Originally posted by: JS80
Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper
So in your view having the government own and operate the police, military, courts, firefighters, and education system is not socialism? Why won't you address my very real hypotheticals about the awful things that can happen under capitalism?
State such hypotheticals and I will address them.
In a city that is 85% Christian, the business owners refuse to hire or employ anyone who is not a devout Christian. Your choice is to either leave the city or convert. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Since the government doesn't regulate businesses and respects private property rights under real capitalism, this sort of thing would not be illegal.
A grocery store chain decides that it doesn't want to have black people in its stores so that white people will not have to suffer the company of black people. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Since the government doesn't regulate businesses and respects private property rights under real capitalism, this sort of thing would not be illegal. Of course you could argue that that is irrational and that capitalism is actually the cure for racism. Blacks could always show at black-owned grocery stores (assuming that landowners would sell or lease the land for that).
Rich Influential Guy X dislikes Regular Guy Y, so he tells every business in town not to do business with Y and tells the road owners not to allow him on their roads, effectively trapping Y at his own driveway.
Let's pretend that instead, Rich Guy X purchase all of the land and roads that surrounds Guy Y's home, turning Guy Y into a trespasser if he tries to leave his property. (This is known as the Problem of Encirclement.)
The nations' businesses tire of sharing a significant percentage of their employees' contribution to the act of wealth production with their employees and reason that they could all be much wealthier if only they had slaves, indentured servants, and/or near-slaves working for them. So they bring over 100 million impoverished people from third world nations to work for poverty wages and fire all of their American employees, effectively increasing the labor market overnight and putting severe downward pressure on wages. The banks then repossess the homes of the Americans who cannot afford to pay their mortgages, robbing them of any equity they had built up. Although new businesses might open up, since the government doesn't regulate immigration at all nor who is present on private property, the businesses can continue to import people into the country. This also results in overpopulation and a large decrease in everyone's standard of living and increases the demand and price for resources. Is that a good thing?
It's good to have elements of capitalism in the nation's economy, but too much of it leads to what the advocates of capitalism claim that they fear--dictatorship and poverty--not caused by government regulations and evil socialist taxes, but by the owners of capital. They claim to oppose the initiation of physical force yet end up supporting a system that would result in an indirect initiation of physical force via the enforcement of private property rights. Unfortunately, since we don't live on our own individual islands and since resources only exist in finite quantities, there is in fact such a thing as a conflict of interest amongst rational men (regardless of an unconvincing essay a famous author once wrote on this subject) and it is essentially impossible to keep from initiating force against other people in indirect ways, hence the need for rational government regulation of the marketplace and the economy.
(I guess I've just repudiated any claim I could ever make about my being an Objectivist or a Student of Objectivism and should now be regarded as an evil whim-worshiping Kantian excrement-grubbing nihlist subjectivist altruist Marxist.)