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This is why the US government runs the mail service, since it guarantees delivery to every address, no matter how remote, even if at a loss.
This is why education should stay a government service, so that schools exist for every student, even when a given class is too small.
And this is why medicine will always need a socialized element, since rare diseases are not profitable enough to treat.
socialized healthcare will still be better at popular diseases. None of the approaches are particularly good for rare disease sufferers. But socialized is not a silver bullet.
The point is that private healthcare is driven by the profit motive.
The state is the only institution under our current social organization both that carries capacities at the same scale as corporations, and that may be legitimately supporting the interests of the public.
I live with socialized healthcare, its nice. Especially for the poor, who would not be getting any without it. But you get random doctor that might be good or not very good. Some medicine you wont get cause its too expensive to procure. In the us, it seems if you got good coverage, you get better healthcare than pretty much all countries with socialized healthcare today. But i dont live in the us, so i dont know
But i dont live in the us, so i dont know
Obviously not.
So you are saying you dont get better healthcare in the US than say, UK, if you have a good healthcare insurance?
This reminds me of a quote from the Grapes of Wrath, (which is set during the great depression):
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
I’ve never gotten around to reading that book. Never knew enough about it to be interested. At the same time as I was eating on $50 of food stamps per month, I was the person who had to take out all the expired meat and stale bread and unsold, entire cakes down to the dumpster.
Had I taken anything and been seen, I would have been fired. A coworker was fired, for handing it out to the homeless shelter across the street instead. I’ve never forgotten that.
I’m going to read that book, I think.
Make sure to get the unabridged version as theres a lot of abridged versions out there for the grapes of wrath.
A friend of mine ran a grocery store in the 70s in Texas, and tells me it was routine at the time for grocers to hand out their unsold just-expired meat and vegetables out at closing time. There was always a line to a Dutch door where someone handed out the food by the bag.
It was also known to reduce shoplifting.
So yes, it’s interesting that the practice of tainting discarded food has become acceptable again.
One of the USDA’s responsibilities is to track food waste like this, since 30%-40% of all food in the US is wasted, and discarded food makes up the largest factor in our managed solid waste. I can’t say it is a crime to mass-dispose of food in the US, but it is regarded as a harm, at least by the USDA.
It is certainly regarded as harmful when grocers and restaurants taint their disposed food to deter dumpster diving. But this is done to deter homeless people from trying to forage, e.g. disregarding the humanity of those desperate enough to eat discarded food.
Not only do they refuse to distribute wasted food, they’ve laid the blame on the people, stating that they can’t distribute it for fear of an overly litigious populace.
Which we’ve solved federally, I think during the Clinton administration. Businesses and people are protected when donating discarded food in good faith, let alone letting dumpster divers pick what they want.
Yes things were really bad before Keynesian economic policy was invented. But fortunately they figured that out.
Since then most famines have been caused by political instability. The largest famine in the world since we figured out economic policy happened in a socialist country (China).
While socialism is beneficial in some sectors of the economy, historically socialism doesn’t have a reliable track record when it comes to food production and distribution.
The largest famine in the world since we figured out economic policy happened in a socialist country (China).
are you willfully ignoring the bengal famine or do you just love pretending you’re not a racist piece of shit?
The Keynesian theory that was enforced by the largest military in the world has arguably failed at this point.
Free markets don’t exist. It’s just a load of assumptions.
Free markets don’t exist. It’s just a load of assumptions.
also heavy state subsidies
socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor
Keynesian economic strategies have never been implemented. We almost did that in 2020, but the rich saw what was happening, namely them losing control, and they stopped the stimulus packages world wide, for the poor. They kept the handouts for themselves
Please explain why farmers in capitalist economies were grinding up crops after the lockdowns started.
Just watched a thing yesterday about milk companies dumping tanker after tanker of perfectly good milk, because they don’t want the prices to drop.
In Canada dairy is regulated. Hopefully all food becomes regulated soon. Real hard push back from the right even though they complain the liberals are doing nothing about food prices.
In Canada, regulation is the reason they dump milk. Regulation creates milk quotas that they are not allowed to exceed. Farmers do not benefit from this, they would certainly sell more milk at a lower price if it was allowed.
I mean that’s your speculation, however the contrary of your speculation (companies literally dumping extra product so that they DON’T sell it at a lower price) has already happened. So I don’t think your speculation is accurate.
