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Originally Posted by kahljorn
I read your posts to stave off boredom, but they were interesting. I feel we agree on a few things from what you've stated, and if you realize where I'm coming from you'll see there's some similarities.
Me: "Business in america seems to have no loyalty to america, nor to their employees and consumers. They are so focused on the money and less on delivering their product." (for clarity)
You: "Your comments are exactly what stands in the way of the problem as you see it."
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Once again, you are hitting the nail on the head.
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Originally Posted by kahljorn
How is that standing in the way of Businesses making shitty products? Is it wrong to expect quality out of business? What is the point in doing business in the first place if you're not receiving what you need? Then it becomes something more akin to stealing. Well sir I'll give you five buffalo nickles for a dollar.
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Business exists to make money. That is it's primary function. I know me saying that is producing a very negative reaction in you right now, but I want to encourage you to see the bigger picture here, kahl.
You, as a consumer, are much less likely to purchase products from a company that you know treats it's employees badly or that has a reputation for shitty products. Maybe you watch out for businesses that have a reputation for harming the environment. There's a whole lot of negative criterion you could apply to any one or all of your purchasing decisions. In addition, you also apply positive criterion to those same decisions, to reward businesses for doing whatever it is you might value.
In this way, you are exactly like any average consumer. We all do that stuff, and we all weight the same set of criterion in different ways. I think it's pretty safe to say that the vast majority of consumers have very similar weighting tactics for their purchases, in fact. On average, by and large, most of us want cheap, defective knock-offs of good products that were developed largely by an entirely random and wholly unrelated process of raping monkeys and sold to us by unbathed indentured servants from the third world.
Well, that may be more comedic overstatement than a valid point, but it goes to motive, Your Honor.
What do you think would happen if we ALL got together and decided none of us would buy any more products from Wal-Mart? That's right: They'd go out of business the very next day. We have not yet done that. "We" shop there. I'm not making any personal statements about Wal-Mart, as I have no personal problem with what they are doing. It's not that I favor all of their commercial practices, it's just that I recognize that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
They are delivering the maximum value possible to their stockholders. PERIOD. That is their only job. When they put a pickle company out of business by letting them agree to a badly conceived contract, I blame the pickle company for not doing THEIR job. When they abuse eminent domain legislation and use the power and greed of government to take Farmer Johnson's family plot away from him in order to erect yet another big concrete box entirely unuseable to anyone after the big box fad passes I do not blame them... I blame the government for being greedy and WAY too powerful. Well, I actually blame you for everything the government does. It too is only just doing what it is supposed to do. It was your job to limit it.
When Wal-Mart hands it's employees brochures advertising government healthcare solutions available to them in lieu of corporate benefits, how can I blame them? It's there. It's free! Why spend a bunch of money providing something for them they can get elsewhere at no cost to them or Wal-Mart? That would only hurt their stockholders, which would be a violation of the Golden Rule of business.
To further complicate my example, I will now compare business as I'm describing it to a gun. It actually makes sense to do so...
Any normal, right-thinking, Red-Blooded American son or daughter of God knows that the gun was invented and then enshrined into our Constitution for one purpose: The Protection of our Lives and Property. By suggesting that we change the nature of business into something less possibly dangerous, you might as well be suggesting that we change the nature of the legal gun so as to only shoot flowers and sunshine.
Good luck protecting your family with your new pussy gun... and good luck making a living at a company that avoids it's primary responsibility for any sort of reason. When you violate any of your principles, you doom all of your associated efforts. I have worked for companies that followed alternate paths of altruism. I just does not ever work. The employees, customers and their stockholders will always destroy them. THAT's what's happening to the American automakers and airlines.
However... and there's always a catch... if a company changes it's policies to be more altruistic and something more like virtuous because they see a desire within their consumer base for such a move, it will be rewarded for it's actions with the only thing it cares about
: Profit. To do anything else would be bad business, or bad capitalism.
Union labor used to be a big selling point among American consumers, so companies abused themselves with it willingly. Unfortunately for them, and us, unions used government to their favor and our detriment, and THAT, dear kahl, is 90% of your problem with Ford. As our automakers and airlines restructure themselves in the coming years, bet against unions. Bet on profit.
Businesses also have been known to use the awesome power of government to entrench themselves within markets that measures of their profitablity alone would not allow. Look at the Oracle and Apple inspired anti-trust cases against Microsoft of just a few years ago for a good example there, but that's not the only or even best exhibit of such bad business available to us... only the most likely memorable.
