With the rise of multinational corporations and global debt, and the death of the welfare state, national states are becoming little more than mechanisms by which corporations and banks can enforce usury on the working population through taxation and the appropriation of surplus wealth. Stateless capitalism requires stateless Socialism to fight it.
reading and agreeing with this post really helped solidify my transformation from regular-commie to anarcho-commie @Cocoron
@cyrinsong That's great to hear! Keep reading, talking, and pushing your own path on this journey.
@Cocoron the free market economy, however imperfect, is the most moral economic system ever created. It does not care if you grew up poor, the color of your skin, or by what name you call God.
Your ability to rise above your peers in a free market system is limited only by your ability to provide products and services of value to others. No economic system on earth has raised more people out of poverty than free market capitalism.
"No economic system on earth has raised more people out of poverty than free market capitalism."
No, science and technology lifted people out poverty. There has been no "free market" (an oxymoron), ever, that has supported and encouraged scientists and researches. Scientists have always relied on safety nets to conduct research, either in the form of publicly funded universities and institutions, or with their own inherited wealth.
@Cocoron respectfully, no.
Certainly, scientific advancement is part of the equation. But scientific advancement has been part of the picture for a *long* time.
Yet, more people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 25 years than at any other time in history. This correlates, and I think correlates causally, with the fall of the USSR's iron curtain and the fall other similarly un-free economies.
The next frontier in economic freedom is the fall of the iron burqa.
@profoundlynerdy
Donno where you got that statistic from, but the real one is that between 1990-2015, 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty - this was not thanks to any sort of deregulation of Capitalism; it was a coordinated plan by the UN, state and NGO actors under the Millennium Development Goals. Also worth noting that inequality grows every day and 8 ppl now own the same wealth as 50% of world pop, a product of the paradox of accumulation of capital.
@Cocoron Yes, I *think* we're talking about the same data points. Do you have a link that details the NGO's involved and the actual work performed? I'd like to read that.
I fully acknowledge I'm not entitled to my own "facts."
@profoundlynerdy Unfortunately I can't find any link-able stuff, as most of what I have read has been in the form of academic texts, such as this one:
http://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9781403979742
Some NGOs that use the MDGs as a framework include Red Cross, Concern and Oxfam - they all have published info available online.
I would say that that is a rather arbitrary application of the 20:80 rule, considering that what constitutes as "wealth" is mostly a human designation
@Cocoron "…what constitutes as "wealth" is mostly a human designation"
It's *entirely* a human designation. More specifically, without sentient spinet — and in some sense technologically capable — life there is no wealth. Fish don't need widgets.
Thanks for the link. I'll certainly Google around for that study. I'm with you, (mis-)use State power is often the problem with respect to economic freedom.
@Cocoron That said, the wealth income disparity cannot be changed, even by force. This is the natural outworking of the Pareto distribution.
The thing to remember about the Pareto is that it's fractal: 20% of the population holds 80% of the wealth. Then 20% of the 20% (that's 4%) hold 80% of that group's wealth, and so on.
It's a law of nature. I can no more be angry at it than than I can be angry at E = mc² or V = D/T. It just is.
@profoundlynerdy @Cocoron Free Market does not exists.
To start producing things I need to have access to capital. And this capital is guarded by the same people I will be in competition with. In the end, bigger corporations always lock the access to the market in whatever way they want, making the market unfree as you say. It is in the DNA of capitalism to end up with a non free market.
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@Cocoron Wouldn´t the logical course first be to crash the capitalist system?