Skip to main content

Matty done thunk some thoughts...


More context on this post will be forthcoming in the near future.



Some logical problems with the three main complaints one might make about capitalism;
a. Value is created by work/workers and then redistributed by employers away from those workers. Their wages represent only a part of the total sales price of the goods they produce and the difference between total revenue from those sales and the worker's income constitutes exploitation in the Marxian sense
b. All private property in land that is non-residential is tantamount to violence against the persons of anybody who doesn't own land.
c. Capitalism kills millions of people every year by starvation and preventable diseases

There are answers to all three, however;
a. Parasitism relies on theft of labour-produced value - relies on labour theory of value - which is metaphysical and so fictive
b. Anti-propertarianism relies on appeal to 'society' or 'the collective' enjoying claims over-riding those of original appropriators - 'society' and 'the collective' are nothing personified - fallacy of reification
c. Statements to the effect that capitalism kills people outside of specific workplace and renting situations when it is just a mode of production is a non sequitur - "Maybe deaths from working conditions at a workplace that is run for profit can count but nothing else can."

So all three arguments are fallacious.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

RIP Macroeconomics

This post has no intellectual rigour, but I'm posting it anyway, because neither does macroeconomics. Most economists love spending all day doing macro, preferring it to the prosaic small-scale world of microeconomics. This is where the brazen hypocrisy of many heterodox folks will make itself known, as they decry the fallacies of composition rife within neoclassical economics and then go away and commit the same daft mistakes themselves (sometimes quite well disguised) using aggregates of demand, supply, and labour time. Further friction for modern economists can be had when contending with the tripartite division of economics into land, labour, capital, and the action of classes (the 'class' praxis) of the owners of those three economic resources. So, to all of macroecon... you're drunk. Go home and rethink your life.* * Yes I know I just committed a fallacy of reification.

Foreign Policy hates you...

In Foreign Policy a hardcore fluff piece * talks about young Americans falling out of love with capitalism. The closing paragraph is very artful but also insipid and inaccurate. Read it and weep! ~~~ * A fluff piece that does a very bad job of grappling with a subject that is actually important.