holy **** this is funny

Well I think this conclusively proves that winning on the internet is about getting the last word in. Being right is an irrelevant distraction.

Resorting to the same tactics AGAIN?

I will repeat: Paring my arguments down to single sentences so you can discard them when they are out of context is asinine. You aren't fooling me and you aren't fooling anybody else either. I think people are fully capable of understanding what arguments to assign your counter-arguments to without you doing this.

As I mentioned before, I have an excellent memory too. I can see that you're editing out parts of my post so you don't have to respond to them, hoping they will get lost in the sea of your bull****. I believe I also mentioned that I wasn't going to let this fly, either.




I did make an actual argument that those who have it are more qualified other than "there are lost of risks involved," you have simply failed to read and comprehend the argument. As I previously stated: Capital wealth is concentrated in the hands of the people most able to use it because those who cannot use it effectively will definitely lose it with surprising alacrity. If someone has enough money to buy a factory, and their factory is a commercial failure, they will have lost an enormous amount of money. The problem here is that this is a fairly obvious and logical conclusion. The idea that you couldn't see this the first time I brought up the point is bad enough, but the fact that you never realized this earlier in your life - like maybe the first time as a child that you got an allowance for doing chores and realized that the money sticks around longer if you spend it wisely - is truly baffling.

You did claim that life is unfair because capitalism reflects life. While it is extremely important that the government view us all as equals, we aren't: there will always be someone with a better job, better abilities, a hotter girlfriend, better hair and bigger genitals. There will always be "haves" and "have nots," and I overwhelmingly prefer the system where there is a chance - however remote it may be - that a person can become one of the "haves" rather than a system like yours that determines social order via immutable traits.

The wealthy managers don't need to correct the behavior of "the entire class;" they need only correct the behavior of their own employees. You previously brought up the 'carrot and the stick' earlier, but you don't understand how employers control their employees? If you perform poorly you get fired; if you perform well you get a raise or promotion. Have you actually never held a job before? Or are you just a really terrible employee?

You're also quite wrong about the Soviet Union. Work ethics in the Soviet Union were poor which is part of the reason the Soviet Union failed. The system was viewed as corrupt to the point where supervisors never had any reason or need to do any supervision, the corruption disenfranchised workers and over half of the population was unsatisfied with the nature of their work and the salary they were being paid. Because, as you mentioned, the Soviets were "state capitalists", this disillusionment toward their employer became disillusionment with the party.

Inflation is a natural consequence of scarcity. The exact same sort of devaluation happens whether you are talking about a livestock barter system or the average amount of dowry paid relative to the local population of men. I keep bringing it up because it is a fundamental concept to discuss in any economy. You keep saying that inflation only exists under "this" system but you have repeatedly failed to exhibit any alternative (theoretical or historical) that eliminates the concept. Any society that engages in any form of commerce will see the effects of relative devaluation; if they use any form of standard currency it is inflation.

You do know that feudalism is a political system and not an economic system, right? And that capitalism has existed since before recorded history? And that our modern governments are called things like "constitutional monarchies" and "republics?" You are also aware that millions of people were killed outright under Stalinism, that millions more were put into siberian gulags, and that millions more starved to death due to mismanagement of farmlands and produce? You are also aware that modern quality of life (standard of living is a worthless metric) has severely diminished in modern industrialized nations over the last 30 or so years?


Life is based on personal gain. Even our limited altruistic behavior has selfish motivations - the expectation of reciprocation, improving our public image or a spiritual reward: the evidence for this is omnipresent. You keep making the claim that humans are not inherently selfish but the only thing you can come up with is an argument from ignorance? Try again.

So who chooses the guy in charge? Who decides who to hire - and what's to prevent a minority-elected person from stacking the company in his favor? Who decides who to fire, and when it's appropriate? I think plenty of simple two-way partnerships fail due to personality conflicts without turning it into a 200-way brawl, thanks. You've restricted it from micro-democracy but you haven't adequately refuted my argument.

