Comment Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score 1) 944
So all those European countries with socialized public services and high tax rates to pay for them, you know, the ones that rate highest on the happiness index and life satisfaction studies, the ones with thriving standards of living, just don't exist? Norway? Sweden? The Netherlands? Finland? No guns, no violence, no pogroms, none of that at all.
Tyrants and despots CLAIM to be following certain philosophies all the time, and then warp the language of them to their own ends. Communism and socialism don't include anything about mass murder, repression, and starvation, any more than democracy and capitalism do (but we're doing our best). It's happening right now here in America. When people in other countries argue for capitalism and democracy, they make this same argument, BTW...that people shouldn't judge capitalism or democracy from how the US goes about it.
On top of this, both Smith and Marx were laboring under a false idea of what humans are like. People need to stop acting like these theories are religions, or anything more than a set of philosophical ideas these people developed...they are no more handed down by the Powers That Be than any other philosophical system. Economics is only a science the way playing chess is a science...because we are playing a game by a set of rules that we decided upon and certain possibilities are inherent to that game. But those games are seriously flawed. We don't make choices for rational, economic reasons, workers don't have the luxury of refusing to work when the "price" offered by the bosses is too low because life, and the lives of one's family, are more important to just about anyone than making the right min/max calculation.
So long as this is true, so long as workers are not able to refuse en masse to "sell" their labor at a given price, thus driving the price up, the promised equilibrium of capitalism will never, ever occur. Similarly, Marx's vision of a state that dissolves itself after the transition to his "communist utopia" is complete, doesn't account for the irrational desire to hoard wealth and power *despite* the fact that this hoarding ends up hamstringing the entire system one is "wealthy" within. Neither utopia will ever come, neither set of equilibriums will ever obtain, because the systems were designed for a different sort of animal than us.
What we need is a new theory of economics that takes into account the irrational creatures we are. It needs to take into account our tendencies for cognitive biases and fallacies, it needs to take into account short-sighted and irrational greed, it needs to make sure that at no point one side of the exchange of wealth, labor or capital, holds all the power and choice, thus destroying the possibility of equitable exchanges of wealth throughout the system.
It's just a game. We broke this one. We can make a new one. A better one.