Straight to GULAG for wrong opinion.

haha, whelp. I sometimes can tell what posts are going to be outside the Overton window, but my nature compels me to say them anyways because I believe they're true.

You are getting downvoted, but the article makes a similar observation.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due

> The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Locke's argument for private property ownership of land beyond space to live in not being obviously-unjust was built entirely on this: improvement of productivity of land through work and investment. Holding private land to sit on or to wildly under-use wasn't compatible with his ethical justification for private land ownership.

(not that the Second Treatise isn't full of weak reasoning—natural rights as anything "real" rather than arbitrary, LOL—but it's considering one of the top influences on the founders of the US, the founding of which was a major step in the rise of capitalism to global dominance)

Exactly right. I could not agree more.

If those downvoters would comment, we could all have a healthy debate.

Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. "the invisible hand" sounds good and all, but the problem is that if the owners of capital control the profits produced by the mobilization of capital, then money and power will inevitably become concentrated enough that those capitalists both benefit from and become capable of restricting market freedom. The idea that free markets are a stable state of affairs is a faulty assumption.

[edit to note: this is only one of the many internal contradictions of capitalism, but the most relevant to your argument imo]

While I don't agree with your hyperbole, yes it is an imperfect system, but it is the best system we have.

You have not understood what I said. I'm not talking about unappealing features of the idealized version of capitalism that GP is lionizing. I'm talking about how capitalism as described brings about the conditions that undermine free competition, by its nature. You're talking about it as though we can just agree as a society "we're doing free competition now" and that's that. Capitalists won't agree to this -- every incentive leads them to want to restrict competition. And they have too much control for a notional agreement among citizens or whatever to overcome.

I'm essentially asking you what system you are proposing.

I'm not sure what gave you the impression that I was proposing something in my comments.

You don't have an opinion of a better system?

Not that would add to the present conversation. Please take your goading elsewhere.

So you want to criticize the current system without bringing in a proposal?

The proposal is clear from the comment if you read it: it's not a proposal about a socioeconomic system, but about how to analyze socioeconomic systems. Namely, that we shouldn't just think about the first-order consequences of things being arranged according to a certain system, but we should also think about what forces inherent in the system are driving it to change so that it is organized differently. That is all that I am interested in talking about at this point.

That's not at all what your top comment was getting at and you know it.

Yes I generally agree that the absolute version of "Free markets" as in 0 government (it's very existence is a distortion), is not going to work either, and it will just lead to interested groups using acquired forms of power to create distortions in their own favor.

More so I'd propose a system of government which has baked into its constitution things which remove the power of capital from politics. For example lobbying and non-individual and non limited campaign donations are 2 such things that must be not allowed.

Those sound like useful bandaids to me, but it doesn't change the incentives. Historically, capital finds a way.

Under capitalism, the wealthy class tend to be the trendsetters and tastemakers, if no reason other than they can afford the biggest billboard and most magnified microphones, so I don't see a path to the solution you've described, if you believe that societal trends need course correction away from this.

I see assertions in favor of a conservative (in the literal sense; a return to a lost past prosperous age) viewpoint, but no attempt to justify why these assertions are accurate or why the proposed solutions would be effective.

Limited reply to requiring zero debt:

Public assets (roads, sewers, other kinds of infrastructure) are always going to be "debt" in the myopic accounting from the perspective of the government. Requiring zero debt means selling these assets off to (presumably private) entities, which sounds like a terrible idea for reasons aligned closely with the kinds of arguments found in Doctorow's blog post.

maybe I'm not fully understanding your point, or public accounting, but it seems me that if government followed this order of operations

1. Collected sufficient taxes (ie money) to pay for a work 2. Built the work spending down the money 3. counted the work as an asset on the public balance sheet (ie, we own the pipes)

Wouldn't that mean no debt and not selling it off to corporations?

The gold standard was far from stable - just look at the US’s economic history - it was continually swinging between inflation and deflation with regular crises, panics, recessions and depressions.

The question you need to ask is “would there generally be a relationship between the amount of gold on hand and the amount of money required in the economy?” There is no reason why the answer to that question would be “yes” over an extended period of time - you can set up some kind of sensible exchange rate at the start but it eventually (and invariably) gets out of whack.

It’s the same with fixed exchange rates, pegged currencies, etc. - these things tend to exist for a time and eventually don’t - because they’re ultimately not sustainable.

yes this is a good point. There is little specifically about gold besides rarity and intrinsic value/desirability that makes the gold standard ideal.

I actually think the function is that it's tied to _something_ of intrinsic value, that the intrinsic value isn't wildly fluctuating, and that it's roughly fixed in supply. Then by tying the currency to the resource it means that the currency cannot be created (fiat) without addressing those properties of the backing asset.