Thank you for leaving this in your post, it saves me the effort of reposting it:

You have failed to refute my argument that this would be impractical. You have failed to support your argument that it would. Define what "context" would create people who are qualified to do this. Furthermore, support your assertation that this system would be better and explain why.



Are you trying to tell me that you aren't able to remember what you read five minutes earlier? Or are you trying to tell me that you refuse to quit being a douche and quit refuting arguments in a vaccum of context?


I was offering a specific hypothetical example of what impact inflation can have. I never stated that food prices are affected only by inflation, and I never mentioned the current food problem. It's called contextomy and a strawman. You don't know how to do this.

You continue to fail to read what I am posting. My claim is that wealth redistribution would be bad for the economy and the population general; my argument is that wealth redistribution causes widespread inflation. It is a prima facie argument: I do not have to support it, because the nature of inflation is general knowledge. This is the equivalent of making the claim "It's hard to see a blue plane against the sky" with the argument "because the sky is blue." I do not need to explain why the sky is blue or the fact that human vision is based on contrast. The argument stands by itself. You still don't understand the difference between a claim and an argument, which makes me inclined to either reiterate my previous point about your cognitive abilities or express doubt that you aren't being deliberately obtuse.

That would have been when you posted about binary economics, champ!


Yes, I'm glad you agree.




Actually it's a refutation of your point that the spanish civil war communes were "hierarchy-less." The rest of your refutation is irrelevant and a strawman.

This type of debate tends to not have a "winner" but yes the last word is important for the internet, which shows the unimportance of internet message board debating. But for example, the famous Chomsky/Buckley debate's "winner" tends to be perceived differently by people who agree with one ideology over the other.



You're not attacking my point properly here. I didn't claim that some capitalists fail and lose out (although I'm not sure how much downward mobility there is from capitalist class to lower classes, as they tend to find other opportunities given their situation). I instead was arguing about the actual ability to own such a factory, and that it is actually quite limited. This is the point about social/economic mobility being limited, as if it's the case that upward social/economic mobility is actually quite rare compared to what free market proponents claim (which is the case), then it's hard to imagine that only such an elite few are the ones who are "the best qualified" to be the owners, as even the opportunity for the rest to try it was nonexistent.

And as for the point about "editing out things from your posts." Notice how I decided to not include your lame attempts at personal attacks again. As I noted earlier, I'm not going to waste my time responding to "you are just wrong" or "you just don't get it" as they have nothing to offer for this discussion. I don't see why you bother still, it's quite sad actually that you have to continue with that over a message board honestly.



What exactly do you mean by "capitalism reflects life"? Capitalism is an economic system that is socially constructed, not a natural occurrence. Granted, proponents of it often try to make the claim that "it's the best suited for human nature" but that's something that I and many others disagree with.

As for your point about equality, Socialists do not argue that everyone should be equal in every sense. Socialists recognize that there are differences in ability and among individuals. The criticism of the economic disparity is that the "haves" in a capitalist system are "haves" at the expense of the have nots and that it is the economic structure that maintains that disparity under the veil of a false sense of equality of opportunity. So I would say that socialists argue for a true equality of opportunity which would lead to less disparity.



And I haven't claimed that managers correct and police the entire class themselves. It's a systematic process that involves many aspects of economics, wealth distribution and social issues (the last point which Marx didn't hit on well enough).



Your source deals mainly with the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras, which were the two most corrupt period of the USSR. The Brezhnev era is often blamed by the policies of Khrushchev and his rule lead to a stagnate economy (and many Marxists blame the move to more of a state capitalist system for causing this).

So I would imagine that there is a high correlation (and perhaps some causal forces involved) in a stagnating economy and the decreasing work ethic in these poor economic periods. Just as I would imagine that the work ethic was a little lower in the Great Depression in America than it was in the 50s or early/mid 60s.

