Pyramid of Capitalism

[theVOID]

You should have a portion of the pie relative to the value of your contributions. The problem is your proposed system has no non-arbitrary way to assign value.

Why? Why SHOULD it be that way? Nobody's name is on that gold, or on that food sitting in the storage bin.

So what if "nobody's name is on it"? I couldn't think of a more irrelevant point, it's like a thief stealing a car and saying "nobody was using it".

Imaging a situation with a barter system, people trade their resources for those that they believe to be of an equivalent value. A person hires two people to paint his house and he's willing to offer a chicken for each wall painted, one painter paints 3 walls, the other two, both in the same amount of time, do you think there is something "unfair" about the more efficient painter being rewarded for achieving more? Clearly his labor is objectively more valuable than the other painter, he can achieve more with the same resources, his contribution is one that results in a higher increase in net-value over the same period of time.

The unfair thing in my view would be both painters receiving 2.5 chickens even though one person contributed more.

Do you consider human life as valueable?

As long as their life is desired by themselves or someone else then, seeing as value is entirely a function of desire, they necessarily have value. In contrast, suppose there is a person living by themselves on an island whose existence is unknown to anyone AND this person does not desire to live, then their life objectively has no value - Without someone to desire something there simply cannot be any value placed on it. There is no intrinsic value, no value "as a matter of fact", only value contingent upon the existence of someone who desires it.

I do. Syndicalists place human life as the value in their system. Human life is precious regardless of age, sex, race, and even religious beliefs and THAT is how they base their values system.

So human life has special magic value that just is? Nonsense. That's no less mysterious and unexplained than God or pixies.

How does your proposed system assign value?

I'd ask you the same question, because other than asserting "all x are valuable" you haven't laid even the barest framework of any kind of value theory.

Value is entirely an emergent phenomenon, there is absolutely no way for any thing at all to have a value unless it is desired by some sentient creature, the more desired some thing is the more valuable it is.

First off, pay as in "money" pay will usually be abolished in the system.

So there is no medium of exchange? Suppose a person want's a guitar, how do they go about attaining it?

I personally am in favor of the ration system.

That says it all... "Hey Mr overlord, I've worked mighty hard, do you think you can give me a guitar, I would go buy it myself because I've contributed unredeemed value that surpasses the value of the guitar, but I have no medium of exchange! Please Mr. Overlord, would you be kind enough to appropriate me a guitar? I know you might need to contact the Luthier's syndicate and you'll have to promise them some other resources from various other syndicates in exchange but I really want it, pleeeeeeaaaaase!"

And dont give me that heartache about rationing. rationing still exists in capitalist societies.

Rationing, by definition, is when a government or other organizing body appropriates the sum of a type of resource and distributes this resource of their own accord. What a fucking messy system that would be, you would have the most backwards, inefficient and eventually BROKE society ever. What if someone want's coke rather than pepsi in their food supply, does someone need to go and check a spreadsheet to make sure that person x still has some rations left to redeem? And who decides the value of each of these products if you have no price system? In the USSR they had to get their prices FROM the market economies because they had absolutely no non-arbitrary way to endow objects with value - Unless you're able to devise a system that 50 years of Russian economists couldn't master you will fare no better.

Oh, and Rationing DOES NOT exist in a market economy, one where people instead are given a medium of exchange for their productivity and can use this to exchange for whatever resources they desire and are able to purchase.

the only difference is that someone who has a crap load of money can buy up the entire rationed stock

Go do some research on Rationing systems please, because you're speaking nonsense. A rationed stock CANNOT be attained entirely by a single individual, it is distributed such as to spread it as far as possible among a given population.

and then jack the prices up and sell it for an inflated profit, which is cruel and anti-social.

Again, not possible in a rationed system, but let's assume in a market economy someone does exchange their resources for the entirety of item x and then resells the items for a higher price. So what? Do you have a "right" to these objects? Has someone "stolen" from you? No and no. You might not like it, you might really want item x, but you have no right to dictate what other people can do with their own resources - doing so is pure authoritarianism.

Luckily these situations are essentially unfeasible, producers are always producing more, someone hoarding item x and raising the prices gives other people great opportunities to compete in the production of x.

My proposed system has no need for investors and most especially money lenders.

So then, suppose some people form a syndicate to produce a new product, there is no existing infrastructure for the production of this item, everything needs to be built from scratch, assuming that all people who participate in the production of this new product are given an equal share of the results, how do they (1) Attain the resources necessary to build the chain of production, (2) Get resources to live off in the mean time?

They are leeches of society who do nothing more than shuffle paper work, create slave wages, and are generally worthless and harmful to society.

