Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Originally posted by: Vic
Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie
Don't get me wrong, any system that is going to work will need private property; collectivist societies have in common that they rarely exist much beyond subsistence and a few easily shared luxuries.
But there is no natural right to property, or life. You have the 'right' to whatever you can create, steal, and defend. So to create a society, we need to install artificial rights and responsibilities, and enforce them so that people live in a fair system. Note that I'm not saying we need to make 'life be fair' in the kindergarten sense, which I perceive to be the idealistic grounding point of communism. The problem of corporatism comes from managing to give money more rights than we give to people. Although advancement is possible, there is absolutely no doubt that the playing field is not level in an intergenerational sense, and even the artificial moral imperative of 'keeping what you earn' starts to break down.
I don't have a great solution for this, because I don't think there is one, at least not one I have encountered or am smart enough to devise.
Every game needs rules in order to ensure fair play. You may call them "artificial" all you want, you still can't have the game without them.
As for corporatism, it's problem IMO is that it pretends to put a human face on that (and give human rights to that) which is inhuman. Think calling to complain about a problem with your bill. Good luck getting someone who cares. And why should they? No one has a genuine vested interest in caring. The result of our secure, insulated, safe society is a collectivist system that is psychopathic to the core.
The first solution is to remove the ability of a corporation to function as a legal entity. What you need to envision is
a system where the owners and controllers of a company are responsible for what that company does, because they
are the company.
But how do you do this, and still benefit from the massive economies of scale that can be provided? Whatever evils they perpetrate, it's hard to imagine a phone network being more efficient than a single national-scale system can be. Of course you're right, not one single person at that large phone company actually cares about you as a customer.
I hate to be a nay-sayer, but like I said, I don't have the solution, and private property rights on their own aren't it (they probably would be, in a one-generation, finite time-line model).
Edit - what I mean by artificial, is that there is no one, obvious set of rules that should be used. Yes you need a framework to play a game, but it is absolutely non-obvious what that framework should be. For example, true collectivist societies function very smoothly, but tend to have little or no technical progress.