Azelma wrote:
Electricity/power is limited because of reliance on finite resources and inefficient uses of renewable ones.
Almost all renewable power sources are infinitely scalable. If wind/solar/hydro/geo/biomass aren't producing enough power, just plop down another plant.
Nuclear power is essentially unlimited and it IS safe as long as you don't have Kazahks building your plant without a containment dome or in a tectonically active area. And uranium, unlike most other forms of fuel, is practical to harvest in outer space, so it is essentially unlimited in its availability.
The only reason we don't just build the plants we need by government mandate is because people insist on the pretense of a free market. And it IS a pretense, since the firms that qualify to build them are basically government anyway.
Azelma wrote:
Fresh water is a very real issue.
It's only a "very real issue" because of poor water management.
Again, the free market. The Great Lakes or any other body of water in the Americas didn't start out polluted, that happened because pollution is an "externality". And that is why the free market now capitalizes on selling water in bottles.
Also because of agricultural bubbles and massive water projects that drained entire areas so people could make a buck. Most of which were built at taxpayer expense, by the way.
I'm not saying we should manage water sources by government fiat, for the reason that given human nature and how complex the resources in question are, I don't believe that will work either. I simply believe that the economic system needs to be reconfigured to base economic costs on natural resources, and the free market idea that you can do whatever you want with a piece of land because you happen to 'own' it needs to be thrown out.
In the here and now, the best that can be done is adopt water rationing on a per capita basis (including businesses), give local governments the money and mandate to build water purification systems, build desal, and begin work on long-term plans to restore estuaries and forests to slowly replenish groundwater.
Azelma wrote:
Housing is probably the easiest thing to fix...since we have so much poorly utilized land and a wildly out of balance real estate market.
It's not a space problem, it's a building problem.
The real causes of the housing problem are:
1. Banking-fueled housing bubble
2. Land and sales taxes
3. Cars, and our willingness to support them
4. Lack of rent controls
The banking-fueled housing bubble has led to outrageous inflation in the costs of houses, due to speculation and the trade in mortgages. Houses became expensive and coveted because they were seen as the road to prosperity because of high rents, inflation, and the fact they can be tapped for dough. This, despite the fact that in other respects, houses are a pretty lousy deal financially - they are expensive to maintain and a big liability. Homes are only attractive investments because of the eccentricities of how our economic system works.
Reliance on land and sales taxes has encouraged local governments to make really bad development decisions, devouring huge plots of open farmland and countryside to build hideous suburbs because they need the tax revenue. This is also financially costly, since those suburbs have to receive roads and services that are much more expensive to provide than in an urban setting, and since the entire arrangement is inherently boom-and-bust prone.
Cars. Cars, again, don't make much sense. They are expensive, inefficient, polluting, and a massive economic burden on individuals and communities. But they make suburbs more appealing than cities by virtue of the fact we choose to support them, by building highways, byways, parking lots, and the gasoline infrastructure.
Finally, lack of rent controls. Many rented properties in urban areas were built 50+ years ago. Why build a new, taller high-rise, to bring supply up and prices down, when you can just jack up prices on the current apartments built by people who have been dead for decades?
The solution is to put massive taxes on gas to discourage consumption and fund investment in alternatives, implement a national VAT and distribute the receipts per capita, strictly regulate the mortgage market, implement an infrastructure-regressive land tax (meaning that the more built-up land is, the less tax is paid on it), and make it so that workers and leasors are awarded 1% ownership per year by statute (something like that), so owners have to keep building/investing to stay ahead of the game.
Azelma wrote:
Food is second, since we aren't producing to our full capabilities (though meat generally is still a problem given its limited status currently...it's lack of ability to grow with the population)
Again, it's only a problem because of bad planning.
The first thing I'd do is axe direct agricultural subsidies and outlaw environmentally dangerous agricultural practices (such as excessive use of hormones). I would also implement strict seafood rationing and do what the Icelanders did, lay claim to a large swath of neutral seas, implement a fishing moratorium and have Navy destroyers fire on any violators.
