I actually don't care about profit, I care about how it's distributed - it should be given to the people who generated it. That's not how capitalism works.
You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
I don't support regulations uncritically, I think rent control plus NIMBYism is a disaster. You'd ideally want to build more accommodation, preferably apartment blocks over single family.
I'll admit I'm not a policy wonk so I don't know how non wage compensation plays into it. I do know that the American healthcare system is fucked and should be transitioned to a single payer system.
Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
I've given so many examples of people being victimised in this thread, you just keep restating your opinions and moving on when I show my point so it's pretty clear you're unmovable in your ideology so there's no point continuing with this. I didn't engage with this thread to debate with libertarians when my established premise was that libertarians never move from their positions.
Like I said, your explanation for that not being how capitalism works, which was:
>>However, if you take apple alongside all their inputs, what you have is an extractive model where shareholders capture the value created by employees and suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc).
Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.
>>You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])
Beyond federal regulations, state and local regulations increased as well. The land-use study I linked to earlier explains how much land-use restrictions, enacted at the local government level, have increased since 1960, and how much this has contributed to income inequality and productivity growth stagnation.
Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
>>Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
> Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.
There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets. You can see this given that (let's momentarily discount Marxian economics) Austrian economics, Keynesianism and MMT are all considered variously "consensus economics" within different groups (and libertarians tend to favour Austrian economics while actual economists don't), clearly economics is not a hard science with decided models.
> The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
> Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
Have you considered that perhaps it is you who has been misinformed?
> Pure Dunning-Kruger over-confidence.
Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed. Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
The paper notes that corporations can be converted to worker coops, but in actuality this rarely happens because workers don't have the capital to enact a buyout.
And with that, I'm done with this argument. I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up, because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth. Resorting to historical revisionism about child labour just shows me that you're constructing your conclusions first and making the facts fit that conclusion. Your arguments against left-wing analysis of capitalism have consisted primarily of pointing at the USSR and China, which does not address the critique of capitalism, it just creates a new critique of Leninism. Oh, and calling Marxist analysis "victimhood politics", which isn't an argument.
None of that is meant as an insult - we all have biases, but we should aim to examine them in order to more accurately assess our environments. That's the hypocrisy I find with rationalists being libertarians: they don't even approach Marxist critiques of capitalism, they just ignore them or attack strawmen in response. If you truly believe that capitalism is not meaningfully critiqued by leftists, you should be able to address their concerns directly, even steelmanning their positions.
>>There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets.
But there is a mainstraem consensus, and Marxism is entirely outside of it. It is quack economics. For example, Marx believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
>>Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
This is just the mainstream narrative. The real powers in society, which revolve around the state, have for 50 years, spun a narrative of an ascendant libertarianism (e.g. "neoliberalism"), when all broad-based measures of the centralization of society shows rapid transition to a more controlled and restricted market with more power in the hand of state bodies and industries tightly intertwined with them.
>>I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there):
The reason union membership rates declined is that unions bankrupted nearly every industry that was amenable to unionization. The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.
The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.
Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year, and the average government worker in California now makes over $140,000 a year:
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
>>Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed.
The historical revisionism + ideologically-motivated naivety is in thinking that child labor could be eliminated without the economic development that free market capitalism fostered.
Child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. If you prohibited child labor in the poorest countries in the world today, you would cause an increase in malnutrition and extreme poverty, because productivity in those societies is so low that children working is often the only way every one in the family can afford to eat.
Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
Focusing on child labor is another case of you focusing on an outlier scenario where libertarianism doesn't apply as a matter of principle, as you attempt to rationalize your anti-libertarian principles.
>>Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
And you're completely ignoring/depreciating the significance of creating and expanding productive enterprises, which is what the market right to own a company as a founder and investor incentivizes and sustains. You will see dramatically less new business creation if you abolish these rights, for the sake of forcing society to use coops.
>>I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up,
I spent many many years completely discounting what libertarians online had to say. I only feigned debate with them, when in reality I dismissed them as simplistic ideologues, blindly parroting a narrative concocted by corporate-owned think tanks and media (e.g. Fox News) to trick the masses into fighting against their own interests, and never actually evaluated their arguments with an open mind.
Libertarianism is actually just a basic understanding of economics, devoid of ideological narratives alleging exploitation in certain types of voluntary interaction, that are advanced to rationalize restrictions and special privileges imposed and bestowed by the state, respectively, to allegedly combat these invisible chains of oppression.
>>because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth.
Arguing that market rights cease to apply in extreme circumstances for which market rights were not designed is entirely reasonable, and for you to critique capitalism, and argue for the social democratic anti-libertarian order, which in most countries of the world, gives the state control over at least 40 percent of the productive output via taxation and regulatory gatekeeping, based solely on appeals to these fantastical outlier scenarios, shows bad faith debating.
You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
I don't support regulations uncritically, I think rent control plus NIMBYism is a disaster. You'd ideally want to build more accommodation, preferably apartment blocks over single family.
I'll admit I'm not a policy wonk so I don't know how non wage compensation plays into it. I do know that the American healthcare system is fucked and should be transitioned to a single payer system.
Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
I've given so many examples of people being victimised in this thread, you just keep restating your opinions and moving on when I show my point so it's pretty clear you're unmovable in your ideology so there's no point continuing with this. I didn't engage with this thread to debate with libertarians when my established premise was that libertarians never move from their positions.