Book: Moral Calculations by Lazslo Mero

I just finished this book and it's the nuts and probably would be a big hit among the likes of minds that hang around 2+2.


It's not a humor book, not by the longest stretch, but it does have one little gem worth sharing:


The basis of capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and with socialism it's just the opposite.


Tommy

The basis of capitalism is the induction of cooperation by withholding and granting claims on propery (whether you call it "several" property or "private" property). Without a moral framework that enables you to deny or grant something to your fellow man, the only means of acquiring cooperation is force.


Through several property, each man has a handle, and a check, on the aims and ambitions of others. Through the price system, each man has a telecommunications system by which he can discover the aims of others, and harness them to realize his own aims better than he could acting on his own.


Through capitalism, the greatest possible realization of human aims by each person, through choices between alternative activities, and not at the expense but to the benefit of other people, is discovered. Capitalism is the only information-dissemination mechanism by which individual people can figure out how to dovetail their plans with the needs and wants of 10 billion faceless strangers.


eLROY

As an aside, I recently visited a web-site at lucifer.com.


The proprietors held to the illusion that a moral framework can be designed - calculated in effect - as a product of human reason.


But the system encompassing multiple human beings is so complex that no individual can foresee, analyze - or therefore choose between - the consequences of his "alternative" moral behaviors.


All efforts at moral calculation throughout history have merely deteriorated into the application of force by leaders, on minorities, in response to least-common-denominator mob aims. Moreover, the mob calculation was irrational, so their aims were not realized even at the expense of the lives of minorities!


No amount of human reason can ever calculate how to coordinate and intertwine human activites for maximum mutual gain. Moreover, the only morals which survive are those which, in no foreseeable way, promote the survival of the society which transmits them.


So, for instance, "Don't be fruitful, and don't multiply" is a conceivable "calculation." But it can probably never be a "moral."


eLROY

It must be the faceless part that makes it so easy for capitalists to exploit people for their own profit, continually denying those that do the work of the world adequate health care, livable wages, etc..


Workers of the world unite.


KJS

That's just the point, you silly.


It is impossible to weigh the value of work - and determine what is "the work of the world" and what isn't - without capitalism.


Capitalism is just a way for remote people whom you can't see, often with different skin colors, to tell you how much they value what you are doing.


And what is "adequate" health care, and what is a "livable" wage?


Because if we are going to have to take a popular vote to define what this is, you are going to have to suck a lot of dicks in the political establishment before they even let you live!


Would you rather have capitalists tell you what to do and where to work, what to plant - and then pay you for it and let you buy whatever you want - or would you rather have politicians tell you where to stand and when to speak - and then just lock you in prison anyway, on a whim.


The saddest thing is that you measure the results of capitalism using the yardstick of Western Christian morals. In Africa, forget human dignity, people are lucky just to be alive.


As I said in a series of posts in the "stocks" forum, the principle achievement of capitalism is to help enough people to survive childbirth that they grow up to be whiners. You would prefer a world, quite simply, where with no means of survival, factory workers were simply never born.


Meanwhile, these people whom lazy, upper-middle-class intellectuals are training to be whiners, are risking their lives are drowning just to get here, from places like Cuba - where healthcare is free and nobody is "forced" to work.


The main reason you despise capitalism is because, as a communications mechanism, it is the messenger telling you how worthless the product of your mind really is.


POOR PEOPLE DON'T WANT YOUR EMPTY PROMISES OF A UTOPIA, THEY'D RATHER HAVE A JOB!


So yes, poverty is our way of telling a million starving dirtbags somewhere we don't really need them. But nobody's asking them to show up for a single grain of rice - seems more like THEY WANT TO!


The moment where socialism stops starving people is the moment where it starts having to kill them, or cut their uteruses out, like in China. But people are not your pets.


If poor people want a chance to have kids, what business is that of yours? You would tell them it's better never to have lived then to take the opportunity to live poor.


If death is so much better, than try it yourself. The rest of us will keep springing into the world to chase after the multitudinous fruits capitalism has scattered about.


All systems support poor people, the question is just how many.


eLROY

The quote is the exact opposite of reality. Socialism exploits, capitalism does not. Capitalism does not use force to get people to produce, buy, or sell. Someday we might even try capitalism.

And no central authority can ever discover even a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the positive-sum cooperation opportunities presented through the reassignment of private property rights - such as to the product of individual labor - through the unfettered associations of atomistic individuals.


leroy

Sorry, but you are wrong.


In a true socialist model, noone would ever be exploited.


It's just getting a true socialist model to work has proved impossible thus far.


Keith

The reason socialism has never worked, and never will, is because people have no idea what to do.


So someone has to


1) figure out for them what to do, and

2) get them to do it.


But, by definition, there is no way of getting them to do it by paying them - because the worker is never given a means to communicate what he wants in return!


So with no means of discovering (and disseminating) what an individual wants - whereby his cooperation could be induced - the community (meaning the coercive authority in whom they have vested coercive powers) has no option but to tell someone "You're going to do this, and take what you get, and like it."


The only reason it cannot accurately be termed "exploitation" is because, for it to be so, somebody somewhere would actually have to somehow get what he wants at the end of all the misery. And apart from a few elites for a brief period, that never happens.


eLROY