Caramel's Ideal Society

1) a) Pro tries to prove that we endure slave like conditions because lots of wealth gets transferred to the upper class. Source?ï¿½ Regardless, inequality is not evidence for slavery. The typical statist line is that the inequality is SO bad, that people are FORCED to work for a master, who becomes analogous to their slaveowner. In our current mixed economy, people'sï¿½ caloric intake has actually been increasing over the years.ï¿½ http://www.cdc.gov... There is no reason to prefer Caramel's anarcho-primitivist society to the status quo. Even if living conditions were very very poor, the sole criterion for slavery is the initiation of violence. Again, people who left sustenance farms for cities were not called by their masters. They chose dire poverty over extreme poverty. It sucks but they aren't slaves. b) The right to stop other people from harming or stealing you is capitalist. See above for the "control" argument. 2) I don't have a BOP in this resolution, so I don't have to outline the best way to have capitalism. Pro's BOP is to show improvement over the status quo. 3) a) Pro thinks his example of theft shows that capitalism promotes crime. In the status quo, people don't regularly steal each other's groceries, probably because there are adequate alternatives and enforcement mechanisms for theft. No problem. Pro misunderstands my point about machines. Investors buy machines so workers can be more productive. By raising the productivity of workers, real output and wages rise. Capitalists can't skim an infinite profit because of competition. Pro thinks everything should be evenly distributed. This ignores the process by which capital was generated in the first place. Investors put up capital because they expected a profit. No profit, no capital to redistribute. b) Pro thinks that capitalism means that everyone is in an ultra competitive rat race. But since capitalism is defined by negative rights, it entails no such thing. Again, the Amish are great capitalists. So are Bhuddist monks. Pro's whole case fails to be anti-capitalist. c) Pro thinks that the Tragedy of the Commons is alleviated in coops because people act in each other's interest. Why would they do that? Some psychological argument from peer pressure no doubt. Regardless of any cultural brainwashing scheme Pro wants to advance, there is always an individual incentive to cheat on the system. He's advocating a society without any real checks and balances. 4) Pro has to make a policy recommendation that will substantially improve the status quo, as per the OP. 5) a) Division of labor would suffer drastically because each of Caramel's villages has to produce everything on its own. It can't specialize. The lowered productivity means there are fewer resources. A larger percentage of wealth must be consumed, leaving little for investment in things like medicine and technology. It is true that many third world countries are exploited by western violence. But literally all of them? Are there no examples of successful, isolated communities? Probably not. Being isolated sucks. b) The point is that capitalism doesn't automatically equal selfish cutthroat hording. Amish use their freedom to live humbly. Some people give to charity. Caramel's complaints only amount to wanting people to give more. Whether it is voluntary or under the point of a gun, he does not say. c) Caramel thinks cooperation and competition are mutually exclusive. Clearly he has never heard of a corporate merger. A business in itself is an example of cooperation too. So you can have cooperation under capitalism. Competition, however, is ever necessary to motivate cooperation in the first place. Why hire a hundred people to design a better processor? Because AMD might do it first and Intel will lose out. d) Caramel thinks that profit should be weighed along with environmental concerns. I already said that the environment that humans use is protected by capitalist property rights, so this point is moot. He also thinks that profit seeking is unprofitable because you have to spend a lot of money on stuff he considers frivolous. You can see by the way I've phrased it that this can't be the case. The most profitable firms will minimize economic waste. Basically, he thinks the system we have today can work without prices through "planners". Well the planner doesn't know anything. Without the price of resources, he can't know what consumers demand. He can't know how scarce resources are, or how expensive they are to get out of the ground. Its economic chaos. ï¿½e) Caramel thinks that capitalism is the reason for government zoning decisions. It's difficult to see how restaurants and shopping centers benefit from the government forcing them to locate far away from people's houses... Regardless, this is classic leftist confusion with crony capitalism. Please use the definition of capitalism I specified in R1. f) Walmart is better for the masses because it offers a wide array of goods at low low prices! g) Monopolization is bad, because without competition, firms simply raise prices and reduce output. Monopoly is best broken through competition on an open market. Limiting the market to a local community will only make it easier to monopolize things. 6) a) There probably aren't a lot of gardens in people's lawns because they realize it's a waste of their time to grow their own food when they can just go to the supermarket. b) He writes "I don't care about your distinctions between the govt and business. The govt is mostly businessmen and capitalists who are only there to facilitate the private sector in the first place". Obviously, the people in government are not capitalists because they initiate violence against other people. Pro should care about the distinction because he agreed to it when he joined this debate. Regardless, he thinks his system saves money by not having police etc. See my previous comments about his system having no checks and balances. New Zealand is (by accident) the only industrialized country without subsidies to domestic agriculture, so I kind of have to use it as an example of agro-capitalism. ï¿½ c) Pro seems to want to stimulate neighborhood gardens EVEN THOUGH there is already plenty of food. Why? Most people get paid a lot more at their job than they could earn by growing their own crops. It's a waste of time. 7) a) The motive to pollute another's property is more profit. It can be alleviated by actively reducing the profit of aggressive polluters. b) Pro concedes that small towns won't be able to produce as much. Pro is right that his ideal towns are largely theoretical... see my citation about the poverty of American colonies, which he thinks doesn't apply because they didn't have technology. That's basically my point; that if we did go into small towns we wouldn't be able to produce technology. He thinks it's an advantage because supply chains can't be cut off if you produce all your own stuff. Supply chains are not very often cut off in the status quo. Maybe electricity every once in a while. He also thinks the free time makes it all worthwhile. But value is subjective, so I don't see how he could possibly know this. ï¿½8) Patents were created by Royal courts as a way to grant political favors. http://en.wikipedia.org... Pro tries to blame government intervention on capitalists because they cause it. A profit-seeker is not a capitalist. A capitalist is someone who respects other's negative rights. 9) a) Extend. There isn't a fundamental conflict between Pro's society and capitalism. He hasn't explained why we can't go live in his villages voluntarily. b) Pro says you don't need money to trade. My point was that money allows people who have no social bonds to trade, vastly enhancing our connectivity and division of labor.