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...

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?

Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index , which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available? The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions. If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income. An illustration of the score system is just below. And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000...

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in! We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog. By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says  in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky cla...