Newfoundland has one of the largest amout of dairy farms in Canada and not a single one dumps milk.
Actually, I took your word for it when I first read this response, but it turns out dairy farmers in Newfoundland were asked to dump milk by their provincial dairy association. So yes, they have had to dump milk, and it was directly caused by the provincial dairy commission.
Also, the whole milk dumping thing became viral because of Ontario specifically, each case of which was cause by government regulation: https://globalnews.ca/video/9459508/milk-dump-dairy-farmer-exposes-where-excess-milk-goes/ https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/02/02/dairy-farmer-dumping-excess-milk/ https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-viral-video-shows-canadas-dirty-dairy-secret-we-dump-lots-of-milk
Your source relates to the dumping of milk due to demand drop during covid. Can’t sell spoiled milk.
But you can sell unspoiled milk for lower prices. Regulation prevents them from lowering price or selling to other marketers. That’s a fact. Regulations restricted sales. Regulation restricted dropping prices.
Regulation causes dumping, free markets cause lower prices. You have not falsified that idea yet.
Dangit bobbuh
I did and I got a 14 day suspension from League of Legends.
Aren’t you forgetting the whole supply and demand thing…
No. That’s why the caption says “… capitalism must manufacture [scarcity] in order to justify its existence”
If there are enough resources for everyone, then it is difficult to make a profit. So capitalism creates artificial barriers and waste to artificially create scarcity and demand in order to maximise profits. Its most obvious with products that are deliberately designed to wear-out, or break, or degrade over time.
Making long-lasting durable, repairable, and upgradable products is not beyond us - but is harder to make a profit that way. So instead we get stuff that degrades over time.
With food it is more subtle, but what is crystal clear is maximizing profits is the top priority for the invisible hand of capitalism. Keeping everyone well fed may be a desirable side effort, but is not what capitalism is trying to achieve. And that’s why we end up throwing away huge amount of vegetables that aren’t quite the right shape for supermarkets, but at the same time as having people starving.
Yes, and when the cost of a product becomes too high for it’s true value, alternatives are created, which is why you’re probably on lemmy right now. Right now, made to break profits are marketed to be cheaper, and while they are not, people believe it which is why they are still in high demand. There is an abundance of supply with many options, this is very different from low supply.
Capitalism is not inherently the problem. It’s the corruption of governments that allow artificial scarcity to exist.
god you libs would have your paper politics ripped to shreds by basic marx and engels if you didn’t have the power of incredible amounts of ignorance
Yeah, just send some food to a place that doesn’t have enough. Simple enough.
Except doing that puts the local agriculture out of business. No one buys food when someone’s giving it away, right? I suppose you can just continue sending food to that country that’s now completely dependent on your country. Good plan. That is if your plan is to establish a colonial empire with client states completely dependent on yours.
How about a socialist revolution? Nobody has ever died in a famine in a socialist country! Oh… wait.
Nah the best strat involves subsidizing the local agriculture industry, expanding it while temporarily providing just enough food to top up to area with the needed calories to prevent people from starving. Once the local agriculture industry has expanded, you’ve succeeded in the whole “teach a man how to fish rather than giving a man a fish” thing.
So you have to send tractors, develop irrigation, maybe send some GMO seeds that have higher crop yields if you’re more concerned about people starving than first world moral objections.
But yeah, let’s just feed people.
You lack imagination and swallow the pill handed to you. Maybe the economic theory is just bullshit thought to you by the people who benefit most from said theory.
There are some very serious problems with various economics systems around the world. None of theses systems is actually capitalism and all of them feed people.
“Capitalism” is a theoretical extreme form of a market economy which nobody practices. In particular, all the larger economies are heavily regulated and have a lot of social programs.
Food scarcity has been so thoroughly beaten that in “Capitalist” countries the problem is reversed. Poor people can easily get all the calories they want. In many developed countries, poverty tracks with obesity.
Capitalism is not theoretical or hypothetical.
It is a system of social organization and production that emerged in a particular historic period following from particular historic antecedents.
Capitalism requires and produces stratification, marginalization, and deprivation on a massive scale.
In the US, over one in ten are experiencing food insecurity. In marginalized countries, rates are even higher.
The fundamental definition of capitalism is that all means of production are privately owned.
