Maybe we do, although given the complexity of the systems involved even small differences in how we weight the minority interests could end up leading to a completely different “right” answer for a lot of questions. That’s the other part of this that is challenging for me, I see cases all the time where two thoughtful intelligent people can look at the same data or situation and see completely different “right” solutions, and while one of them is actually right and the other is actually wrong which is which often depends on information that is not fully known and it comes down to who makes the better assumptions. Whenever people have certainty about their personal assumptions it bothers me, because it demonstrates that they don’t understand the difference between a fact and an assumption that they believe strongly to be true

What’s the fundamental difference that makes China communist but he US capitalist in your mind?

Because as far as I can tell both countries operate in systems where the government owns some of the means of production but private businesses own others. The amount of regulation exercised by the government in both countries varies by industry and by company, and in both countries the state has the unilateral right to seize and appropriate all privately owned property any time they want. It’s hard for me to see a systemic difference in how the economies are structured that would cause me to define the US as capitalist and China as communist

I think Herbie has too readily conceded that "capitalism contributes to global warming". It seems clear that industrialization, whether capitalistic or socialistic, is the culprit.

It is not clear how social control of the means of production yields a more enlightened, sensible, or measured approach to the consequences of the requirement of near-term efficiency than a more atomized formulation of control.

You also have to contend with the potential problem of incongruent goals.

I love Herbie so
Purposely obtuse birdman
Gets owned constantly

So my belief that capitalism contributes to global warming is due to the aforementioned (and lampooned) belief that businesses occupy a position of power that is in some cases oppositional to the interests of the government and has the ability to influence the government to advance those interests. In cases where polluting more yields cost and or productivity advantages those companies will in many cases work to prevent the government from regulating that pollution in a way that harms their business

Whether this problem would be greater or smaller in a communist system is not necessarily certain, but my general feeling is that it would be less of an issue because the power of individual businesses to influence the government would be lessened, but I could be wrong

The correct axis of distinction is centralization/decentralization of economic direction.

The public/private distinction is a semantic quagmire.

I’m also kinda using “the government” as either or both the theoretical “state” that acts in accordance with the theoretical ideals of government and/or the actual government as it exists in the real world which is.......not that, so some of these arguments are kinda murky due to my lack of precision in terms

I’m not sure the situation is any more clear using your criteria than using the ones I outlined, but I need to think some more on that

And I seem to be repeating words a lot within my posts which annoys me but I do that in conversation too *shrug*

There was a revolution in China were the peasants and proles took control of the government and established a Marxist political party so that the "government control" you are talking about are completely different things in each case. The party educates its people differently, promotes Marxism, develops 5 years plans, not to mention the intentional incorporation and invocation of communist language and rhetoric in their governing documents etc. Moreover, China has much much much more state control of its economy, especially its largest businesses, than the United States. Lastly the role that finance capital plays in the economy of each country is vastly different. This is a decent article to check out if you want to get a better idea of what is going on in China and why they are socialist:

https://medium.com/@wolf.aldrich/thr...a-7056e40b40f3

I already pointed you to some resources that explain this. "It is not clear" to you, but it is clear to anyone who is interested in learning why.

So you are saying that exxon, which has extremely centralized control of fossil fuel resources is the same as PDVSA which is the state controlled petroleum company in Venezuela? lol come on IANAW

Yeah perhaps you are right. The very idea of looking at a country's GDP to gauge the "success" of its economy is anathema to me. So yeah maybe there is a value difference.

Shareholder dividends spur investment in short-term profiteering, but this is only a consequence of our current financial market regulation; it is not a necessary feature of "private" ownership.

The great value of "mixed" capitalism is that public influence can be exerted upon the field of variant actors, jointly bent towards a predetermined, ~unified goal, without a closed prescription of method that would preclude creative development towards said goal.

I’m clearly not the only one mixing theoretical and real world governments in the thread

Venezuela has 3 oil companies


US has 177?


** reread: I have no idea what point you are trying to make here.

I understand where you're coming from, but you have to admit "I may know things which I don't want to argue with you about" is kind of a non-starter, conversationally. Even if by design.

Anyway, I've also had moments where I'm like "damn it's ironic that birdman lectures people on being ideological", and I think I can relate to the demands you want to make of him conversationally, but you're probably asking too much. It works better to just engage in conversation where you want to do so and pass over the rest in silence. I'm not sure what response anyone can expect from someone when they tell them "you're wrong but I'm not interested in talking about it." I mean I have the same thought all the time, it's just not useful to say it :P

(also please indulge me my predilection for engaging in meta-conversations about how to have conversations :P)

Herbie, fwiw, this is the guy you are debating.

So I’m not trying to be obtuse here, but as far as I can tell this all boils down to two things (since we had one of those revolution things too it was just longer ago

1. They call themselves communists and we call ourselves capitalists
2. The Chinese government chooses to use the power it has differently in practice than our government does

I’m still not seeing the actual systemic differences or power differences that would allow me to delineate one from the other in a purely theoretical way or even in a way that will necessarily be true tomorrow instead of just being true right now

Did you see this part of the article:

No reason not to trust Puerto Rican government

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crim...707-story.html

I just felt like someone needed to be the voice of the proletariat here and attempt to foment a revolution against our POG politics thread Bourgeoisie overlords

Yes