Democratic Capitalism (pro) vs Libertarian-Socialism (con)

RE: Revolutionary CataloniaI was a little hesitant with bringing up Revolutionary Catalonia, not because of the bad things about it, but because it was so short-lived, so I don't know that we can really conclude anything for libertarian socialism based off of them. And I realize that when I said the standard of living went up, I had this argument from previous debates and I think I accidentally had it alter over time. You know how a game of telephone works, right where when one person tells another person something and so on and eventually it gets changed? I think something similar happened here since I brought this point up several times without refering back to the original work, and I should have read the article over again before posting about Catalonia. Anyways, the part I was refering to can be found by pressing ctrl+f, and searching for "standard of living", go to the second time those words are found in that article. It specifically says "But at least some urban workers clearly seemed to greatly improve their standard of living during the early stages of the war." And goes on to say how it remained unchanged for most of the people or even was worse for the unemployed, etc. So, I don't think I can point to any examples of libertarian socialism, because there haven't been any that were allowed to last longer than a few years.I was also hesitant with continuing this debate, because maybe we should change it to be Libertarian socialism versus Democratic capitalism in theory only because I would be at a clear disadvantage since there really aren't any long-term libertarian socialist countries, but there are examples of democratic capitalist countries. So, I will agree to completely have my example of Revolutionary Catalonia dismissed, on the grounds that it was too short-lived to conclude anything meaningful from it in terms of how well libertarian socialism works if my opponent would also agree not to bring up examples of democratic capitalist countries.RE: "So, if co-ops are as old as the United States[2], why were only approx 0.3% (and that's a high range estimate[3]) of all businesses (in 2005) co-operative?"I would say it's because we live in a capitalist society. Let's go back to when feudalism was the majority system and capitalism was in the minority for centuries. Just because something is the majority system, doesn't mean it is the better system. Feudalism was once the majority, so we could technically apply this argument to when capitalist businesses were just barely being introduced. Let's suppose capitalist businesses were once only .3% of the businesses out there and feudal lords owned everything else. I'm sure my opponent would agree that in spite of feudalism being the majority, capitalism would be better. Now, to further explain why cooperative are very much in the minority, there are many things in our society that promote capitalist businesses. For one, banks rarely loan out to cooperatives[10](despite the fact that the ones that do exist are generally more successful than their capitalist counterparts as established above), the government only ever bails out traditional businesses and never cooperatives, cooperatives are not generally set-up to out-compete other companies either[10], and finally cooperatives are at a disadvantage since the vast majority(89%) of people can't even define what a cooperative is[11], I personally didn't even know what a cooperative was until I was 20, but I could give you a basic idea of what a capitalist business was before I was 10. I think I can safely assume that a vast majority of people have heard of and can define what a traditional/capitalist business is like, so most people shop at those and people looking to create a business probably never thought about making it a cooperative instead of a traditional business since most don't even know what one is. Also, I would argue that the business owners who do know about co-ops, they don't want to create one because they would rather be selfish and keep the business under sole-ownership for themselves. This is probably one reason why feudalism was in the majority once in society: most of the feudal lords were selfish and wanted to own the means of production by themselves.RE: Cooperatives getting what consumers right to begin withYou could argue the point of a business is to benefit it's owners, but to do so you have to benefit other people. If you don't provide something that other people want and/or need, you won't stay in business long and thus the owners are not benefited, so the fact that in order to benefit the owners of a business you have to benefit society, means the point of a business is also to benefit the consumers. It's really just an argument regarding perspective. Now, my opponent says that I have not provided evidence that co-ops do sell what consumers want better than other businesses, but the evidence is that more co-ops stay in business than other businesses. In order to make a profit, you have to sell stuff people want. If no one wants it, then you will go out of business. The fact that a vast majority of co-ops do not go out of business in the first 5 years suggest that they sell to consumers better than traditional businesses. It's also logical to conclude that workers, who are also poor or middle class, would get what the majority of people want(since majority of people are poor or middle class) than a single wealthy individual who is disconnected from majority of people(the poor and middle classes). Can you argue this is not the case? I mean, it seems to be the logical position that someone who is also poor/middle class would know what poor/middle class people want better than a rich person does. Therefore it seems logical to conclude that traditional businesses fail at a higher rate because they have someone in charge who is disconnected from the people. While I may not be offering specific evidence proving this, does my opponent have another explanation? If there is no other explanation, then we can conclude that my explanation is true. I personally can't think of another explanation for co-ops surviving the first 5 years at a higher rate than traditional businesses. So, while I didn't use direct evidence of this, I'm using logic and logic is just as valid as evidence. Re: Comparative study on co-opsI think I cited the wrong page, a direct quote from page 522 of that source says "Average employment and wages in WCs tend to be greater than in CFs. "[12] Where WC is short for Worker-cooperative and CF is Capitalist Firm. The graph for employment index does seem to show something slightly different than that, which is odd. Maybe either the graph was a little off or their statement is. That statement is true when it comes to the wages though, as the graph shows that average wage in WC's was greater than CF's for most of the time. RE: Decentralized governmentBy local government, I would mean cities. Some things would be handled by the state/provincial government, but I think most things should be handled by the cities themselves. I did offer a TED talk that talked about mayors and city governments, so I thought that would imply I meant city governments, for the most part. While local governments would have a smaller budget, they also have less people in them. So, things would be less expensive too. I don't think this is a problem at all, as the price per person for an item remains the same, as does the revenue per person. Revenue and prices per person doesn't change when you go from local governments to federal governments. As long as they are the same, the local governments would be able to afford the programs themselves. For example, let's take social security. Each person gets a certain amount of money when they retire, but there are fewer people so the cost goes down from what it would be for the federal government. The revenue you get from a tax for social security would also go down, but it would be in proportion to the amount costs went down, so there would be no difference. Now, my opponent did make the wholesale argument, but I don't think this would apply to most things the government provides. Taking the social security example again, you still spend the same amount per person as you would if it was the federal government doing it. Think about it, the reason why buying things in bulk costs less is because it's cheaper to make items when you do so in great quantity, but this doesn't apply to social security, for example, since it's not products we are talking about, but money that is given to someone for social security. Money is money, and the amount it costs is the same per person no matter what. It's not making a product for the person, if it was making a product, then my opponent's argument would work. Re: Mon dragon corporationActually, the yearly revenue for Mon dragon Corporation isn't 12 million, it's 12.11 Billion[13] and there are 74,333 employees in Mon dragon Corporation[14]. That means they have a revenue per employee of 162,915.52. That's more than what professors of universities make and close to the amount a psychiatrist makes. I would say this is evidence for socialism, not against it, since my opponent got the revenue for Mon dragon corporation incorrect. Also, I didn't mention mon dragon corp in this debate, but thank you for doing so. Sources[10] [11] http://www.geo.coop...[12] http://disjointedthinking.jeffhughes.ca... [13] dragon+corporation+revenue&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">https://www.google.com... dragon+corporation+revenue&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8[14] dragon+corporation+number+of+employees&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">https://www.google.com... dragon+corporation+number+of+employees&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8