The reason I say that it’s theoretical and hypothetical is that you won’t find any real economies where that’s the case. Just like we don’t find any instances of the platonic ideal of Communism the way Marx described it.
What we have instead is a set of systems with varying degrees of public vs private ownership and various implementations of what should and shouldn’t be considered a public vs private resource.
I’m not sure why you would site “product stratification” as a requirement of capitalism. That literally just means that you sort products into different categories. It has nothing to do with any particular economic system.
Most modern economic theory does involve marginalization, but probably not the way you think. The requirement is just that either consumers have different preference curves or producers have different production abilities. That’s it and there’s nothing particularly sinister about it. Communism makes the same assumptions since those differences are a requirement for, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” to make sense.
Deprivation isn’t a requirement of capitalism either. It’s a basic assumption of economics. The idea is that we have unbounded capacity to consume but bounded capacity to produce. If that isn’t the case you don’t need an economy, everyone just gets everything they want. The difference between Communism and Capitalism is in how they prioritize using limited resources.
You can cite a single statistic on food scarcity but the data is very clear that we’re living in an era of unprecedented food excess. If you look at data sets that cover more than a few decades you’ll see strong trends of decreased malnutrition, both within the US and around the world.
One of the chief problems with getting these facts wrong is that they lead us to making bad decisions. Food donations are a prime example. The US subsidizes food production. That’s generally a good thing since it improves food security. However that screws food prices. The US deals with this by having the government buy up excess food at guaranteed minimum prices. It then has a bunch of food that nobody wants so, in an effort to kill to birds with one stone, it ships a lot of that food to poor countries at below market prices. That feeds some people but it also massively undercuts the local agriculture industry. There’s no way a near-subsistence farmer can come close to competing on price against a modern mechanized farm. That’s theoretically OK if we came up with some alternative economic activity but we don’t.
The fundamental definition of capitalism is that all means of production are privately owned.
The reason I say that it’s theoretical and hypothetical is that you won’t find any real economies where that’s the case.
When we discuss capitalism, we are discussing existing systems that are based on the capitalist mode of production.
We have no interest in fairy tales.
I’m not sure why you would site “product stratification” as a requirement of capitalism.
I believe you misquoted the text. I apologize if I originally submitted an inaccurate representation of the intended language.
Capitalism produces forces that impose systemic inequity across the population, and also, capitalism would collapse if somehow the inequity were resolved.
Thus, capitalism produces and requires inequity, on a massive scale.
Most modern economic theory does involve marginalization, but probably not the way you think.
We are concerned with facts, not just wishes.
The requirement is just that either consumers have different preference curves or producers have different production abilities.
Marginalization is cohorts of a population being systemically separated, disempowered, and disenfranchised.
Deprivation isn’t a requirement of capitalism either. It’s a basic assumption of economics. The idea is that we have unbounded capacity to consume but bounded capacity to produce.
Again, we discuss reality. Capitalism depends on cohorts of the population lacking access to the more desirable opportunities of employment available to others, thereby becoming forced to accept less undesirable employment. It also depends on most of the population needing to be employed to earn the means of survival. Wealthy business owners require no employment to survive, because they survive from the labor provided by their employees.
Thus, capitalist society is structured by a class disparity between owner and worker, and of further systemic stratification across the working class.
Asserting the intractable necessity of similar stratification for any system represents an argument from ignorance.
difference between Communism and Capitalism is in how they prioritize using limited resources.
The difference is based on control over production. Naturally, if workers control production, then they direct it toward their own interests, as the whole public, not the interests of a narrow cohort of society that has consolidated immense wealth and power.
You can cite a single statistic on food scarcity but the data is very clear that we’re living in an era of unprecedented food excess.
Food scarcity is the degree to which certain cohorts of the population have inadequate or insecure access to food, not the total amount of food with respect to need.
Statistics are easy to find if you search.
If you look at data sets that cover more than a few decades you’ll see strong trends of decreased malnutrition, both within the US and around the world.
Much has improved over time, however, precarity and insecurity have exacerbated by most measures in recent years and decades.
The US subsidizes food production. That’s generally a good thing since it improves food security.
The relationship is weak. Food security depends on stability and equitability of distribution. A society producing enough food to support the population is considered as resilient, but such an achievement is not sufficient to ensure security for the entire population.
Inequities in distribution are harmful to the population, by producing food insecurity.
The US deals with this by having the government buy up excess food at guaranteed minimum prices.