Please don't take my use of that case as some sort of admission that I respect Microsoft, though... I believe them also to be guilty of much bad business, though also the victim of it. Microsoft had it's origins in pure capitalism, though it's history since has been a collage of crap they really should not have been allowed to get away with... BY YOU. I don't look to government to fix problems caused by me or you because I recognize that government is not responsible for that. You and I are.
Now, that being said, I can expect a little help from the government that I employ in these endeavors, can't I? I believe so.
What I would like to see is a government less actively involved in the overt management of commerce and more actively engaged in helping us make better informed decisions, whatever our collective criterion.
How so, you might ask? Oversight instead of Regulation.
Let me explain: What if you were able to go to a government website that allowed you to view, for example, every record of every company in regard to it's compliance with current environmental standards. What if you could cross reference that data with similar records concerning labor practices and the countries of orgin of the raw materials used to manufacture the end products of these companies?
You and I could be sitting around discussing how to weight all this data in our purchasing decisions, instead of arguing theory based in ignorance and untruths.
Were I to be looking to buy a Big Screen or a new car, I think I'd like that. My question is: Why do we support a government that would rather keep us in the dark on such valuable information in favor of a system where it has the power and opportunities to blur this data however it chooses in such a way as to actually encourage companies to "play the game" rather than submit to our actual desires?
Rather than continue on this diatribe, let me instead respond a bit more to what you were actually talking about....
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Originally Posted by kahljorn
"I believe our primary responsibility in life, as individuals, is to be happy."
How can you be happy with big business fucking everyone over? How can you be happy when there's people in america starving(and elsewhere, as you said), while they have plenty of money. Then when they shaft people out of jobs to move to another so they can pay cheaper wages (so they can have more money to themselves) you say they are helping starving people? Do you think this is a good trend to continue? Do you think it will somehow help the world?
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Now that I've rambled on for a bit, accidentally responding to most of this, let me address one new point you just brought up: Specifically, your mistaken assumption that there are jobs enough for everyone in the world.
In one way, you are right, but you are mostly wrong in your premise. Let's just say you didn't know just how you were right, so I'm not giving you credit for it...
As it stands, the kinds of jobs available in the world are very limited. American politicians, working for bad capitalists, have made sure that all our manufacturing, assembly and agricultural jobs were well protected for many decades past the point where such protection was bad for all of us. America has always been known as the Mecca of innovation. Whether it was getting you to work on time, cooking your dinner or blowing your shit up, Americans have always been your go-to guy for the newest, fastest and most efficient way to do so.
That's what we do.
Now, you want a bunch of factory workers to show up on time and dilligently maintain standards of quality? Check out Germany or Japan, man. They got that shit going on. Prefer style over function? You should see what's happening over there in Italy and France. You want it done cheaper, at the cost of quality and performance? Mexico, China and India are waiting, Sir. Not cheap enough? Two words: Thailand.
Now, though that's approximately the situation as it currently exists, it won't always be so. In the 50's, products of Japanese manufacture were regarded as something similar to what you might expect to purchase in today's former Soviet states. Basically, crap... excluding Vodka, of course. In a similar way, when you factor in for time, one day we may be looking to the steppes of mother Russia herself for our agricultural or manufacturing needs... and maybe one day, India might be the fountainhead for technological innovation. Who can tell?
What I do know is that we all need to stick to what we do best right now. Isn't that what we expect of each other as individuals? If your best friend was intent on being the next Picasso despite his color-blindness and complete lack of anything close to talent, wouldn't you be being the best friend you could be by encouraging him to find another career path?
I see only enough room in a healthy, modern America for only two types of worker, save the obligatory though entirely necessary local manufacturers and assemblers: The highly paid but incredibly focused innovator and the service provider. There is enough of that to do for all of us, and it focuses us on what we do best as a country. If you don't quite get that, let me know and I'll answer your questions, but for the sake of time and pithity, I'll move on...
To be very specific, the help desk jobs we've so far "outsourced" to India SHOULD be there, as long as the service quality doesn't violate the Golden Rule of business we've previously discussed. WHY should we forcibly retain them HERE if we can get these services at the same quality at a lower cost? Your answer, as I see it, would be that Americans can earn money filling this need, so we should give them these jobs based on that alone.
Have you stopped to consider it might be better for those Americans to be doing something more "American?" Sure, they'd need more and better education to be small business owners, executives or scientists, but shouldn't you be pointing at our own government's motivations and, ahem, government run education system when you start to play your blame game?