I don't disagree with you about the point of how corrupt the USSR became and that their method of a planned economy ultimately failed as a strategy. However I assume that you believe that Marxism leads to this (as many proponents of capitalism argue) and this I disagree with.



I didn't say that inflation only exists in this system. I said that the way in which it would increase as a result of redistribution is a function of this system. Of course the main alternative to this is the Marxist Labor theory of value, which also takes into account how money is printed and scarcity but at the same time recognizes that the value of commodities is based in large part the cost of labor. This is part of why Marx argued that capitalism had a fundamental problem, as it would try to raise the prices of commodities as much as possible while lowering labor costs as much as possible (and labor are the ones who need access to the commodities). This, in part, creates vicious cycles that makes the system instable. Although you could argue that it always picks back up, which it tends to do, but the instability is very harmful to the "have nots". Granted welfare states were introduced to make this system less harsh and more stable, and that has worked up until now, although the welfare state has been reduced and reduced so it will be interesting to see what happens to those cycles in the coming years.



There is a political component to feudalism, yes but it is at the core more of an economic system. The way in which the economy was structured and how the modes of production were owned and operated was fundamentally different than under capitalism. The relation of the "lower classes" to labor and the means of production is also fundamentally different under a feudal system. In a capitalist system, labor owns their own labor power and ability to work where they want and sell there time, where as in a feudal system, they are tied to their land, and production benefits much less people than under capitalism.

As for the Stalinist system, the majority of those killed were due to the collectivization of farms. But it wasn't just mismanagement (although I'm sure that contributed) but instead an attempt to get as much for the party/state from the farms at the expense of the peasants. It was done in a quota system in a sense, farmers were required to produce X amount of crops, and the state would take that much, anything above they could keep. The problem of course was when they fell short of that mark, they starved. This is one reason that Humanist Marxists are very opposed to Stalin. The strategy worked quite well for industrializing the USSR, but not for human life. This was basically a process of compressing the industrial revolution into a short period instead of a more natural long process like the West, and in the West many died as a result of this transition too, but it was just spread over time. (Don't misunderstand me as trying to justify Stalin though of course).



Well a collective society is not at odds with granting people their personal gain. This is why Marx makes the distinction between private and personal property: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm (starting with "In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.")

As for the altruistic argument, altruism isn't the notion of completely selfless motivation for certain actions, that is impossible because you derive some satisfaction for fulfilling a desire to help someone else. Instead it is putting someone else's interests above your own. But I don't see the point in arguing of altruism, as Socialism isn't a 100% altruistic society, just a society based on the social character of economic production instead of wealth acquisition.

As for the "what's to stop someone from hijacking a company for themselves after being elected" Well first, I would imagine the same principle of representative democracy should be at work here and you could even have checks and balances, for example workers councils could have the ability to impeach.

You could use the same question to make an argument against our own method of electing officials: what's to stop the people we elect to run our country from using it for their own personal gain (although the past few years may be an example of that).

Management could still be run the same way, thus equally as practical as it is today, but as I said, with people having more of a stake in how things are run (at least if the context is a market Socialist one).



Fair enough.



Well they're both claims. Even the claim that wealth distribution (in this system) leads to mass inflation. That's a claim of a causal relationship between those two things, and is likely right under this economic system as I have pointed out earlier.



You must still be taking my posting of binary economics out of context. It was simply a point that "you don't have to be a communist to disagree with this wealth structure". I never tried to justify or argue for binary economics, I was simply making a side point.



How is that a strawman? You said "if you're talking about the forced collectivization in the USSR" to which I replied "no, of course those are not non-hierarchical"

Too bad this has absolutely nothing to do with the following:

A. Opinion
B. Perception
C. Ideology

You're either right, or you're wrong. In this case, you're wrong. The only reason this "debate" hasn't ended 2 pages ago is because you refuse to take a loser. Anyone with even a modicum of common sense and intelligence in the matter knows you're wrong. You're essentially becoming the laughing stock of Massassi, joining the likes of Fizzicks master Friend14.

