RE: Individualism Is Stupid ( Or Why Libertarianism And Objectivism Is Stupid)
December 4, 2017 at 7:11 pm
(December 4, 2017 at 8:49 am)Tizheruk Wrote: I don't think competition is a very good way of dealing with corruption . As for central planned states . We can indeed learn what they did wrong . But i don't think that leads us in the direction of capitalism or privatization .
(December 4, 2017 at 8:19 am)Khemikal Wrote: The trouble with the "invisible hand" is that it;s not so much invisible as it just doesn't exist. Look around you, bad actors aren;t being put out of business by the government -or- the consumer. Just a few months back, when products were spontaneously catching fire and banks were found to have defrauded their customers...their stock value was going up.
The notion is that it's just an effect of crony capitalism..but it isn't. An "efficiently" run business can crush it's competition, and the ability to do so is ethics-neutral. The invisible hand relies on every actor in a chain making the right decision on grounds of ethics. Not only has that never happened, it never will and it -can't-. The only situation in which people would have the type of freedom required to make the invisible hand work is if no-one in the chain needed money or the product itself in the first place........and there were tons of other ways to get it. At which point, there's no point to capitalism.
We can at least agree that all institutions are not created equal. A casual stroll through yelp confirms this. And I think the invisible hand does exist-- the problem is that an oligarchy of shady individuals have got their hands on a remote control which makes it do their bidding.
Look at the USSR. Those faulty institutions were broken, and they remained broken for the 70-ish years that the regime remained in power. China became so broken that it began sucking corporate dick (hard!) just to make ends meet. I'm not trying to undermine Marxism by referencing Adam Smith, but one must recognize that certain elements of capitalism work. And if including those elements into a Marxist society helps that society achieve its ideals, then we ought to revise the theory accordingly.
