self-analysis.
    2 points
  2. The owners of the coal mines tried to keep wages down by preventing workers from forming unions. For that, they used state power and militias. That depends on your ideology and how you define exploitation. That depends on supply and demand. If there is an influx of cheap and unskilled labour, the demand for high wages remains stagnant. No. The Industrial Revolution occured in the UK because the wages were relatively high and the need to reduce marginal costs was there. Relatively high wages and increases in productivity are different sides of the same coin. Several societies got close to the Industrial Revolution, but it didn't happen because the initial investment in more productivity doesn't pay off when there is a pool of cheap labour to choose from.
    1 point
  3. The good thing about anarcho-capitalism is that you don't have to be a capitalist as leftists generally describe it. In a free society you can just get together and live as socialists.
    1 point
  4. He takes a really long time to get to the point, but ultimately gets to it - wage labor is a form of slavery. The "workers" are really the one's responsible for the products, and the difference between their wages and the profit from the products is somehow stolen through the arbitrary owners of capital. This is just rehashed Marxism, and necessarily ignores all of the arguments against Marxism - specifically that the labor theory of value is invalid. It's really an effect of the Dunning-Kroger effect, people with no understanding of business and economics don't understand the great deal of skill involved in capital investment, management, and so on...so they assume the large salaries of these people are unearned. A free market system actually allows for a Democratically run Corporation, but you don't see this model because it is dysfunctional. Management and effective business decisions are real, specialized skills, and if you just have factory workers and janitors vote on these decisions, it is not likely to work out well. Also, ownership entails responsibility - ownership of debt, liability for damages, responsibility to the consumers, and so on. Many people would prefer a paycheck to these responsibilities. I have heard some Socialists argue that the Spanish Company Mondragon is an example, but I don't know a lot about it. The last thing I would say is, any "critique of capitalism" that fails to acknowledge the massive interventions in property rights and free trade that is rampant in every modern Western democracy, is fundamentally ignorant or dishonest. Govt spending in the US is nearly 40% of GDP, Debt exceeds GDP in this and many other countries, Taxation is nearly half of many peoples' incomes, Central Banks constantly interfere with the market, and every business has thousands of pages of regulations to overcome. But the real slavery, they tell you, is selling your labor for a wage, when you can renegotiate or leave at any time. Gimme a break.
    1 point
  5. You're now equivocating "use violence" and "interfere" as "oppose". I'm not playing your games. My direct question was repeated several time: would you interfere? would you use violence interfering in the accumulation of capital, contracts and trade and the answer is, yes of course you would. I'm not asking "would you oppose..." but "would you (or communists) interfere violently in the accumulation of capital, contracts and trade and the answer is, yes of course you would. That's the answer every single Communist has given me, after being pushed numerous times to stop coating their language in vagueness. Yes, you would use violence and you would interfere in labor contracts and exchange of resources and you can tell yourself you're justified in doing so all day long, the conclusion is, that Communism is not voluntary except for when you're a full blown Communist.
    1 point
  6. Sorry, I don't own a phone or a computer, and I don't have Skype. My internet is also shared via WiFi with my neighbours and is really intermittent and prone to dropouts. Besides, I'm not yet familiar enough with right-wing terminology and concepts to debate in real time. One day for sure.
    1 point
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