Excelente mercado, este das camisetas com os dizeres “O Capitalismo Morreu”

I’ll start again our discussion, and try to be more clear.

I do not think capitalism makes people moral, neither that it prevents the ugly side of human nature to emerge. To advance my conclusion, the difference between a freer society and a less free one rests always upon the question of the existence and shape of coercitive monopoly.

People are not robots, they can choose and then act. It is not to say that they will always think before acting. But since we cannot ever predict the direction and intensity of irrational actions, the only thing a scholar or a philosopher can do is to try to conform to the laws of logic and ethics, the two sciences that allows the improvement of communication and social cooperation.

Without communication there is no social cooperation, and the inverse is generaly true (lies are only possible because genneraly people do not lie).

In order to judge if a system will allow more or less social cooperation (the suposed goal of political systems) one must pay attention to what the incentives are to rationaly acting people. And to study these incentives one must know the laws of economics, which is the science that delves into the causes and consequences of people acting with the purpose of rationaly exploring scarce resources.

That’s why the democratic liberalism is the most efficient, I’m not saying moral, way of producing wealth to date: it has the best incentives to individuals in their pursuit of material allocation of resources. If you work more, you earn more, if you risk your money in productive projects you profit, if you excell in your field you receive more help. In a freer society, individuals are free to pursuit their goals, to the extent that it does not thread on the rights of other individuals. Individuals are free to be cab drivers, and there is no central authority to decide how many cab drivers should exist in one city. Individuals are free to start mobile companies, and there is no rule deciding how many comanies should exist in one country.

That’s not to say that’s THE best way of producing wealth (I myself am an anarchist, but will not defend it in this commentary).

We had some examples of democratic liberalism in the Europe of the late XVIIIth early XIXth century, and we can see that the statistics of life expectancy and access to products and services skyrocketed during this period. But since then the ocidental countried tended to the development of a democratic corporatism, and the blame cannot be imposed on the division of labor, nor in the accumulation of capital, nor in the pursuit of material confort. It is a social phenomena that draws its causes in psychology, history, culture and other fields that cannot be contained by an economic system. People sometimes act irrationaly.

The nature of the democratic system is built with the intention of giving people the power to change the rules of society through the election of individual representatives which will govern the central monopoly of force and justice. From then on any individual that does not comply with that authority will be at the mercy of the authority’s discretion of how much threat or violence use to make the individual comply. It is not hard to see that the incentive is for the representative individual to use this monopoly to make many individuals comply with their personal views or desires. That’s what happens all over the world, and I know that India is no different.

Naturally the economic powers in place side with the political powers in place to benefit from each other’s strenghts: the economic powers provide a continuous flow of resources through taxation, and the political power provide a continuous flow of regulations and protection from competitors. And voila, that’s corporatism. Different from capitalism, corporatism is a political system, and it is NOT moral. Unprivileged individuals do not have the power to change the rules of the democratic system in place.

Even if there were no significative accumulation of capital in the society, there would still be some people with more access to resources than other, be it by geographical proximity, be it by superior knowledge, and the incentives to the concentration of political power in a democratic system would be the same.

So, as I said in the beggining, a ferer society relies less in monopolies.

The main incentives for social cooperation of capitalism can be resumed like this: In order to accumulate reasources, A works hard, saves and is allowed by society to keep what’s his by right; A take risks and employs his saved resources in the production of something that people will want and there is no or inferior competitors; A produces better or cheaper; consumers reward A by voluntarily exchanging their saved resources with A’s product; A continues to prosper unitll he has failed to achieve the consumer’s satisfaction.

Consumer satisfaction is the true “democratic” system. You don’t need complicated system of regulations and what nots: this is only usefull for real conflicts. Monopolies corrupts this system, they do not need to satisfy consumers in order to stay alive, they will be kept profiting by law and force.

Discussions of how capitalism inevitably leads to corporatism, how feudalism inevitably leads to capitalism, and the pletora of “historicismical” predictions are, using the adjective you used to uncharmingly (otherwise I appreciate discussing with you) attack my view, simplistic and thoughoutly useless. A society’s future is made of imprevisible components, and I think it is best to live now with more material confort, than less.

viaExcelente mercado,….


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