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RE: BERNIE SANDERS TO VOTE AGAINST BUDGET BILL!!!!
I totally get what you mean about government being corrupt but if its made smaller won't business just take its place and be corrupt instead? We need things that are run by people not businesses or state? :-)
When you put people in power they become corrupt especially if they are all the way in D.C I would first of all rather follow the constitution and all powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved for the states. So healthcare should be a state issue not a federal, same goes with percent of federal departments. Now lets say there was no state or business, we would be living in a barter system. If there are "businesses" which I dont like to call them that because they are just people. So in a where we have business or the ability to trade, naturally those that get rich would have to offer products or services to people that need or want them. You would not get rich by being corrupt and doing shady things, nor would most business because they would know if the consumer finds out they wont buy from him. What i'm trying to get at is in a free market which is when two individuals make an exchange voluntarily without the state picking sides or helping one at the expense of another. The only reason two people make an exchange is because they see an equal benefit in the trade. For example if I have a shirt and I ask you if you want to buy it, I may say 10 bucks and you would think if it sounds good to you. You may counter and say 8 I will think if it sounds good to me, if during this process an exchange is made, we must have both benefited from the trade or we would not have made a trade. So that process is all business is. The state on the other hand may want to rig the game as they see benefit in controlling all of us business included, so the state may enact price controls and maybe suggest some business is doing something it shouldn't, which is usually what they say. Now enacting price controls is going on in the U.S right now, what this does is make it harder for other companies to compete, creating a regulated market. For example imagine if they was a man that studied knee surgery for 20 years, just didnt go to college or get any "formal" training, but did train. This man is your neighbor and he has a little hospital room setup in his house, sense i'm thinking of a free market, he only had to trade with another person to get the equipment. There would be a lot more companies producing this equipment too, now your neighbor does not have any licensing from the government. You need a knee surgery the monopolistic hospitals we have today are charging 10,000 or 5,000 whatever it may be, your neighbor says, ill charge you 2,000 and you decide for yourself if you think you will benefit from letting him give you the surgery, he does the surgery and its perfect! you advise your fellow citizens that this guy is good and its cheap, then the government finds out that they didnt give this guy permission i.e a license, to give surgeries, so they arrest him. This is not a free market, in a free market we the people or we the individuals decide who does surgery on us as individuals. You dont decide for me, I dont decide for you, and especially the GOVERNMENT!!!! should not decide for us. This is why business without help from the state cannot do anything to you that you dont let it. For example I could try and take advantage of you, and say I want 100 for this shirt, if you said yes sure I guess I got cha, but you agreed to buy it for 100 dollars. Usually when we as individuals are left to be responsible for ourselves we do a better job then having government be responsible on our behalf. The reason I dont like bernie, is he wants government to be responsible on our behalf. This is just my opinion but usually people are less responsible with other peoples stuff, so why should we trust the government to be responsible for building hospitals, running hospitals, etc Once they control the hospitals they will be complete monopolies, as the private owners will still be the ones running the hospitals but their will be no competition. prices will all be the same, everything would be the same, exempt for in the poor communities where their hospitals would be the worst. I hope I did not loose you in all of this.
No I do get what you are saying :-) this is an interesting debate :-)
I would agree with a lot of that except for in my view there is a big difference between large corporations and small businesses, large corporate interests often push and bully there way that the governments do too, individuals or small businesses are generally much more fair with each other, there is a lot of cases over history of big businesses creating monopolies that massively exploit people who are at the bottom, for example lets say you have one town where most of the jobs are controlled by a large corporate interests, they have a huge monopoly on the workforce, if they shut down everyone lose there jobs so people will obey them no matter what rules they have, ok sure they could try setup in competition but even if they did would they have a real chance against someone like walmart? or would they collapse because they can compete? I agree about your lack of faith in government, it is very often massively corrupted but at the same time I think business can be just as bad and aggressive towards those who are vulnerable, the increase of small business on a mass scale gives more power to the individuals don't you reckon?
yes I dont think we should compare anything to free markets in today's world, so you pointed out Walmart. Yet we have way to many regulations in place right now, so their is not much competition against Walmart. I think Walmart does a good job though at getting the best product at a cheap price. Monopolies usually never form in a free market environment unless they offer a better product for a cheaper price and in this case this is good for the consumers, as when at least I go to the store I look for the cheapest thing, unless its a horrible product of course. I would fear monopolies that form due to government intervention, because now a business has the ability to offer a worse product at a higher price. Healthcare is a great example of a horrible service at a very high price, but where is the competition? Healthcare is the most highly regulated market we have in America. I would not fear a business that is in a free market no matter how big they are because if the business is huge they still cannot offer a worse product at a high price because someone will offer a better product at a slightly lower price and these companies will be forced to compete to stay in business. I admit I am not the king on any of these topics, I advise Murray Rothbard, Ludwig Von Mises, Ron Paul, Milton Friedman, and you know what you could just go to Mises.org and they have tons of books in the store section. I'm not telling you your wrong in your thinking or i'm right in my thinking, I am simply suggesting a site that has a lot of information on these topics. In my opinion if I may express it, Austrian economics speaks true to me, I fully believe that it is the best way to have freedom and liberty and economic liberty, although as the Mises institute will show, I dont believe you can have freedom if you do not have economic freedom. I would say we must not look at today as capitalism, we must look at it as state run socialism or communism. An example that I think shows we do not have private ownership of the means of production, which is the true definition of capitalism. If you own something it is yours you can destroy it, give it away, sell it, rent it out, put it in storage, abandon it, basically do what you want with it so long as it does not violate the rights of others. So a first clue in showing we do not really "own" the means of production which in my opinion is anything that can produce something so a garden, sowing machine, anything that you can sell. Well if you owned the means of production you would not have to pay property tax on the land you "own" Like I said if you own it then you can do what you want with it that includes going to Florida and coming back to Michigan 10 years latter and its still yours. Instead if you leave to Florida and perhaps dont pay your property tax or "rent" to the government they will take back that land as it was not really yours. Now also if you own property nobody can come and tell you what to do with it, yet we let the government come into our lives and say you must have a deck, or you must have a railing to sell it, they say you cannot discriminate when you sell "your" land or house. These are all examples of a situation where the government is the true owner and your just making exchanges on the governments behalf. Now people will say well if we dont pay a property tax we wont have schools, no no we wont have government controlled schools we will have free market schooling, now they say well then only rich kids will get schooling and I can throw that argument out of the water, as there is more low income people then high income so they will be a big target for a capitalist. I could be a private tutor and charge maybe 10 dollars an hour and you could hire them for 4 hours a day but only 2 or 3 days a week, But your free to choose for you so 1 hour a day, or send them to a school whatever you want to do, I mean its your kid not mine. Like I said the Mises Institute can explain everything most likely better then me. thanks for listening and respecting other opinions I see where you are coming from it can really be a scary concept when you look at business today, and think you want them to have free range, but I want everyone to have free range without being restricted or boosted by government.
