[teal]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Tbontob, there is no way to have a "theoretical communist" government. Marxism in practice will naturally flow towards either anarchy or Stalinism, because the theory of Marxism is inherantly flawed. It's flaw is that it fails to account for the fact that it must be administered by human beings, and human beings are inherantly flawed. We are greedy by our nature.

A system such as capitalism assumes this truth and uses the inherrant nature of the species as a check and balance agaisnt it's baser tendancies. Yes of course there are plenty of examples of corruption but they are the exception rather then the rule in a truely free capitlaist economy. They result from fallible humans attempting to control market forces, which goes against the capitalist principle, instead of "letting it be".

hmmmm. I seem to detect a possible double standard here. Please correct me if I'm wrong here Geoschmo because in order to say anything I have to make several assumptions. The biggest assumption that I am making and the source of my post is that you are advocating laisez fair capitalism with as little government or other influence as humanly possible (i.e. the type of capitalism championed by Ayn Rand and the Libertarian party of the United States). I make this assumption based on your comments about a "truly free" capitalistic system and "letting it be".

You point out, correctly, that "utopian" communism is inherently flawed because it fails to account for human nature (i.e. it is unrealizable). I would further add that IMO laisez fair capitalism is equally as flawed for exactly the same reason. The language in your own post helps to support my point of view when you are forced to say a "truly free" capitalistic society has little corruption. You are, of course, forced to use the words "truly free" because no such society exists and never will. People are greedy not only for money, but for power as well and in a laisez fair economy whatever powers benefit from the random fluctiations in power levels to gain power will quickly change the rules away from "truly free" to "whatever benefits us" and you will no longer have a "truly free" economy anymore. I keep putting "truly free" in quotes because IMO there is no such thing, even in theory, since the economic game has to be played by some rules and those rules will always benefit some players over others. What this leads to in my observance of the real world, is exactly as you said, when you try and implement a "truly free" capatilistic economy what you inevitably end up with is large levels of corruption.

A very good book on this topic is "The Mystery of Capitalism" by Hernando DeSoto. To summarize: DeSoto asks the question, "given that Capitalism has worked so incredibly well in the western world and undeniably led to great wealth and prosperity for most (if not quite all, certainly better than any other system in historical record), how come recent experiments with implementing capitalistic economies in third world countries and former communist countries has been such an abject failure?" He goes on to display good documentation that in fact, these third world countries (and in particular the poor people in these countries) have incredible resources and "capital" for investment which is for some reason locked up in their economies and not being unleashed to create more wealth. The reason for this, in DeSoto's opinion, is that these countries laws do not reflect the situation that these poor people find themselves in. The systems for exchanging wealth in these countries are entirely based around those who are already in the system and does not allow poor people to readily convert and move their capital around. For example, many poor people "own" houses (in the sense that they made them with their bare hands), but do not have title to those houses and thus can not obtain a loan to start a small business (for example) by using their house as collatoral. Furthemore to obtain such a title would require something like 100 hours of waiting in line and filling out forms (he actually sent research assistants to stand in line and timed them) a procedure which is considerably expedited for those who already own property and/or have the resources to hire people to do their paperwork for them. Of particular interest was DeSoto's revisiting of U.S. history in which he showed that the famous Homesteading act was in fact a law introduced after the fact to allow people who had worked hard improving land they did not own to benefit from the capital they produced and thus generate more capital. DeSoto argues that these third world countries need similar acts to help them in their situation and they really need strong and fair laws which allow them to utilize their already existing capital. In short, what is needed is a Strong, but Fair, Government. Thus Government, far from being the bane of a prosperous economy, is something which is *essential* to allowing the greatest number of people to play at this economic game and thereby freeing up even more capital for investment and productive use. Obviously too much Government is bad (that 100 hours of waiting in line), but not enough Government is equally bad. The question (and an extremely tricky one at that) is how to decide these laws and how to best implement them, what level of police power is needed, etc. It is here that the idea of checks in balances is, to my mind, the best one, but it is very important to remember that the unchecked free market must also be checked.

To summarize: both capitalism (read little government, dog eat dog competition) and communism (read strong central government, dog shoots competing dog in back of head so their will be no competition) are straw men and their followers (Libertarians on the one hand, and communists on the other) are rightly relegated to minority status in any body politic. Let's try to keep the straw manning down to a dull roar rather than the knee jerk response it typically is...