RE: POLL: As an Atheist, What Do You View as Being the Most Rational Political Outlook?
May 2, 2012 at 4:03 pm
I am a socio-capitalist. I would never do away with the free market but I would never dare let the free market become completely unregulated. It's a cute, adorably naive view that thinks that corporations will always do things for the sake of growing their business. Heh, no...no, not anymore. The sad fact of a company is that it is a self-contained Stalinist Communism-based dictatorship; you work your ass off, some minor official treats you like shit, and you're basically stuck 'being happy' with whatever minimal offerings they give you.
Is this mostly the case? Yes. Always? No. But the only reasons it does not happen are because of the unions rising up in the early 20th century and the workers' rights movements establishing laws that demand corporations to treat their employees fairly and with a minimum expected wage. Don't credit the corporations with valiantly championing equal human rights; if the 'evil socialist unions' had not come around, bet your ass there would STILL be no middle class.
Still I also like the free market. Competition is healthy and what we humans do best. But I have also seen that larger and more powerful corporations take the self-sufficiency of the free market away from many. Smaller stores and businesses get run out by the larger ones, forcing the workers and owners to instead work for another corporation...depending on someone else for their succor. You call that the free market; I call it "rich man with tons of money crushing everyone with far less money under his heel and then subjugating them." Competition is healthiest when it comes from many different sources, tens, dozens, scores...not a grand total of five sources. If you want a fine example of that, look at the US's high-speed internet services. Dead-last in the developed world (and lower than even some developing nations) but twice as expensive as everybody else because there is absolutely zero competition in the market. You either have it by the one provider in your area or you don't have it at all. Dunno about you guys but as a citizen of supposedly the most high-tech, cutting-edge innovative nation in the world, I find that appalling.
The idea of free market "communes," where basically every worker has a say in what happens in the company they work for and there are no real CEOs or executives, is rather appealing to me, and I've seen a few such companies starting up around here in Wisconsin where they've taken off and become wildly successful. The company execs get elected by the other workers to represent them in larger dealings, and the person who started the company ostensibly runs as a president, like a CEO, unless he fucks up and gets voted out. Not unlike a traditional corporation except the executives aren't appointed by faceless investors. The investment comes from the employees themselves which gains more loyalty to the company since the workers have a vested interest in the success of their company, they are happier because they actually have a voice and someone above the treating people like shit and not doing any fucking work but would otherwise get away with it by brown-nosing gets the boot by the people he treats like crap, which also requires a buildup of mutual respect between employer and employee. 90% of the money does NOT go to the guy at the top who does little else besides oversee, instead that money is more evenly distributed, which again leads to happier workers, who have more money, who spend more, who build the economy DO YOU SEE THE BENEFITS YET?
If we could see something more like THAT in the business world, I would probably become an absolute free-market capitalist; that would be the ultimate self-regulating business. But as it is, no, I am not about to just hand over whatever control dictatorship-based corporate giants desire in the ways of wiggle room. I trust most corporations about as far as I can throw one of their buildings. I'll work for them if I must, I'll buy their products, but only after careful scrutiny of the track record of those products and the company itself, and that's it. I sure as fuck am not giving them my address, phone number, or zip code. I barely trust the elected government I vote for and have some semblance of control over with that information, why in the fuck would I give it to someone I have NO legal control over?
Anyway, that's my two cents. My opinion on the whole thing gets a lot more complex the further I delve into it so I'll cut it off here before I REALLY start rambling...
Is this mostly the case? Yes. Always? No. But the only reasons it does not happen are because of the unions rising up in the early 20th century and the workers' rights movements establishing laws that demand corporations to treat their employees fairly and with a minimum expected wage. Don't credit the corporations with valiantly championing equal human rights; if the 'evil socialist unions' had not come around, bet your ass there would STILL be no middle class.
Still I also like the free market. Competition is healthy and what we humans do best. But I have also seen that larger and more powerful corporations take the self-sufficiency of the free market away from many. Smaller stores and businesses get run out by the larger ones, forcing the workers and owners to instead work for another corporation...depending on someone else for their succor. You call that the free market; I call it "rich man with tons of money crushing everyone with far less money under his heel and then subjugating them." Competition is healthiest when it comes from many different sources, tens, dozens, scores...not a grand total of five sources. If you want a fine example of that, look at the US's high-speed internet services. Dead-last in the developed world (and lower than even some developing nations) but twice as expensive as everybody else because there is absolutely zero competition in the market. You either have it by the one provider in your area or you don't have it at all. Dunno about you guys but as a citizen of supposedly the most high-tech, cutting-edge innovative nation in the world, I find that appalling.
The idea of free market "communes," where basically every worker has a say in what happens in the company they work for and there are no real CEOs or executives, is rather appealing to me, and I've seen a few such companies starting up around here in Wisconsin where they've taken off and become wildly successful. The company execs get elected by the other workers to represent them in larger dealings, and the person who started the company ostensibly runs as a president, like a CEO, unless he fucks up and gets voted out. Not unlike a traditional corporation except the executives aren't appointed by faceless investors. The investment comes from the employees themselves which gains more loyalty to the company since the workers have a vested interest in the success of their company, they are happier because they actually have a voice and someone above the treating people like shit and not doing any fucking work but would otherwise get away with it by brown-nosing gets the boot by the people he treats like crap, which also requires a buildup of mutual respect between employer and employee. 90% of the money does NOT go to the guy at the top who does little else besides oversee, instead that money is more evenly distributed, which again leads to happier workers, who have more money, who spend more, who build the economy DO YOU SEE THE BENEFITS YET?
If we could see something more like THAT in the business world, I would probably become an absolute free-market capitalist; that would be the ultimate self-regulating business. But as it is, no, I am not about to just hand over whatever control dictatorship-based corporate giants desire in the ways of wiggle room. I trust most corporations about as far as I can throw one of their buildings. I'll work for them if I must, I'll buy their products, but only after careful scrutiny of the track record of those products and the company itself, and that's it. I sure as fuck am not giving them my address, phone number, or zip code. I barely trust the elected government I vote for and have some semblance of control over with that information, why in the fuck would I give it to someone I have NO legal control over?
Anyway, that's my two cents. My opinion on the whole thing gets a lot more complex the further I delve into it so I'll cut it off here before I REALLY start rambling...
(joke, T)
