23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

[Gawdzilla Sama]

JOZ, are you saying human populations didn't increase until we went agricultural?

ETA: Do you mean dramatically increase?

[sandinista]

Hey, I'm convinced. Let's try hunting-gathering again.

So ideologically committed. The only alternative to capitalism is hunting and gathering.

[Coito ergo sum]

Looks like an interesting book.

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

Thing 1: There is no such thing as a free market



What they tell you



Markets need to be free. When the government interferes to dictate what market participants can or cannot do, resources cannot flow to their most efficient use. If people cannot do the things that they find most profitable, they lose the incentive to invest and innovate. Thus, if the government puts a cap on house rents, landlords lose the incentive to maintain their properties or build new ones. Or, if the government restricts the kinds of financial products that can be sold, two contracting parties that may both have benefited from innovative transactions that fulfill their idiosyncratic needs cannot reap the potential gains of free contract. People must be left "free to choose," as the title of free-market visionary Milton Friedman’s famous book goes.



What they don’t tell you



The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How "free" a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined "free market" is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/9781608191666?&PID=32513

http://www.zcommunications.org/23-thing ... joon-chang

Figures that comes from "zcommunications." It's not like it's a hidden secret that all economies have rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. Hardly anyone advocates a completely unregulated economy (some left wing anarchists and right wing libertarians do, but not many). Capitalism doesn't mean that the economy is completely unregulated in every respect, and has never meant that.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the free market; profit is sent to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses and companies. Having a regulation like, "It shall be a felony to sell food to people that is not fit for human consumption" or something akin to it doesn't mean the system isn't capitalism anymore. The extent to which different markets are free, as well as the rules defining private property, is a matter of politics and policy, and many states have what are termed mixed economies (where there is a mixture of private and government control). Most economies are mixed economies.

But, of course "They" are lying to us, and "They" aren't telling us what capitalism "really" is.

Regarding the first paragraph, about rents - of course if the government places a cap on rents that's an incentive for people not to invest in home rental businesses or to rent houses. If the cap on the rent means that the total rents you receive is less than the amount of money you need to pay out to maintain the house, then you lose money on the deal. If you lose money on the deal, why would you do it? Whether a cap will simply hold down skyrocketing rental prices or kill an industry depends, of course, on the overall characteristics of the rental market. If the rental cap is set high enough that the landlord can still make money, then they'll stay in business. If it's set too low, they won't be able to stay in business because they'll run out of money.

But, naturally, it ought to be completely obvious that if I can sell product X for $100 and the government makes me sell it for $80, and my cost of goods sold is $60, I have reduced incentive to market product X because my profit is down from $40 a unit to $20 a unit. If there was another product - Y - that I could just as easily sell and make a $40 profit margin over cost of goods sold, then if all else is equal I will move out of the X market and into the Y market. But, of course, that's not really true because "they" are trying to sell us a lie about "capitalism" which in fact, according to zcommunications, doesn't even really exist.

[Coito ergo sum]

The assumption that farming was an improvement over hunter- gathering is false . It did not lengthen our life spans or improve our health it was needed to support the increasing population it did not cause the increase .The appropriate use of dozens of different types of wood for bows ,arrows and tips fishing hooks shows a greater sophistication than most of us ever imagined .

Do you have a source for the estimates of life spans of hunter gatherers and agricultural societies. We certainly are healthier and have longer lifespans now than ever before - largely due to nutrition, food availability and of course other factors such as health care and medical advancements. But, it seems to me to intuitively follow that having a greater food supply of different foods would make people a tad bit healthier.

[Feck]

no I don't have the figures to hand and obviously we live longer now , but still life expectancy for the few hunter gatherer tribes left is not much less than that of very poor subsistence farmers in many places .
................................................................................................................................................................................................
Having worked in an unregulated free market I can tell you that it's not nice the cash flows uphill faster and faster . A mixed economy with checks and balances at least makes an attempt to recirculate this money and limit what those at the top can get away with .

[sandinista]

Figures that comes from "zcommunications."

Yea, wouldn't want to reference a web site whose contributors are almost all professors, lecturers and authors. No, wouldn't want that.

Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the faculty of economics at the University of Cambridge.

[Ian]

But, of course, that's not really true because "they" are trying to sell us a lie about "capitalism" which in fact, according to zcommunications, doesn't even really exist.

I'd like to take a capitalist from America circa 1895 and time travel him to present day. He'd be shocked by the different economic rules. And would probably blurt out "Socialism!"

[Gawdzilla Sama]

But, of course, that's not really true because "they" are trying to sell us a lie about "capitalism" which in fact, according to zcommunications, doesn't even really exist.

I'd like to take a capitalist from America circa 1895 and time travel him to present day. He'd be shocked by the different economic rules. And would probably blurt out "Socialism!"

"Only north of the border."

[Feck]

Hey, I'm convinced. Let's try hunting-gathering again.

So ideologically committed. The only alternative to capitalism is hunting and gathering.

Yes need a generation or two of cannibalism in the UK first though ... and we can't spend the winter eating oysters or summer feasting on herring so i think we might starve .

[JOZeldenrust]

JOZ, are you saying human populations didn't increase until we went agricultural?

ETA: Do you mean dramatically increase?

I honestly don't know if agricultural techniques predate the first increase of the population around the onset of agricultural society. You guys know a lot more about early human history then I do, so I'll just take your word for it that the population started to increase before agricultural techniques were devised. However, the population would've soon hit a malthusian ceiling without agriculture, so what caused what here doesn't really matter. The population increase of the magnitude that happened at the onset of the agricultural age would've been impossible without agriculture.

[HomerJay]

maybes over population meant that agriculture, though initially unsuccessful, was a necessity.

[JOZeldenrust]

maybes over population meant that agriculture, though initially unsuccessful, was a necessity.

Might have been, it doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that division of labour is a prerequisite to sustaining the number of people that live on earth at the moment.

[PsychoSerenity]

The assumption that farming was an improvement over hunter- gathering is false . It did not lengthen our life spans or improve our health it was needed to support the increasing population it did not cause the increase .The appropriate use of dozens of different types of wood for bows ,arrows and tips fishing hooks shows a greater sophistication than most of us ever imagined .

Do you have a source for the estimates of life spans of hunter gatherers and agricultural societies. We certainly are healthier and have longer lifespans now than ever before - largely due to nutrition, food availability and of course other factors such as health care and medical advancements. But, it seems to me to intuitively follow that having a greater food supply of different foods would make people a tad bit healthier.

I don't have sources either (so if you do some research, correct me if I'm wrong) but I remember from an anthropology lecture that hunter gatherers had more food per person per hour of gathering, and more sources of different food than agriculture ever produced (until international trade). Even today, remaining tribes of hunter gatherers had something like 40 different food sources, and that's when they've been completely marginalized, forced to the edge of desserts etc. and that number of options would protect against the famines associated with specific crop failures. There were however lots of violent deaths, fighting between tribes over territory.

When agriculture came in populations were able to get more dense, you could feed more people with the same area of land, but variety in crops was very limited. Also because one person could then produce significantly more food than they needed themselves, it became more efficient to enslave them and force them to farm for you, than to kill them and do the work yourself.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

JOZ, are you saying human populations didn't increase until we went agricultural?

ETA: Do you mean dramatically increase?

I honestly don't know if agricultural techniques predate the first increase of the population around the onset of agricultural society. You guys know a lot more about early human history then I do, so I'll just take your word for it that the population started to increase before agricultural techniques were devised. However, the population would've soon hit a malthusian ceiling without agriculture, so what caused what here doesn't really matter. The population increase of the magnitude that happened at the onset of the agricultural age would've been impossible without agriculture.

There was, I think, a steady increase in the population because humans are good at breeding. The may have been an uptick when they stopped wandering do to better chances for lowered infant mortality. Life "on the road" is tough on infants.

[HomerJay]

maybes over population meant that agriculture, though initially unsuccessful, was a necessity.

Might have been, it doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that division of labour is a prerequisite to sustaining the number of people that live on earth at the moment.

A nice to have rather than a prerequisite.