Tony. And yours?

~Kat

Cathy, nice to meet you.

The amount of indoctrination needed to make a change as drastic as the one
you are describing would be so massive as to be unthinkable Dana. This is assuming a transformation in a (relatively)short time span of course. If, over the next 200-300 years our culture shifts in that direction, that's slightly different in my mind even though I am convinced it will not happen for that sustained period.

What I could see happening is something like an aftershock effect from the hippie years. Many of them took jobs in education and thought it was their mission to 'reeducate' a new generation. The next decade or two might very well be much more socialist, but such systems are unsustainable in the long term and it will revert to an independently monetary one.

I'm a little curious though. In your ideal system, are people allowed to move where they want and participate in whatever other systems they wish? In the US you would be totally free to join a commune and do business with the rest of us. Would you allow capitalists to operate in smaller micro-economies which could interact at will with the general public?

Capitalists would be able to operate within that system, the only thing that changes is the relationship to wages and the effect that wuold have on the flow of finance. Freedom of movent and choice would be essential.

And I agree with your first point about the violence of change. This is why I am not a revolutionary :) Having spent a lot of time amongst some of the wilder trots in my country I am quietly convinced that I'd be on the other side of the barracades were they to try and provoke a revolution :P

Good point, well put.

aww,

right back at'cha

I think it definitely means we don't indicate value through money. It seems like evidence that supply and demand is a primary factor in how much someone is paid. Compare the number of professional footballers in the world to the number of doctors: There's your wage differential.

Supply and demand again. There are only a handful of top footballers who entertain hundreds of millions, and the same handful of top docs can only treat a limited number of patients a day. The footballer who is not entertaining is paid less than the average doc. I can't find the inequity.

In effect in a free market, the decision of what makes life meaningful and important is made by everyone, and not by a cultured few. It is what is right for them, and it's not your business to question it. In fact one might note that if you consider it your business to reform others' choices they will be less interested in having you lead them. Thus your control becomes a matter of force.

We might next ask which cultures produce the best doctors and the most medical cures. Which ones have the most Nobel prizes for medicine? Here's the list. Do the winners come from the countries where they centrally plan what people are paid? Wow, Not At All! For the most part they come from countries that produce highly-paid footballers. Maybe there is something to this freedom to choose deal eh?

What's odd though, is that the the top of the heap brain surgeons and research scientists who are as rare as the top of the heap footballers, are paid less than the Beckhams of the world.

One of the things that puzzles me about the arguments for supply and demand economics being something that is natural and inherent and impossible to regulate away sustainably, is that actually we do regulate the supply and demand model. Our economic health depends upon such regulation. Most countries which have embraced capitalism have also instituted strict anti-monopoly regulations.

In reality true laissez-faire economics would lead to a handful of monopolies controlling each sector of the economy. We institute laws against monopolies to protect the free flow of trade and to allow competition within the market to drive prices down and spread the effects of wealth creation.

I would be interested to hear an explanation as to why it is acceptable/desirable for controls to be added to that part of the system and not acceptable/desirable to control the part of economy that deals with wage levels.

The monopoly argument was started a century ago and it is not aging well in the information era and through the end of scarcity.

In this country, with the least number of restrictions, we find that almost all monopolies are unnatural, requiring government support to retain their monopoly power (such as public utilities).

There hasn't been a serious anti-trust case fought here in years. The last one was Microsoft and although they were not successfully prosecuted, it would appear that the most serious competition for their product has appeared, cannot be bullied out of the market, and is 100% free of charge.

I call that a good outcome. The long run corrects better than the courts ever could.

I have a completely out of my ass explanation. There are controls on wage levels. Minimum wage being one of them. Minimum wage laws like anti-monopoly laws are restrictions on what I suppose you might call the controlling class. Anti-monopoly and minimum wage laws give the little guy a chance to survive, and if they have the right stuff, compete.

It all has to do with minimal levels of fairness. If you regulate past a certain point you are enforcing too much fairness. Where is the line? I don't know, but putting restrictions on the top-end of earning seems wrong (aside from reasonable taxation).

And that is the essence of the disagreement: as you say, where is the line?

Beckhams only play for twenty years, if they are VERY lucky, and it takes a MASSIVE infrastructure to be a Beckham (what they make is not what they actually end-up with, not even close).
Doctors practice for as long as they like and don't need managers, agents, personal assistants, PR managers, to travel a fraction as much, and tend to have much longer lives than sports figures. The money they finally end up with is earned and is probably about what those top doctors make, or less.
And, unlike those doctors, they work 18 hour days, seven days a week.
I would not do that job.