Quote:
Originally Posted by kahljorn
Please tell me how. Is your definition of globalization, then, to make the entire world an upper-low class? Or lower middle-class? Let me ask you a question here, are the wages they are paying to the people in other countries really that good? How much of a decrease is it from our wages?
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It's a start. India is pretty much at the same place we were in our 1960's. Mexico is in our 20's or 30's. Shouldn't we be helping them to advance? I personally refuse to believe that our advantage over developing nations is that we are just temporarily ahead of them technologically. I see an unlimited future of innovation, and that we have the advantage in that regard. We will retain that advantage only by adopting a considered plan that emphasises more innovation, rather than stifling any possible competition by using our advantage as some sort of defensive measure.
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Originally Posted by kahljorn
"I tend to think that capitalism is human nature and that government is it's restirction. I like human nature, when it's healthy."
You seem to want to seperate the government and "Capitalism" when most of the most successful examples of "Capitalism" are currently a part of the government or is sharing close ties. Since when has greed and whatever diseases afflict them been a part of good human nature? Why isn't the government "Restricting" them if in your opinion the Government's responsibility is to restrict human nature(and I'm inclined to say you believe it's to restrict bad human nature)?
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Really good observation there.
You said you didn't get the difference between the capitalized and non-capitalized versions of capitalism and communism, yet you picked the right way to use Capitalism in your question.
You capitalize the word when you adopt the method as your form of government. That's pretty much why when I speak of them in terms of idealizing a future I don't capitalize them. I believe them both to be the yin and yang of human nature, and that you cannot hope to build a successful society by beginning with the exclusion of one half of who we are.
That being said, I suppose I need to address your assertion that I believe it's "the Government's responsibility is to restrict human nature." Let me be perfectly clear if not so engaging: Just as I have said that I believe it is the primary function of any commercial function to accumulate profit, I believe it is the primary function of a government to accumulate power. Commerce and government are two of the three pillars of human society, the third being religion, which exists to accumulate truth, ideally.
Imagine two 2D circles existing on parallel planes, separated by three equidistant supporting columns. The lower circle is the realm of the individual, but the circle itself represents all of us, working as a group. The upper circle represents our civilization and all of our accomplishments as a whole. To support whatever we hope to achieve most effectively, we utilize these three constructs to maximum effect.
In commerce, cash is the medium of exchange. Power is the currency of politics, and within the pillar of religion, we speak in terms of truth. In no way can any of our current systems be said to be operating purely, of course... We have yet to adequately define their parameters and task them, y'know... One of the cornerstones of American government ,though, is the separation of state from religion, and with good reason! What happens when you establish an exchange rate between the currencies of religion and that of politics and/or commerce, power and profit, respectively?
Would you choose to trade truth for cash or advantage over a rival?
How about cash for power over a rival or the public's perception of truth?
Unlimited power for cash? ...For the ability to control what people believe is true?
Unfortunately, our founding fathers were not so prescient as to include a specific wall between commerce and state, as is made obvious by even a cursory examination of the current state of economic affairs in our modern system of governance.
How does this answer the question I originally highlighted? I'm not really sure, but I hope my tangent was enlightening. I've really put a lot of work into this so far, and despite whatever misspellings and inconsistencies this diatribe will wind up containing, I don't think I'm wanting to proof-read it. I think I'm gonna just stand behind whatever happens when I press the Submit button, Ok?
You can always ask further questions, and I'll answer. Unlike most of the people you've met on message boards, I'm actually here to learn, and I LOVE to be proven to be an idiot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kahljorn
I'm not saying it's bad to be able to work towards a good life or to have to earn things, you can't expect to just have things handed to you, but on the same token you can't respect people who make it alot worse than it needs to be.
"you're basically saying that consideration for the weakest of the community is primary over consideration for the individual needs of the strongest producers..."
Do they need their excess billions that bad? Don't you mean want. I know this wasn't directed at me, but I just thought I should throw that out there.
Everything else makes me think that, at core, you are an anarchist.
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Not really. There's a fine line between anarchy and libertarianism. Basically, the line is defined by whether or not you truly would bet on human nature or not. I like people, and I trust them to strive for a better life, generally, and given the most encouragement to do so possible.
As for whether or not billionaires deserve their money, I think I've at least so far given you somewhat of a clue as to where I stand on that...