There are enough ways to produce food that outlawing the bad ones isn't going to cause shortages or starvation. Probably it will be necessary to put more people back on the land. Seafood rationing and fishing moratoriums will no doubt incentivize aquaculture. I would also massively tax the consumption of meat and fish, and invest the receipts into re-establishing buffalo populations and re-seeding freshwater fish and clam beds, as well as digging artificial lakes to grow even more fish, clams and seaweed.
Azelma wrote:
Again, how do you propose we fix these issues? And how do we do it while getting rid of money and capitalism?
Money is simply a representation of exchange of value. It's useful as such in any economy. Even full Communist economies use money.
Capitalism is the problem. Let's be clear what I mean when I say capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of capital (land and infrastructure) and distribution of economic products by scarcity. Capitalism is very efficient and dynamic, but it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The profit motive is what keeps capitalism going: those who manage the capital, are incentivized to acquire ever higher profits. This leads to ever more serious externalities (pollution and social chaos), but more seriously, the winners become fewer and fewer and eventually monopolize all capital; all the liquid currency returns to those who own the only things that are really worth anything, land and infrastructure.
The reason the Fed keeps trying to reinflate the housing bubble is an effort to cheat the capitalist system. They are pumping more currency back into it, in an effort to get demand going again, when the fact is that consumers are played out and hedge funds - the "winners" of the game - are sitting on vaults full of tens of billions of fiat dollars in the Caymans. It's no different than the endgame of a game of Monopoly.
Capitalism was conceived in a world in which limited space and resources didn't really matter - there was, as they said, "always another fish in the sea". Well, and now there isn't. The profit motive is an effective, efficient way to maximize exploitation of open land and fresh resources - but that is no longer the case, now the question is the opposite, how can we get the most mileage out of the limited resources we have, encourage long-term planning and development, and empower the individual to share in the wealth?
It's important here to understand that capitalism, like all economic systems, is a means to an end. The "end" is the creation of wealth. Things people want and need. Americans are so lost in corporate propaganda that they have completely lost sight of this and actually believe that the profit motive is an end onto itself and not a means to an end. The reason I am pointing this out is to head off the counter-argument, "but capitalism created this and that, how can you just take it away like that". The answer is, PEOPLE created what we have; capitalism was merely the system we were running at the time, like an outdated OS.
Capitalism has raised productivity higher and higher, in the pursuit of profit, causing fewer and fewer people to produce more and more wealth for fewer and fewer wealthier and wealthier people. At the end of this process, one guy owning an army of robots will have total monopoly over all wealth on Earth.
To understand the effects of this process on capitalism, we need to go back a few centuries. Back in the days when the rich profited off feudal estates, their marginal profitability was pretty low. A peasant would spend all day harvesting crops, and consume most of them for subsistence. Each individual peasant family's net economic profit was very small. Then factories were built, and it was possible for individual workers to produce much higher net economic profits. Then automation, then the internet, so forth and so on. Massive productivity, massive gains, but leading the system ever more rapidly towards its destruction as that productivity gets turned into profit and monopolization of capital sets in.
This is why taxes on the rich MUST go up. Not to punish them - to save them.
If taxes on the rich do not rise, redistributing their wealth back into the system, eventually we will have, what we have now, which is the very rich sitting on massive piles of money, and the economic system reaches stasis because they no longer have an incentive to participate productively in it.
Increases in productivity make ever higher tax brackets possible. Obviously, if the basis of the economy is peasants reaping crops with iron sickles, and the king imposes a 90% tax rate on his barons, there is no way in hell they can pay that. But if the basis of the economy is factory farms, robot factories and infotech, productivity is so exorbitant that a 90% tax rate on the most productive elements is very sustainable. Because
productivity makes up the difference.
Channeling those massive tax yields back into infrastructure, education, service industry and popular needs puts the wealth back into the economy and keeps the system as a whole stable. Even if you pay it back out in straight welfare checks. Because as soon as those welfare checks get cashed, where's the money gonna go? Right back into the hands of the people who own all the capital and are producing products everyone wants and needs.
It works on the same principle as McDonald's "Billions and Billions Served". McDonald's hasn't literally served billions of people, rather, the same people come for repeat visits. By the same token, the same dollars are taxed, paid out, spent, become profit, then are taxed again. Productivity is so high that the loss in each cycle, in terms of direct consumption (the cost of the hamburger that the guy on welfare eats as opposed to the profit earned on making it) is marginal.