Yeah I get what you mean, my fear with business is that they create the same control systems that government creates, I mean for example lets say if you look at the exploitation that happened with coffee growers in africa, large coffee companies dominated the growing and employment of people and kept them for years on starvation wages, they had nobody else to sell there produce to and no money to start a competing company so the business exploited them and made them work hard for nothing, it was only when fair trade companies were eventually setup to compete that they then found better wages, it took charity based intervention to do this though, it broke the monopoly of the people doing the exploitation and gave the workers for wages, it was all still in the capitalist model but the money was distributed in a more even basis instead of a board of directors and shareholders keeping all of it whilst others starved, I think possibly the only resolution is the joint of the two ideologies of social and capitalistic, for example fair trade companies work on the capitalist model but they provide fair and equal conditions and wages, this is all without government intervention but it also challenges the elite business rulers who are happy to pay people wages that make their families starve, maybe a good a balance? :-)
Upvoted and Followed :-)
I understand your concern, my only problem is I dont think we should tell others what they do with their property. This is what social order wants to do. I think we have enough people in america to make pure capitalism work, as monopolies would not form in america unless they were selling a better product at a cheaper price, i'm sure if they were starving their employees nobody would buy from them especially if another company started, to pay their employees better. I just think we need to respect property rights, which means nobody including government can tell you what you do with your property.
I get what you mean, but what about with environmental issues, for example when large chemical companies have been found to be involved in criminal behaviour that has polluted water or lead to people developing cancer? Often they have been aware of what they were doing but continued to do it anyway as they only cared about making maximum profit irrespective of what it did to human life, large corporations are littered with history of that nature, criminal neglect and sometimes knowledge that leads to serious illnesses, the tobacco industry is another great example of this, they were very aware of the effects of smoking a very long time before it was made public, as people did not have that information they were unable to make informed choices as individuals as they did not know it was harming their health.
As far as the tobacco industry, I think the people that buy cigs will always do a better job then government in deciding whats good and bad for themselves. I'm not saying it was right for them not to tell people that it could cause illness, I think if they dont and someone comes to find out they develop cancer they should speak out against that company. As for the environment I think we need to privatize more of the land and rivers, possibly the oceans. Some people think that is crazy but, if someone buy a river and that would be a lot of money, then they would have an incentive to take care of it. Usually someone who pays tons of money for something is going to try and make that money back plus some. Boats come through rivers, people fish through rivers, etc. Now a person who owns this water source would never allow a chemical company to dump it on his land/water because now it will effect his profit. I just think capitalism which is just the private sector, will do a better job at helping the environment, stopping chemical dumping, oil spills, than the government will. When something is owned by everyone its usually not taken care of as well as you would if it was yours. Example, if there is a pond with fish but everyone can just come and fish it, then we would run out of fish and then nobody would fish it. If it was privately owned then the owner would determine how many fish are left and charge more money to fish it, in till he is able to replenish the supply.
I do agree that ownership can be a good thing on a small scale to protect things, the problem comes surely when you have large companies buying other companies and other ones and they grow bigger and bigger, don't you think that people at the top of corporations abuse there positions? You seem very cynical about government (which I agree with) but very trusting at the motivation of corporations, do they really have our interests at heart? What if they want to enslave humanity, will anyone be able to stop them?
Yeah I get what you mean, my fear with business is that they create the same control systems that government creates, I mean for example lets say if you look at the exploitation that happened with coffee growers in africa, large coffee companies dominated the growing and employment of people and kept them for years on starvation wages, they had nobody else to sell there produce to and no money to start a competing company so the business exploited them and made them work hard for nothing, it was only when fair trade companies were eventually setup to compete that they then found better wages, it took charity based intervention to do this though, it broke the monopoly of the people doing the exploitation and gave the workers for wages, it was all still in the capitalist model but the money was distributed in a more even basis instead of a board of directors and shareholders keeping all of it whilst others starved, I think possibly the only resolution is the joint of the two ideologies of social and capitalistic, for example fair trade companies work on the capitalist model but they provide fair and equal conditions and wages, this is all without government intervention but it also challenges the elite business rulers who are happy to pay people wages that make their families starve, maybe a good a balance? :-)
Upvoted and Followed :-)
Oh and also, as this is an interesting debate, followed :-D