There may be some lenders who are assholes, but in general lenders are given resources by parties who seek to invest and then find the most efficient opportunities for investment, lending money to people who will use the resources to add value to the system, a portion of which will be rewarded to those who lent the resources initially for their abstaining from consuming their own resources in the short term, and also to the broker who gave up their time to organize the affair.

And you can't exactly replace this model, rather than a broker working as an intermediary between the lender and the debtor you would have a bureaucracy of some kind in the same role, some organisation who takes resources from party x to deliver to party y - the intermediary performs the same function irrespective of the larger environment.

Syndicalism will come together with all trade unions in deciding where the raw materials will be used to create necesary items.

And this cooperative, just like the broker and lender, is going to deliver the resources to the party for which they believe will make best use of it and whom will later return the most value back to the syndicate. This is no different in principle, you still have lenders and brokers whether or not you wish to call them such.

Companies will no longer exist.

So if an individual decides he does not want to be a member of a syndicate and begins to product his own goods to exchange for other resources, much like any business does, then what happens to him? Do you use force to shut him down and steal his ideas and means of production?

Syndicates are NOT investors.

Yes, they are, among other things. Taking idle resources and putting them to work in the hopes of a net increase in value IS an investment, by definition, whether or not you want to call it one doesn't change that.

The return is a happy life. Loss of resources are minimized through recycle programs.

Oh, so perhaps your syndicate can give me some resources so I can throw endless drug/alcohol fueled parties and make people happy. After all, that's a lot of happy lives. We can recycle the beer bottles to minimize loss!

Nope. I will have an equal vote in the process when it comes to the trade I am involved in. It is to ensure that those who are knowledgable have the say so in the direction of what is created from the result of their trade. Capitalism will let greedy, blood sucking investors fund medical research. because of that, medicine price are outrageous. In a syndicate, medical professionals form a group to decide what would best benefit humanity. Monetary profit is obsolete, and human happiness and well being becomes the value.

Nice job not answering the question!

Please, explain to me from start to finish the process involved in a person attaining a guitar.

Property is theft? So if you make a guitar and claim ownership of it then you've "stolen" from someone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft!

In your own words, thanks. Explain to me how someone building and then owning a guitar is "theft".

So. Do you have a guard then?

No, but Aung San Suu Kyi does, last I checked she's not a capitalist, neither are the people who are after her.

Sure, and no socialists ever had protection!

I'm sure they had to as well... and?

That's my point, people see the need for protection for a large variety of reasons, saying that you won't need one because you live in a magical happy-fun-time syndicate is bullshit, someone could be out to get you for a wide number of reasons. Perhaps you banged the dude's wife?

No, a syndicalist is a generous person, just like a generous person is a generous person. Lets not try to play word games here.

What word games? Generous people exist in all circumstances and walks of life. Are you trying to pretend that people in a syndicalist system have a monopoly on generosity? Someone call Bill Gates, he's been doing it wrong!

And just being generous isn't a long term solution, it's a stop-gap, the best solution is to make people self sufficient, making the generosity that exists stretch further for those who need it.

I like being accused of being "apolitical".... it's fitting.

What are you smoking there revvy? Not only are you clearly not Apolitical, but you didn't pay close attention to what I wrote if that is your conclusion.

Maybe maybe maybe.... I have alot of maybes too. Maybe people steal because capitalism forces them to do so. Maybe people kill because their society values things more than human lives.

Care to be a little more careful with your terms? "Forces" for instance, implies that "Capitalism" threatened them unless they stole. It doesn't happen, of course.

People steal primarily because they want something they don't have, whether it's through desperation and poverty, lust for an unattainable item or the profit involved. If you have less people in poverty then I strongly suspect that rates of theft will decrease, but that's got nothing to do with Capitalism vs Syndicalism, it has to do with raising the standard of living, something that has happened FASTER in market economies than other systems. For all the bitching that the "99%" do they fail to recognize that they, and other people in market economies, are in the top 1% of the global population.

The best solution though has little to do with any economic system, it has to do with raising the value of young people, giving them skills that are more desirable so they can contribute more and receive more in exchange. It is the unskilled who fester the problem, people who can't contribute anything of much value and blame everyone else for this fact, demanding that they be endowed with value that they have no means of creating on their own - Furthermore, I read a study yesterday that demonstrated that education is by far the dominant factor in societal health, things like economic systems and incomes were trailing far behind in importance.

So education is easily the most important thing, and market-driven charter schools perform better than average in terms of the results per dollar spent, so the market solution to education already has stature to solve the problem. The market socialist economies like Denmark also perform well under a different model, this fact suggests that the more important considerations run deeper than the model and environment.

absolutely 100% correct. And I am not suggesting to change a political system. I am advocating abolishing the political system.

Same difference.

BTW...thanks for the great discussion!

You too sunshine. Btw, I like your new political groove much more than the previous one