When we talk about ending capitalism, what we really mean is the reconception of our obsolete scarcity-based economics and replacing them with an economics based on material efficiency and economic and social democracy. That doesn't mean everyone ought to be equally rich, it just means no one should be poor. There should always be money and free enterprise, the emphasis should be on pure innovation rather than exploitation of resources and people.
You've seen most of my suggestions before, in other threads (backing the currency with tree-covered land, harsh regulation of the free market, tax-and-spend policies, massive populist infrastructure projects aimed at raising the quality of life for city dwellers and improving the level of our culture through investment in culture, recreation, education and public services, implementing capital-wage laws designed to incentivize co-ops and gradually flatten the economic pyramid).
Azelma wrote:
Finally, you did not address my point about the ease of starting a business (specifically an LLC) in America versus other countries. You can argue all day that the businesses started are shitty, derivative, and not innovative...but the fact that in America more businesses will be started than anywhere else leaves a much greater chance for a successful one. Agreed, the money needs to be there for investment, but business prosperity has always relied on nerds setting up shop in their garages or basements. Other countries have more restrictive laws and regulations on starting businesses, and I think this holds them back.
In practice this means privatizing profit and socializing loss. More is not necessarily better if lack of consequences for failure reduces investor confidence in the long run, which is exactly what is happening. Why do you think hedge funds prefer to run everything into the ground rather than innovate?
Take Facebook. Did Facebook IPO to become successful, or to cash out on unsuspecting investors after it already was?
You talk about "restrictive laws and regulations". As Tuhl said, you're being vague. What laws? What regulations? Holds them back from what? Are we really happier?
Also, what Tuhl said. The elegance of regulating the free market is that people are so greedy, if you tell them they can't do something, they'll just find some other way to make a buck. If you tell them that gasoline now costs $25/gal and everyone gets a free global transit system ticket, there will be those who find some clever way to make a buck off that, by making gas substitutes or selling services to mass transients. If you tell them that the currency is now treebacked and there is a moratorium on fishing, there will be those who start businesses rolling out forests and making fake fish cakes or doing aquaculture. If you tell them there is harsh per capita water and pollution rationing, the guy who finds a way to increase productivity on the same level of water or emissions by even a small percent has his golden ticket.
Blocking off competition in spheres that shouldn't be competitive will redirect competitive energies. That is how the "post-capitalist" system should work.
Azelma wrote:
Remove money from the equation...I think conflict still exists. There will be those who test boundaries and try to get away with doing less work. There will be those who want more than they have. I believe it would be like this in a vacuum. Even if we had unlimited resources...we'd all be fed and clothed and warm...and people would still want more. Why did first Matrix fail? It was too perfect. To be human is to be thirsty...when you are quenched, you get bored. I don't see evidence that shows me this won't hold true for a majority of people.
The answer is simply world of Star Trek. That was something JFK understood. The purpose of space exploration isn't really to look for resources or scientific discovery, it's to provide an outlet for human energy. Provide something for people to excel at and put resources into besides making money or plotting destruction.
Most cultures have believed that without war, people will sink into decadence and nihilism. This was why the Victorians were so militaristic, and, well, the result was WWI. Maybe they were right. Maybe without war, people will just "make money undisturbed and turn into imbeciles"
(place the quote). I would argue that need for a moral purpose that was previously filled by war and is now filled by profiteering must be filled by something else, and space exploration is as good as anything.
Azelma wrote:
You point out real problems, I'm just curious if you have workable solutions.
What do you think of the solutions I presented, my reasoning about how to fix or kill capitalism (depending on how you look at it), Azelma?
The biggest problem is not the lack of solutions, it is the inability of people to accept them for the reasons the OP identified. People are so brainwashed by the right wing media and so stultified into five-second-soundbite mode that they just can't handle the solutions. It's very depressing.
Probably the only way the problem will get fixed is some sort of Christianity-like movement that offers sea change to a population that has finally gotten tired of the status quo and is looking for something completely different. That may happen soon, or it may take a century or more, but it will probably happen eventually.
