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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Where do you get that from?
Government has been around for millennia and it has mainly been about security - not being invaded - than economic freedom
It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.
"Natural state" is not a very useful predicate because, even if you can define it (what hominid and what period) first you need to define poverty unambiguously.
But I'll bite. If we settle on stone age, in my very humble opinion, poverty is a natural state. Someone can argue that paleo people were happy or in harmony with nature or whatever, but then they were at the mercy of elements, diseases and wars. That's poverty to me.
It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.
This seems a description of a lawless society. By the way, law of the jungle is the natural state. Property law is a cornerstone of civilization.
GP specifically mentioned property law.
>Property law is a cornerstone of civilization.
This is a dubious claim, but I believe GP is specifically referring to property rights and law under capitalism, which until quite recently in human history was not the cornerstone of civilization. Property law worked much differently in pre-capitalist societies, and through the enclosures in Western Europe and imperialism off the continent, it is by no means a stretch to declare it as originating in violence and requiring a monopololy on violence by the state to continue to exist.
'If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.'
Exactly.
"...capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
This is a way to look at things as useless as the "natural state" thing, and for the same reason: it's looking back, not forward. It's condemning the money and the production means as evil because of their origin, not their usefulness.
It's far more interesting to look at how societies evolve when you tweak the rules. It turns out that the results of abolishing capitalism are not pretty.
What do we mean by default? Would we say that the default state of a child is surviving without their mother? Is a lack of breast milk or shelter the default? I can easily imagine a situation (I.e. a functioning society) in which poverty is not the default.
If poverty is defined to mean having below a certain daily wage[0], then how is that "default"? Do we mean absolute or relative poverty? Just like default settings in your favourite program presuppose the program itself, it seems poverty presupposes a system where some people make above $<poverty threshold> a day and some do not.
To say that poverty is the 'default' without also specifying to whom and in which society it is the default is either useless information, or an apparently irrelevant claim that only concerns some cases in the early stages of human pre-civilization.
[0] Beware that if you disagree with this supposition, you lose the ability to claim that statistics which use increase in daily wage indicate moving out of poverty. The case for saying that capitalism does away with poverty depends on this definition of poverty.
You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default. A machine's default state isn't being powered, but if you power up a machine and keep feeding it power and maintain it well, you can rely on it being powered. Once you stop maintaining it, or stop providing power, it will go back to the default state of not being powered.
> Do we mean absolute or relative poverty?
Absolute if you want to get anywhere. Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median.
They have changed the default from the perspective of an individual in that society, or if the society is large enough to encompass the majority of people, they have changed the default even more. The default state in the abstract sense is not only poverty, but the struggle against a state of non-privation through human labour.
>Unless you distribute everything perfectly equal, you'll always have one half that makes less than the median.
Nobody is denying this fact, and no serious philosopher (with the exception of Barbon in the 18th century) contends that "distributing everything perfectly equal" is possible or even desirable.
What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us? What is its rhetorical function?
Any individual may perceive it to be the default because they've never experienced anything else, but it would be foolish to believe it to be the actual default. History has taught us over and over again that it's not, that civilization may crumble and advances can be lost. Like somebody relying on their car always working because "it never died on me before" and not maintaining it well, they will eventually find that suddenly it does.
> What is "poverty is the default" supposed to be telling us?
I believe it's an important fact, because it changes the perspective. If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. If poverty is the default, it's the opposite: you need to do something to end it, and you need to keep doing it.
This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent on the true default of human labour and appropriating nature. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the absolute sense) doesn't provide any new information. Humans need to make things to have wealth.
>If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state.
Why is this an important point to make? Even Marx famously claimed (in defence of his theory of value) that every society must constantly maintain itself, or it will perish within a week. Others have gone further and argued that society must constantly maintain its ideology and relations of production too, not merely the fact of production. It's unclear who denies that society needs constant maintenance and improvement, even just to stay in the same state.
I'm not so sure. There are a few (more or less) "unconctacted" tribes left that are pretty stable in their environment and haven't progressed beyond a certain state that's very close to the default mode (and which we would call poverty if compared to us). I see no reason to believe in inevitable progress.
> Humans need to make things to have wealth.
That's short and correct, and it's why I think it's important to keep in mind that poverty, not wealth and comfort, is the default. It's not that anybody denies that you have to maintain and improve, but it helps to understand what came first: the effort or the reward?
