Don’t forget the part where markets pay people to lobby the government to undermine markets.
lol i bet this is a exhilarating read
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Honestly, these sorts tend to overestimate the degree to which marketers are just being desperate.
You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)
In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
Endorsed.
“Capitalism with a Human Face”
“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
Centralized committee!
Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!
By the by, @kissingerandpals, one of the reasons I’m not a pure Capitalist is that I think such things should be voluntary, even living in communities based on it.
If you are a purist Capitalist and not a Transhumanist, then I suggest abandoning Capitalist purism. In the long run, Capitalism will sell you out to Transhumanism unless it is leashed by a strong hand. Its alignments with traditionalism in some cases are less to do with its fundamental nature as technology increases, and more to do with other factors (like not needing the same structure to enforce as the economy of the USSR).
I am not a capitalist, I do not know how you came to this conclusion.
“If” wasn’t a throwaway word, I really did mean “if you are…”.
A lot of the people who are against Transhumanism are also Traditionalists and Capitalists, who have bought into the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism.
I disagree with the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism, partially because I worry about some of the dark futures it may create, so I leverage people’s hatred for/fear of cybernetics and the like in order to convince them to ditch it.
If not you (maybe you’re a Communist or a Distributist or something), then one of the other readers will be both averse to Transhumanism and a moral Capitalist.
I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.
It’s about 158 to 161 million.
Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started.
We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?
Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.
Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.
hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people
Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels” attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.
Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).
The example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).
In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.
Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.
That’s Noam Chomsky’s point.
xhxhxhx: right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses
Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?
Or, just gonna put this out here,
The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.
We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?
That feeling when you have been clothes/shoe shopping and you want to shout in the middle of the store
Just give me a freaking nanofab already!
I want to pick some shoe designs, scan my feet, and have a computer deal with everything else.
You don’t need nanotechnology for that, and it’s only going to be about 20 years before it starts to become mainstream.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.
Let us return to aircraft.
The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die. It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.
Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft. He will be at the company for five years. There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves. There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.
So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.
However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis. To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.
BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!” Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.
So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.
So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.
Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.
The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is. This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.
Demand unsustainable wages, get replaced. Pretty fucking simple.
Lose out on work experience early in life, get penalized for it later, lose opportunities to help the family out, get a degree, go into debt, struggle to find a job that pays decently. But Wall Street is happy so that’s good.
>Get paid minimum wage
>Minimum wage never increases
>Lose job to machine anyway
Wow this is really an improvement, people should starve so I can get a wopper for $2 god bless capitalism wanting to live is for communists
I hear Cuba is nice this time of year.
I got you, though.
#not real communism
Yanks are genuinely this retarded.
Triggervs Medivs, 200 AD: “Slavery is good, slaves just have to outcompete horses while working for less”
In which it is impossible that increasing automation across all sectors simultaneously which arrives at a speed exceeding would-be employee retraining could cause significant unemployment and downward pressure on wages below the levels necessary for long-term wellness.
But don’t worry, Libertarians’ anti-nationalist sentiment means that they’ll bring in ethnic groups that favor increased state intervention (on average), because Libertarianism assumes the political will necessary for itself. The alternative, after all, would involve buying off low income voter groups in clever ways so that they are supported by the nation and support the nation in turn.