Crazy Communist propaganda - Capitalism and Mental Health: How the Market Makes Us Sick

[ProfessionalTeabagger]

 

This guy's position is left anarchism. 

[Hannibal]

Screams of loser.

[Livemike]

"How the market makes us sick"

First thing he mentions is a government monopoly industry that has no market competition.

Second thing he mentions is the "democratic system" which is also a government monopoly that has no market competition and which is highly rigged to restrict even the entry of candidates within it.

Ok so I'm going to bet that he mentions 2 more  problematic government monopolies before he mentions the first more free market (but still heavily government controlled) industry.  I'll post this before watching more than 23 seconds of it.

 

Ok I was wrong, overexploitation of wildlife isn't a government monopoly, although government contributes to it significantly.

But to continue "mercilessly exploit women in sweatshops" notice how that mostly happens in areas where te market has been weakest and government control strongest?  And what is wrong with "exploiting" women?  If he thinks that they could be better employed elsewhere then by all means he can hire them for better wages.

"and bomb countless "

And we're back to government monopolies again.

 

"profit matters more than protecting our environment"

To who?  He's just making things up here.  And what does that even mean?  Some degree of profit certainly matters more than some degree of protecting our environment because we're not insane.  We're not ready to impoverish the entire world to save the Western Spotted Mosquito.  We're also not prepared to poison every single river with lethal levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic and multiple other heavy metals for profit sufficient to buy a used Corrolla.  Everyone is between these two extremes, so saying "profit matters more" depends entirely on where on that spectrum we already are.  

 

"profit matters more than behaving in an ethical way" 
To who and defined how?  

"profit even matters more than the health of the general public"

Again that depends entirely on how much of the health of the general public and how much profit.  Nobody is prepared to sacrifice the GDP of Australia to prevent one case of cancer, nobody is prepared to doom everyone to a 40 year lifespan so that someone can have a jetski.  This argument is flawed in exactly the same way as the environment argument.

"For the capitalist class the health of the public only matters"
Classes don't have opinions only people do.  And what would it matter what the capitalist class thinks?  In a free market they don't get to decide what is acceptable.  

"and most importantly they need a workforce to operate the means of production"
That is not more important than a market for their products.  That's a minor point but it shows the complete economic ignorance of the poster.

"Capitalists do have an economic interest in paying their workers a wage, but only just enough so that they can stay alive and go to work each day"
And here we see the result of class thinking, the idea that people act as members of a class, considering class interests rather than individual ones.  While of course capitalists would like capitalists _in general_ to pay enough so that workers can survive and ideally produce lots of children they in particular don't really benefit from doing so.  Imagine a society of 100 M people, 95 million of them wage workers.  Suppose one really large employer employed 500K people.  Suppose wages were 50% of total costs.  Increasing their wages by 10% so that they don't starve to death at a rate of say 10% a year would cost 5% of your costs but increase the market by only 0.5%, making it a massive loser for you, if a winner for the capitalist class as a whole.

Of course this assumes that people will work for you at wages that mean 10% of them starve to death in any given year.  This in turn assumes that nobody will hire them at higher wages than that.  But why would the rate of wages that stop you starving be the amount someone is prepared to pay for your labor?  This would only be true if increasing wages instantly increased the amount of people available to labor, thus lowering wages back to subsistance level.  But there is no reason to believe that increasing wages will increase population in anything like those numbers, even before birth control.  Even if it did it would not be instantaneous.  People would get higher wages, have children and get them to work usually a minimum of a decade later.  So you have at least a decade of people having higher wages but no resultant increase in labor to compete.  

"make sure they aren't so dissatified with their wages that they want to start a revolution etc."
Wages aren't what starts revolutions.  Staggeringly poor wages have coexisted with stable regimes, relatively high ones with revolutions.  Cuba was pretty rich by Latin American standards before Castro.  America was relatively rich (and relatively untaxed) before it's revolution.  In any case no individual capitalist will think it his job to pay his workers not to revolt.  More class "thinking".

[Livemike]

Ok first thing he mentions is racist police, which is no part of the market or capitalism.  So already he's including things that have nothing to do with capitalism on capitalism.

Second thing he mentions is "the democratic process" which is very much a government monopoly.  You can't set up competing elections.  

 

Third thing is "species after species is driven to extinction as the rich lay waste to ".  Ok so this is the first thing that isn't a complete government monopoly that he's mentioned, but even here non-market forces, especially government have a large role in most extinctions, many of which aren't the result of "the rich" doing anything.  Poor people kill things and destroy habitat too.  

