RE: My apology
October 12, 2011 at 7:37 am
(This post was last modified: October 12, 2011 at 7:41 am by theVOID.)
(October 11, 2011 at 6:33 pm)reverendjeremiah Wrote: In other words, government is dumped in favor of a group of trade unions that work together without coersion for the benefit of all humanity regardless of nationality.
There is a more sensible solution, it's called Georgism, the idea that no natural resources can be owned but one does own the value that they add to natural resources. In such a system society would own all resources, land, minerals etc, yet you could profit by adding value to the system, paying back the value that was not available to others because of your procurement of the goods and taking for yourself that which you contributed.
Say someone takes a section of land, landscapes it and builds a house, they would pay rent to the community which would be equally divided for the resources they are using that are unavailable to others, but they would be able to profit from the work they did when they transfer the lease on resources, the next person would either have to pay increased rent to them for the labour done or buy it outright.
It would be a bit of a nightmare to implement given how deeply engrained ownership of natural resources is, but in theory it's the single most fair and efficient type of "tax" possible, one that makes sure that people who use more natural resources pay a higher price and other people are fairly compensated for missing out.
Given that I believe as a classical liberal that people should be the sole beneficiary of their own productivity Georgism (Geolibertarianism) is a position I've taken great interest in recently.
(October 12, 2011 at 3:03 am)Tiberius Wrote:(October 11, 2011 at 6:27 pm)5thHorseman Wrote: Surely with the big companies crushing the smaller ones, they then become a monopoly and dictate the markets. The customer becomes less important because they can only get the goods from the company that dominates, creating a non competitive market with potentially a nasty business charging what they want because of no competition(I realize this is an extremity). Also employee rights, would they go out the window with deregulation?You forget the consumer in all of this. Consumers control the market; the "99%" control the market, they just don't realise it. In a completely consumer based society (which is what right-Libertarians advocate), all corporations must eventually answer to their consumers.
A monopoly could exist, but it would only be strong for as long as it kept it's consumers happy. Imagine, for instance, that there was no Mac OS X, no Linux, no Solaris or UNIX. Imagine there was only Microsoft and their Windows platform. Pretty soon, people would get sick of it, and start to come up with their own ideas; get funding, and start some of the aforementioned products as direct competition. It's already happened to some degree; Microsoft used to be a monopoly, but they are quickly losing a lot of their market share to Apple, and certainly to Red Hat in the business world (if you didn't already know, Red Hat Linux is a Linux distro which charges for licenses / support).
As for employee rights, I assume you mean the whole myth about "corporate slaves". In Libertarianism, the government still exists to enforce the law, and one law I am very much in favour in is against people (or corporations) owning slaves. Just because there would be no government regulation of business, doesn't mean that businesses get to break other non-commercial laws. Social laws are above all other laws; no business can get away with murder, or rape, or slavery. Employees have the right to quit if they want, or organise mass walkouts, or any other social action. Consumers can do the same, because consumers have shown time and time again to care about working conditions of companies they buy from.
Not only that but we should actively encourage consumers councils, unions and buying collectives as an effective countermeasure to private interests, put more pressure on them, make sure that profit is made by adding value to social systems.
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