misutip-deactivated20101021-dea asked: I love your arguments for capitalism; I just wish the world weren't so full of greedy bastards (rich bastards are okay, however.)
i have so many questions for you, since you seem to be the only sane republican/ conservative i know that doesn't go against her/his values every other day. but i'm trying to take a break.... do you think that both communism or capitalism in theory works, but in practice fails to achieve their initial purpose?
and this is a really good question, asked by my fellow friend (who's a socialist/ anarchist --idk) if [you guys] believe in a free market, why have borders? doesn't that defeat the purpose of (laissez faire) capitalism/ the free market approach?--hopefully i didn't skew it up that badly.
Well, I’m not a huge fan of greed myself (I prefer to say it’s self-interest that provides the profit motive; it lacks the connotation of excess and malice), but I don’t think doing away with capitalism will do away with greed. Rather, it will simply provide the greedy with different avenues to fulfill their desires.
As for communism and capitalism…let me start with the latter. I think capitalism — by which I mean the free market, not the corporatism our society likes to pretend is capitalism — hasn’t ever happened in its true form. The United States has perhaps come closest to having real capitalism, but even here there has always been some sort of restraint on the market, typically (at minimum) in the form of government monopoly of the money industry, which is in many ways the most important industry of all. But I do think that to the extent we’ve had a free market both here and abroad, it’s shown itself to be as effective as the theories to which I ascribe say it would be — and that if we had an entirely free market, it would be even better.
As for communism, my answer here is a little more qualified. As you no doubt know, it’s defined many different ways, but I’ll take the simplest and most common definition of no classes and common ownership of property. I actually think communism could work in practice as well, but it must be 1. entirely voluntary and 2. on a small scale.
Here’s why I think those two qualifiers are so important: If all property is communally owned, someone is going to have to take the role of administrator, organizing who will do what and get what from the communal work and property. For practical purposes, though the role may be passed on to a different person regularly, those different individuals must remain in the role of administrator for a decent amount of time in order to learn their job well and teach their successor.
Now presumably a well-run communist community would have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse of the administrator position. But so does our government, and we all know how well that works out. Favors are given to friends and swipes are made at enemies. The same thing would happen in a communist system, which does not automatically make everyone nice people.
Those who felt slighted might revolt against the administrator, but if the society is large or not entirely voluntary, their dissent will necessarily be ignored or suppressed because it will eventually disrupt the community ownership or cause class conflict (the favored vs. the unfavored instead of the rich vs. the poor), both of which go against the very point of the society.
However, in a small, voluntary community, abuses might be dealt with easily (or simply not occur) and dissenters would be allowed to leave without violence. This sort of thing already happens in practice; some Christian missionary and retreat groups (L’Abri and YWAM, for instance — the latter of which I’ve attended) already have members live in community (not entirely without private property, but close) and it works very well. On a larger and involuntary scale, however, I can’t see communism ending in anything but tragedy.
As for the borders thing, I’m personally against much in the way of border control for exactly the reasons you named. I do think that it’s fair to ask for names and run a quick background check for security purposes the first time someone wants to cross our borders (this can be done instantly now on computers, so it shouldn’t present any real hindrance to the free market), but that’s really about it.
I would very much agree that limiting immigration while claiming allegiance to the free market is a contradiction. I also tend to support amnesty on the basis of Augustine’s idea that an unjust law is no law at all. Telling people where they can and cannot live and work is pretty unjust — not to mention hypocritical if you’re simultaneously complaining about the government telling you what to do with your health care.
One caveat about that: Obviously the United States has, whether one wants it to or not, a very large welfare state — a category in which I include public education, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, welfare payments, etc. I do agree with the argument that unlimited immigration is not fiscally feasible while our national debt continues to be huge and these programs remain in place. That said, I really don’t know what percentage of this welfare spending goes to immigrants, but I very much doubt it’s as much as is often implied (I need to do some research into that).
Hopefully that answers both your and your friend’s questions! Thanks for waiting so long for the answer :)