 

"mercilessly exploit women in sweatshops"
First of all I love how he focuses on the women rather than say, men dying by the thousands in the mining industry in the third world, many of whom would give their right ball to work in a sweatshop.  But he comes afoul of Price's Law Of Poverty Reduction.  If someone is offering the poor a deal that makes them better off and you want to criticize that deal, either have a better deal or shut the fuck up.  Of course these sweatshops are in places where historically capitalism has been weak, but he ignores this.

"and bomb countless populations into oblivion" 
Again a government monopoly.  

 

"profit is the bottom line, it comes before everything"
Well no.  Not even to the people making the profit does it come before everything.  If they had a choice between making a profit and not getting lethal cancer the chances are pretty good they'd choose not getting cancer.  Most businessmen could probably make more profit if they completely ignored their family and socialised only in business circles or where they could gain some sort of profitable connection.  In general they don't do that.  

Even then profit is only important to those who make it, and perhaps their dependants.  Everyone else doesn't give a damn, except that they know without profit entrepeneurs will stop dealing with them.  It's no more true to say that capitalism is obssessed with profit than it is to say it's obsessed with wages or rent, since more people earn those than profit.

"profit matters more than protecting our environment"
Well that depends on how much profit and how much environment protection we're talking about.  Nobody thinks profit enough to buy a used Corrolla is worth that pouring lethal levels of lead and cadmium into every river in the USA.  Nobody thinks that sacrificing enough wealth to send every child in the USA to university is a good idea if it saves the Western Spotted Mosquito.  Everyone is between these two extremes, which means that saying "profit matters more than protecting our environment" without mentioning any specific level of either is meaningless.

"profit matters more than acting in an ethical way"

He doesn't define this, but it's said over footage of a factory pig farm so I'm assuming he's talking about treating animals right.  But here's the thing, it's not profit that is put ahead of animal welfare, not really, it's wages.  If workers insisted on buying only meat from humanely kept animals then there would be no profit in factory farming.  Workers don't do that because they care more about high real wages than they do about animal welfare.   In fact in all cases consumers, who are mostly workers, decide what ethics they consider acceptable for firms selling to them.  They decide ethics not entrepeneurs, although entrepeneurs may override their preferences and be more "ethical" (by their own standards) at the cost of their own profit.  

 

"profit matters more than the health of the general public"
Well that depends on how much profit and how much health we're talking about.  Nobody thinks profit enough to buy a used Corrolla is worth that pouring everyone dying by age 40.  Nobody thinks that sacrificing enough wealth to send every child in the USA to university is a good idea if it stops one case of cancer .  Everyone is between these two extremes, which means that saying "profit matters more than protecting the health of he general public " without mentioning any specific level of either is meaningless.

Yes that paragraph was a copy and paste of the environment one, because the points are exactly equivalent.
 

Then there's the real Marxism (this guy is not a "left libertarian" he's a hardcore commie.

 

He introduces the idea of "economic reproduction" the idea that capitalists will pay enough so that workers won't starve, because they need the workers to live to work the means of production.  He says that having workers is most important, more than having a market, showing that he's totally ignorant of economics. 

 

His reasoning is typical of "class" thinking, regarding people as members of a class that are concerned with advancing the interests of that class rather than their own.  Consider a capitalist that employs 100,000 people in an economy of 100M workers.  Suppose wages make up 50% of his expenses and  that if he paid 10% higher wages he could stop 10% of his workers starving to death per year.  So increasing the wages would cost 5% of total costs and mean that population would increase 0.1%.  So it would do almost nothing to increase the labor supply for the capitalist and send costs up a crippling amount.  

Of course this is irrelevant because what limits the number of workers employed by a capitalist is not the total amount,but he amount that can't find better work elsewhere.  Opportunity cost, not cost to maintain the worker is what is important.  Of course Marxist theory depends on the "iron law of wages" that says if wages go up, more workers survive, increasing labor supply and thus lowering wages.  This however depends on the adjustment being pretty much instant and large enough to overwhelm the higher wages.  Sure if workers have more money they are more children, but those children don't become workers for years.  In the meantime they demand more goods, so there is MORE demand for labor, meaning more demand for labor.  Addditionally workers won't put all their resources to having more children, they'll purchase other luxuries as well*. So feeding and providing necessitites to the new workers won't consume the entire surplus of wages above necessitiy.

"they're interested in keeping you healthy enough to work but no healthier"

As though there was a level of health "good enough to work" but beyond which you aren't any healthier.  

"from a catalyst point of view any investment into the health and well-being of the population"
Note that employers don't get to decide how much gets invested in that.

"the condition of being economically exploited has a negative effect on health and well-being"
And yet health massively improved when capitalism came in.  The poster doesn't provide any evidence of economic "exploitation"  being bad for anyone.

 

I'm going to pause here as he starts on the supposed pyschological effects of the market.  I have a feeling that will deserve a post of it's own.


* economically having children is a luxury, since they cost resources and you don't have to have them.