Much food is wasted.
Retailers discard food to keep prices inflated, even as many remain hungry. The practices you are describing, of government making purchases to keep prices stable and also distributing according to need, for households unable to meet the retail price, are not occurring in practice, to any meaningful degree, to address the problems.
In the US, over one in ten are food insecure.
Stakeholder of a variety of agriculture and food manufacturing corporations here.
How 'bout nah? I’d rather make a profit and let the government also buy food from me to feed the needy if the government wants to do that this election cycle.
Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to feed people, it’s produced to make a profit.
The only way to make a profit under capitalism is to satisfy the needs of your consumers, regardless if you want or not.
When it’s not profitable to feed people, we let them starve.
Hunger is literally an innate need. It will not be profitable if other external factors arise, just as regulations, licences, government-granted privileges that squash other competitors… any violation of the right to self-ownership and private property is detrimental and coercive.
Even when our labor has conquered scarcity, capitalism must manufacture it in order to justify its existence.
Scarcity is not something you can “conquer”. Resources are scarce and all have alternative uses. Any time we consume any good, it comes as an expense to someone.
“The unplanned order of markets is the greatest achievement of mankind. It enables us to prosper. It is the foundation of civilization. It has no real alternative, and emerges spontaneously, so it costs us nothing. Fear and loathing of this self-imposed and unintended gift threatens our well-being, even our very lives.”
No. You can also profit by appropriating the fruits of somebody else’s labor and taking advantage of market failures. Often times, actions that benefit consumers fail to receive adequate funding due to involving public goods.
Capitalism violates the ethical basis of property rights of getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor. In the capitalist firm, the employer solely appropriates the whole product of the firm, which workers produce but are denied the legal rights to
No. You can also profit by appropriating the fruits of somebody else’s labor
Capitalism violates the ethical basis of property rights of getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor.An entrepreneur can’t “appropriate” somebody else’s labor if the employee who agreed to work for a wage did it voluntarily. Denying this would imply denying the natural right of the worker to free will. Social cooperation is not the same as slavery.
and taking advantage of market failures.
These so-called “market failures” are the product of an utilitarian and scientific economic theory to understand the causes and effects of economic relationships, as it ignores completely the difference between the study of Human Action and economic history.
In fact, the intervention of the government makes it more difficult to have a good allocation of resources.
Often times, actions that benefit consumers fail to receive adequate funding due to involving public goods.
"Every good is useful “to the public,” and almost every good […] may be considered “necessary.” Any designation of a few industries as “public utilities” is completely arbitrary and unjustified.
Property rights’ moral basis flows from the moral principle that the de facto responsible party should be held legally responsible. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. The voluntariness of the employment contract is irrelevant because de facto responsibility cannot be transferred even with consent. The labor’s voluntariness makes them more responsible. There is an inalienable right, which can’t be given up even with consent, here
Property rights’ moral basis flows from the moral principle that the de facto responsible party should be held legally responsible.
Property rights are deduced by the natural right to self-ownership.
“Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a “property” in his own “person.” This nobody has any right to but himself.”
The voluntariness of the employment contract is irrelevant because de facto responsibility cannot be transferred even with consent.
As I said before, you’re denying the natural right of the employee to free will.
Every individual employs scarce resources to attain a desirable end. If you are against social cooperation, you’re making human action more difficult.
“For a contract to exist as property, each contracting party has a property interest in specific performance on the part of the opposing contracting party. But a property interest in specific performance is not a property interest in the person. The employer contracts with an employee for specific performance. The employee also contracts with the employer in similar style. Each has a property interest in the performance of the other, but neither owns the person of the other.”
In an enterprise, the whole product is the property rights to outputs and liabilities for used-up inputs. By the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match, the workers should jointly get the whole product.
You are denying employees’ free will, which comes with responsibility for the results of their joint actions.
Not against social cooperation. Am arguing that all firms should be worker coops. Labor and responsibility are de facto non-transferable
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/
One example alone I can think of of how privatisation is bad is that redundancy is ignored because it is not profitable. For example, our water companies in the UK is incentivised to not have huge reserves because they cost more to maintain, which means that during a bad drought, people do run out of water. This has already happened, and this is only one example.
