Comrade Chavez At Climate Summit

[Winchester]

Disorganized tyranny is better than organized tyranny because disorganization is less effective.

[jonyelmony]

First of all per Capita Hong Kong and Singapore are close to the two richest nations on earth and per capita is the relevant number when comparing the economic development/prosperity of a nation. China has a huge economy but the majority of people are still poor. Hong Kong and Singapore are truly amzing, especially Singapore which was as poor as any where in Africa in the 60's. The fact that both Hong Kong and Singapore are City states has helped both in there Economic freedom and their development (Rural populations are both poorer and usually have enough political clout to enforce policy which redistributes to them/ lowers barriers to trade).

I am not a big fan of using Isms, every economy in the world today is a mixed economy, with the only difference being the difference in mix. I am curious as to how Australia got to number three on the Economic freedom rank as we are far more a social democracy than America, I think the rank may be based solely on barriers to external trade (forgetting all other taxes and regulations).

An entrirely planned economies will always fail because governments are far more inneficient at gathering and acting on information than markets. Though the incentives of markets are not always going to lined up with the goals that a society, or at least the voting public may have in which case planning and intervention are justified, though the limitiations of governement intervention need to be recognized there will allways be a cost and the question is whether you will be willing to wear the cost.

People don't realize the importance of the legal system to economic activity. For instance Somalias troubles are rotted in the very fact that they did not have a real experience with Common Law, the legal system put in place was created entirely for the British to extract from Somalia and did not give any Somalians propert rights. Further every place that the British have chosen to colonise for the purpose of residance has become extemely prosperous . We take the ability to enforce a contract for granted. Personally i don't see why the free market has to be explicitly linked to the primacy of Capital. I think a simple change to corporation law where a firm is controlled by the providers of Labour rather than the providors of capital would go along way to creating a system of Free Enterprise without the inequality of the current system. the idea of providers of labour rather than the providers of capital controlling a firm is seems to be mind blowing though. Even most labour co-operatives only dream of giving control to workers by having the workers own the capital, my dream is more of Labour owning the Firm (controlling the firm) no matter who owns the Capital.

Edited December 23, 2009 by jonyelmony

[jonyelmony]

Winchester, the free market economy does not preclude people from creating a better product so as to improve society or for bosses to be generous to their workers. A free market economy does allow for people to people to act selfishly and this will often leave any two people in an interaction better off. Why you would expect to find an aristocracy more concerned about justice than our current capitlists or previous Economic Planners I am not sure. As i said in my previous post I think that changing the legal structure of the firm could go along way to switiching the power from those who provde Capital to those who provide labour and thus provide a more equal and just society.

Further I am interested when you say the true value of labour do you mean the value of an hour worked or the value of the person providing the labour. I think the value of the person providing the labour is almost entirly independent of the value who each hour he works. For instance if a man is unemployed, not working, he is not worthless, i should hope that he will be able to keep from starving a roof over his head. I don't for instance feel it is immoral to say be willing to pay someone $10 to mow my lawn but $1000 on someone to spend the same amount of time performing surgery on my shoulders. Further i don't think i should be any more guilty about the people who earn $2 an hour making my Nike shoes than I am about the subsistence farmer who harvest the equivalent of $1 of food a week. The fact that either person is in the situation they are is immoral but at least the Nike worker is objectivly better off.