I would say that on the spectrum of pure capitalism - mixed economies - complete socialism, mixed economies work best, as proven by real life.
You can even see it in our modern mixed society, everything is a voluntary transaction - minus paying taxes to the government for the "common good". A few people willing to signal their virtue will say they're happy to pay for taxes. But why not just use voluntary donations to charity? They have the added benefit of being auditable by third parties (unlike the government, which polices itself) and they have arguably less bureaucracy than a government, increasing the amount available to help whoever you're helping.
From my side, I'd love to try a society based on the Machinery of Freedom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o One can dream
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...
You don't think that today's poor are better off than stone age humans?
There is strong evidence that overall economic growth peaked at times (or places) where income taxes were higher and the distribution of wealth and income was more equitable. Of course there is the whole matter of causation/correlation, but this at least shows that a capitalist society can and does prosper when the highest tax bracket is over 80%, while trickle-down economics mostly failed to induce general growth.
I was listening to Thomas Sowell recently and he made some comments that sounded quite the opposite of what you say - that lowering taxes resulted in increased revenue. It's clearly different times and places that you / he are referring to, I am interested in learning a bit more.
There are some pretty simple arguments that would justify this: one individual with 20 times the average income is going to spend less than 20 individuals with the average income.
Note that I'm not arguing for some Soviet-level of extreme equality, I'm just saying that the US in the 60s or Sweden from WW2 onward are much healthier economies than Europe during the Belle Epoque or the US nowadays.
[0] http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2019GraphiquesTableau...
High taxation is also not capitalism given they imply threat of violence (eg. incarceration); a purely capitalist society wouldn't have taxes, it would just be a stateless free market based society with only voluntary transactions.
The defining characteristic of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. As long as that ownership isn't equally distributed, that's exploitative by definition, because profits go to owners "for free" -- the owners don't have to work for those profits. This isn't really the case if ownership is equally distributed, but then how exactly would that be distinct from socialism, i.e. the collective ownership of the means of production?
So it's plausible to suspect that those peak times of growth you talk about were successful precisely because capitalism was reined in by other policies, like those higher tax brackets leading to a more equitable (and "less capitalist") distribution of wealth and income.
It appears to assume that the company or factory concerned has always existed.
There must have been some point at which said company did not exist at first, then came into being.
The person or people who started that company were likely to have begun it by;
- performing any and all research required into starting the company
- acquiring the premises (or starting from home/garage)
- doing the work themselves
- at the same time, managing the company; running the finances, sales, gaining new customers/contacts etc.
If the company thrived, they then considered additional workforce. Perhaps they replaced themselves with these new employees to take on a more managerial position. So now you have a person or people who are concentrating on the managerial/sales/contacting/financing side. And now the company has additional employees.
The company has provided employment to more than just the person or people who initially started that company.
I do not agree that is "exploitative". Nor do I agree that the profits are going to the company owners "for free" - the owners are still performing work in the company. It's only the nature of that work (i.e. the tasks which need to be performed in order to keep that company going) that are different.
I own shares of companies both directly and indirectly. Because of this ownership, I receive a (small) part of those companies' profits. I don't have to do anything to receive that profit -- I do get it for free.
(And yes, I'm a partial owner here because I didn't spend some money I earned in the past on other things instead. But why exactly should I be rewarded for that? It's far from obvious, and the usual rationalizations all have weaknesses. Keep in mind that many people who receive such profits didn't work for them at all: they inherited the ownership.)
I had thought that in relatively rich[4] countries, providing air (minutes) for everyone would be trivial, providing water (days) easy, and providing food (weeks) something that would require something less than 5% of the population labouring under slightly altered habits[5].
However, by mid summer it has become painfully obvious that not only did some rich countries shut off water to their citizens, there has even been an infamous case of someone being deprived of air.
Now I am much less optimistic about climate change than I was last year.
[1] considering only physiological needs
[2] based on the chinese curves. It seems to have also been accurate for us.
[3] In practice, we didn't even "lock down", relying more on shared responsibility, and managed to get new cases to single digits per day. Unfortunately we're now in a (smaller, at least for the time being) second wave.
[4] For concreteness, consider those whose net worth exceeds GDP by at least a factor of 4.
[5] This was before I learned that food processing elsewhere is done in much more crowded conditions than here.
Q. Why is trickle down economics like UDP?
A. One might attempt to joke about either, but very few are likely to get it.