Save whatever little face you have left and stand down from what is becoming an increasingly dull and repetitive "debate". You aren't making any headway with Joncy because he's straight up right on every account. He doesn't even need references, because his arguments are so blatantly simple to understand and realize.

The only good mod that doesnt make you look like a pirate is mods to play PAL & Japanese games.

Oh Jesus Christ, you just don't get it. Why don't you just get it?

Resorting to the same tactics AGAIN?

I will repeat: Paring my arguments down to single sentences so you can discard them when they are out of context is asinine. You aren't fooling me and you aren't fooling anybody else either. I think people are fully capable of understanding what arguments to assign your counter-arguments to without you doing this.

Yes this type of debate does tend to have winners. The winners is me. You are the losers but you aren't intelligent enough to see it. I won pages ago when I called you a selfish infant for pirating a game and then publicly masturbating about how you're fighting the wealthy elites, and ever since then has been a downward march to "BUT MARX SAID" land which is the political debate equivalent of comparing something you have a mild distaste for to Adolf Hitler.

Marx was wrong. Many countries have proven him wrong, and no sane educated economist or political scientist takes him seriously: not real socialists (who believe that a violent class struggle isn't necessary) or anarchists (who reject a transitory compulsory government), historical materialism is pseudoscience, the labor theory of value has been rejected wholesale by economists in favor of marginalism and given that the whole general process of Marxism is immensely destructive and the very antithesis of being 'in the public good' I'm afraid I'm going to have to suggest that only the most ignorant of toolbags would willingly quote or reference Marx without ending their statement with some variation of ", isn't that funny?"

I don't even care anymore. You're oh so very wrong it's retarded. You honestly haven't even given me anything to respond to, since I've already destroyed any on-topic "refutation" you've posted earlier in the thread and the rest of your post is an off-topic diatribe about Stalinism, a completely retarded claim about economics that doesn't actually work or a flagrant advertisement of your total lack of reading comprehension skills.

I mean,... Jesus Christ. Did you seriously argue that capitalism is unstable because people won't be able to afford something that's priced too high? I mean... ...seriously? But that's what makes capitalism stable... argh

Wake me up when you actually demonstrate that:

- Collectivization of the means of production would result in an improved quality of life.
- That an economic model that does not experience inflation exists at all, theoretical or otherwise.
- You have the correct number of chromosomes. Seriously.

What do you mean it doesn't apply to A-C? That's just how many philosophical/political debates go, the winner is often subjective. Philosophy and even economics aren't a matter of black and white "right or wrong" as it there is much disagreement on many things and debates don't always settle it.

It's cute that Jon C has a cheerleader in you but I'm not really worried about whether you personally think he's right or not.

[QUOTE=Jon C]I will repeat: Paring my arguments down to single sentences so you can discard them when they are out of context is asinine. You aren't fooling me and you aren't fooling anybody else either. I think people are fully capable of understanding what arguments to assign your counter-arguments to without you doing this.[/QUOTE]

Did you even read my last reply? I didn't "single out" sentences but replied to ones that were already stand alone comments.

I can make all the same smart *** comments you can like "oh wow how are you so wrong" or "just give up" and it doesn't further my point any more than it furthers yours.



Oh so if you proclaim yourself the winner it's the case? Interesting. So you won because you insulted me a few pages ago? And you were trying to talk about logic earlier.



Marx isn't just objectively wrong, as a matter of fact he is still studied at quite a length, and not just to understand history but as a current analysis of today's world and economics. To say that Marxism is inherently destructive is to be ignorant of its analysis of economics and philosophy. You can point to examples like the USSR, but from a Marxist analysis, those countries deviated quite a bit from Marx.



Cute, I'll do the same thing: I've responded to your points and "refutations" to my points in length and your failure to respond shows that I'm right.