This happens with all sorts of industries that provide essential services - they will fail when put under stress, because to account for that stress is unprofitable. At worst, it leads to people suffering, at best, it needs constant regulation and enforcement by the government to stop them running in an unsafe manner. Companies will literally use child labour if you let them - I don’t know why you insist on defending them.
One example alone I can think of of how privatisation is bad is that redundancy is ignored because it is not profitable.
At worst, it leads to people suffering, at best, it needs constant regulation and enforcement by the government to stop them running in an unsafe manner.There you go. The classical myth of “natural monopolies” and the intervention of the government, such as licenses, protectionism, “public utilities”, subsidies, etc. are the mere cause of this problem.
“The fact that the government must give permission for the use of its streets has been cited to justify stringent government regulations of ‘public utilities,’ many of which (like water or electric companies) must make use of the streets. The regulations are then treated as a voluntary quid pro quo. But to do so overlooks the fact that governmental ownership of the streets is itself a permanent act of intenention. Regulation of public utilities or of any other industry discourages investment in these industries, thereby depriving consumers of the best satisfaction of their wants. For it distorts the resource allocations of the free market.”
Companies will literally use child labour if you let them
“[…] the only reason our children don’t have to do this type of labor is that we are wealthier, not because of our child-labor laws nor because we are somehow culturally or racially superior.”
Any ban on child labor is utterly counterproductive and potentially life-threatening to the very people the government is “trying to protect”. Only economic development can improve the lives of these children, and nothing short of unrestricted free trade will do.
ITT: Conflation of free market economics and capitalism.
As far as I can tell, “World Food Program” is short for “World Food Program USA”. These numbers are not surprising based upon that fact.
And donating money to a food charity is not the same as socializing food and preventing people from starving by just directly feeding them all
The American idea of socialism is having to beg strangers to pay their medical bills on GoFundMe.
Yeah, that’s not socialism. That’s the Right’s wet dream.
So all this insulting me in your other post isn’t because you actually want UBI, but because you think it’s the only thing Americans are stupid enough to vote for?
Since I’m trying to go about this educated, let’s make sure. We’re in agreement that UBI is objectively worse than universal welfare, right? So we’re just talking about whether UBI is the best conservative shit that uneducated Americans are willing to buy?
I’d be willing to buy that. But I still need to know how to resolve the issue of impoverished leftists being made poorer. I’m assuming the plan you’re in love with (or just don’t hate) isn’t Yang’s stupid plan. So what’s YOUR plan? Would you make it work without gutting welfare?
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What is it with UBI fans being so ad-hominem focused against the Left? I’m literally asking people to give me reasons to consider UBI and with my complaints, and all people do is treat me like I’m a moron.
Is it that there ISN’T anything substantive, and it’s just a blind dream that someday someone will come up with a UBI that works?
Our discussion has ended, and I’m hoping the mods take my reports seriously.
The relationships of the US and the similar nations, of the imperial core, with marginalized nations, of the imperial periphery, are structured for economic exploitation, under practices of neocolonial hegemony.
Such relationships of labor exploition produce a massive transfer of net wealth from the periphery to the core.
If workers in poor nations were paid as much as businesses realize from selling the products of their labor, much or all of the food donations would be unnecessary.
As it stands, such aid is only an impartial restitution for the wealth that is transferred away from workers by the sales of the products they create through their labor.
What does any of this have to do with Bobby Hill being on Mars in Watchmen?
Funny how communist countries have the worst track record of famines killing millions.
Meanwhile the billions starving under capitalism because it’s cheaper to let people starve than ship food, even a few miles to a food bank:
oh wow communist countries have a bad track record in capitalist media
incredible deduction mate! whats next? the sky might be fucking blue?
What does that have to do with the post?
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Was there a watchmen parody in king of the hill that I missed? Or did someone just make this?
Thats my purse!
It’s just this one edit, it’s been around for like a decade though
I agree with both of you. The USA should stop support in total and let the nations of the world do for themselves. We have carried that burden way too long, as the rest of the world turns it’s back, or complains about what we do.
There is a difference between capitalism and globalization. You can still have radical capitalism, with near sight/profit orientated exploitation of your local system.
Did I misunderstand something in your statement or did you just don’t understand what current practiced radical capitalism means?
I have a complete understanding, but I don’t think what I said supports radical capitalism in any way. I want US dollars spent domestically. Period. Minimal global support, just like every other major nation of the world. The United States should no longer do anything more than the 2nd place country.
