Occupy Wallstreet

[auroraglacialis]

[edit: sorry the answer is long. so this is part 1. I apologize and promise that I will keep my next reply shorter, especially as this starts to be a debate between 2 people]
Again a reminder, Clarke - it is tedious and exhausting to have fragmented posts like you rlast one - it is more a multi-level private discussion that no one else can follow than anything else. Please try to reply with a full paragraph and not with a one-sentence quote plus a one-sentence answer. These are hard to follow and put into context even by me who originally wrote that wuote reply

I do not get really what you try to prove with your example about the egg. It shows that that guy Milo can make a lot of money and buy political influence by making a business scheme in which he cashes in a lot of profit for a service that is not worth that much. Sure the people at AF base will buy from him if there is no one else around, but the price is not the actual cost for the egg. This is even true in free market capitalism, which would in its pure form lead to someone buying the egg for 1ct, add the costs of transport plus a few percent and sell the egg for 3 ct at the AF base, outcompeting Milo. Of course the margin of profit will not drop to zero and depending on politics that other competitor will not have a chance anyways, but basically the value of the egg at the AF base is the price at the producer plus the cost of transport and the wages of the people arranging transport. And I think that latter is highly overvalued in the present system. We pay people 2 or 10 times the value of a good at the producer just so that they organize bringing it to us (not even including expenses of that service). That way some people get fantastically rich on these "profits" - richer than those who in the end sell the product or the ones who produce it or the ones who transport it.
And in the end you even use Milos behaviour as an example of what leads to financial crash - so what is your intention then - showing me that this kind of "creating profit" and "shuffling money around" is not working? I knew that.


The next topic is scarcity. I think one has to make a division here between what I would translate as "scarcity" (Knappheit) versus "limitation" (Begrenztheit). A resource can be limited - like almost all physical things are like grain, minerals, energy, but it does not have to be scarce. Scarcity in that sense means that there is a severe need for it in some place that cannot be fulfilled. So grain is limited worldwide, but in Europe we dont have grain scarcity while in Somalia there is grain scarcity. Capitalism in its current form or even worse uncontrolled free markets lead to that inequality in distribution of the limits which results in localized scarcity. Of course the value of something is determined by the limits of its availability, that certainly is at the basis of trading - a feature that is really really old. The problems arise however if it is easy to "screw over" people by shuffling money - creating fake assignments of value to some things. Like your egg again. Its value at the AF base is the value of its production plus the cost of transport. Yet there is a virtual, created value assigned to it by the trader. That profit has to paid by someone - by the farmer who could charge 2ct for the egg or more understandably by the AF, who overpay Milo for that egg - in the end that cost then is paid by the tax payers.
Another example for created fictional value are brand name shoes. People pay three times as much money for a sports shoe that was produced in a Sweat shop somewhere because it has a special symbol on it. The quality is the same as others, the pain and suffering involved in production is the same, just the trader did a better job at screwing over the buyers by something called PR and marketing.
So a more just trading system would operate without these falsified, virtual or created values (and scarcity) - and it would include more real world values. I dont care if it is possible and economically viable to produce a sports shoe under these conditions for $5 and sell it for $20 in a shop in Europe because that is what the people demand - not if the real cost involve half-slavery , ecological damage and producing toxins and waste. The latter are not included in the $5 or even the $20 - they are not measurable in money, so they just do not appear int he calculations of economists and that makes me MAD AS HELL. - How DARE they say that they can produce something for a few $$ if that number is completely ignorant of all the suffering of life outside their economy? The "best" they are doing is to try and put some value into it that is supposed to represent the monetary value of ecological destruction. A few $$ for the elimination of a wetland, some $$ for burning a forest? Even if they would use that money really for ecological "restoration" its madness. That money never is enough for restoration and restoration is just not the same as original ecosystems. Numerous studies show that it is not the same, that it is fundamentally different to have an old growth forest compared to a bunch of seedlings. And that this will not change for centuries. What is the monetary value of an ecosystem destroyed or changed for centuries. What is the monetary value of a species gone extinct!

So I dont say there is no scarcity. That would be ludicrous. And I definitely dont say there are no limits. To the contrary. But what I dislike is to make a profit out of increasing scarcity artificially or to move around scarcity and dump it on some poor people.

And to make one thing clear - I do not think that modern capitalism is in so many things fundamentally different from previous systems in the medieval ages or in ancient Rome. There are some added features like planned obsolescence, fiat currency and consumerism that add to the predicament, but the problem lies deeper. Modern capitalism came out of an economic system that already had all the flaws, it just increased their impact.

Avoiding scarcity in full is a concept almost entirely restricted to science fiction. To achieve post-scarcity of resources in real life, we'd require supertechnologies not avalaible yet

So I think that is the misunderstanding here - scarcity vs limitation. I do not strive for a world without limits and eliminate scarcity by that means. I think that is proposterous. But by spreading things more equal, I think scarcity can be avoided. Of course with all the grain available in the world, not everyone will be able to have a swimming pool fileld with graint o take a grain bath in it, but if it is reasonably distributed, everyone would have enough to eat, so there would not be scarcity in food for anyone. There would maybe not be abundance or so much food that one can waste it thoughtlessly, but I think such behaviour goes way beyond my definition of scarcity.

Another way to put this is I see scarcity from a human perspective (does one person experience scarcity) compared to some global accounting (is the resource scarce globally).

So it is somehow immoral to sell an experience, or to sell art?

Not per se. I merely pointed towards that there is commodification of emotions happening, something you said is not possible.
If it is moral or not is a different topic. I happen to think that in a culture that has fulfilled its needs, there should be a common culture that fosters art without involving a monetary pressure, but again , that would be too much for here. There are some concepts for that around, a common one is the "culture flatrate" where people pay a small amount to use cultural infrastructure and that money is put into maintaining the infrastructure and providing artists with investments. Add to this the concept of publicly shared income - basically every citizen gets a minute share of the profits of everything in the state. This sums up to enough money to fulfil all the basic needs for a house, food, water, some extras - an artist can then create art free of the pressure of making money with it. If he does well any many people want to see his art, he gets rewarded out of the "big pot" that all people paid into. This is a system that could solve some issues, that also might fail misearbly due to buerocracy - just wanted to point out that people actually have thoughts on these issues.


...ctd