Marx was a prolific writer that published huge amounts of vastly comprehensive works on a huge range of topics. No-one can study economics without studying Marx, not because he was demonstrably 'right' (in politics and economics, no-one ever is, it's often a study of perspectives) but because of the depth and breadth of his work. He is one of the most important economists of modern times and his works have influenced every industrialised economy in the world.
It's almost a shame that merely the word 'Marx' has so many intensely emotional connotations one way or the other, and is almost inseparable from 'Lenin' or 'Stalin' or 'Mao'. But works of Marx are comprehensive and complex, and the critiques of Marx are comprehensive and complex. It's very fashionable to think you can summarise Marxism in one sentence, and disprove it in another, but that is mere ignorance, arrogance and stupidity. It's difficult enough to write a thesis on the topic.

It is much like how Richard Dawkins is, in the public image, often associated purely with his works on atheism and his opposition to the 'Intelligence Design' movement, which completely overshadows his brilliance as a biologists whose works will be studied by every undergraduate biology student.

Dude I'm debating with a kid who thinks it's cool to pirate games. He's bringing up Marx because that communism thing sounds super-keen. A little sophistry here and there can eliminate a future six pages of TSM_Bguitar telling the workers of the world to unite. If you aren't part of the solution here then you're part of the incredibly stupid problem.



Post an argument to back up your assertations that:

- Collectivization of the means of production would result in an improved quality of life.
- That an economic model that does not experience inflation exists at all, theoretical or otherwise.

Pretty much sums it up

There's nothing subjective about what is being argued. This argument was never about philosophy or politics. It was about how you consider pirating software to somehow be morally correct when it is not in any shape or form. It was about how you know nothing of economics, which last I checked is a science and is hardly left open to interpretation.

You then proceeded to blather on about philosophy and politics when Joncy has done everything he could to keep this argument where it belongs. You're just trying to find any way of justifying your childish lawbreaking.

It's also cute how you seem to think that I am "cheerleading" Joncy. I'm just someone who is bothering to post in tandem with Joncy about how wrong you are. Rest assured, I am not the only one who is siding with Joncy. Rather, I'd be tempted to poll who isn't on Joncy's side with this.

Except, you know, he's right. You haven't argued him on any point he's stated, you've ignored the points and brought in some wholly unrelated crap.

Stop using the word cute. You're destroying its meaning.

Sorry for the late return to the topic I was out of town, if this is considered necro-posting then please delete.



Cute that you have to continue to resort to more baseless ad hominems. I don't remember where I argued that piracy is "cool," only that I gave a perspective of it that was counter to your "it's morally wrong!" argument.

Regardless of how Marxism was brought up (I believe it was due to my bringing out that fact that I was opposed to the ownership of the means of production by capital), It certainly wasn't brought up for any reason other than to further explain my perspective.



It is necessary to show first that Capitalism isn't the "quality of life improver" that it is often claimed to be, and that an alternate system that fixes the flaws of capitalism (for example, taking the social character of production into account) would take the benifits that the techonology of capitalism has provided and expand on them by having production oriented towards what the people want as opposed to what the few owners of capital want.

I don't recall making claiming that inflation wouldn't exist in a collective society, it likely would (especially at first). But it also exists under a capitalist society.



But it certainly became an argument about philosophy/politics because my motives were challenged and the claim was made that piracy is always wrong. You seem to take the stance that there is no debating the morality of piracy which clearly shows that you are unaware of alternate perspectives and opinions on the matter. Also, economics, while it is a science, is no where near as absolute a science as something like basic physics. It is still a social science and there is no one right perspective.



No, I was the one who was originally challenged as "just wanting to pirate" and that "piracy is always wrong". Those were two things I disagreed with, and I explained why. Then Jon proceeded to engage those reasons with me. Making posts saying "hah you're wrong!" doesn't really contribute anything to a thread like this, but I'm not too worried about it.



More cheerleading.

I'm pretty done with this thread as I'm sure everyone else is, but if you'd like to continue then perhaps I will.

hahaha, you still care

I'm putting this thread out of its misery.