The Expanding World of Poverty Capitalism
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
BTW, PSA: an out-of-state driver in NY caught speeding can be subjected to an additional >$300 "safe driving assurance" (or some rot) fee, paid to ensure said driver is not arrested outright next time discovered (for any reason) driving in the state. No 3rd-party services/mechanisms involved, just straight-up legal extortion which, per the lead article's premise, hits the poor harder than the better-off.
If you look close you can see some hidden pernicious issues with it. Fundamentally it means that the state can be really mean to the poor and not impact the better off. Penalties that one can buy their way out of can even to an extent encourage lawbreaking.
If you think that large punitive fines are a useful disincentive to crime (whether that's true or not depends on several factors, but for people living paycheck to paycheck and in deep debt, probably not), fine, argue that. But that's a separate issue. So far as I can tell, there's no policy argument for making people for their own surveillance, if what you're concerned about is improving social outcomes.
Speeding ticket. Want to keep it off your mandatory insurance so your rates don't go up? We have an online school where you can learn to not be a speeder. It'll cost you a couple hundred on top of the fine and administration fees.
When the system that rips me off daily offers me the option to get ripped off in a small way to avoid getting ripped off in a big way, I don't feel like I'm really SAVEing.
Also note that you can get away with taking the anti-speeding class only once. It's a one-time deal they offer you, mostly as a warning. It's not a continuous stream of revenue for the party administering the fee.
If the intent were really to penalize and disincentivize then punishment would need to be relative, e.g., your speeding ticket would need to be a percentage of your last annual income.
Given so many do, I'm unsurprised governments seek to increase enforcement & stakes, given limited resources. (malum prohibitum a separate issue.)
Writing on the editorial pages of the Times, he knows he is reaching a primarily liberal audience. He is writing in the context of Democratic political campaigning against big corporations about the financial meltdown, growing income inequality, poor job growth coincident with record corporate profits, and tax shenigans like inversions.
In short, he's speaking to an audience that tends to be suspicious of businesses larger than the local grocer, and that has already been whippped up in that direction for several years now.
So: he frames his pet issue in those terms, in order to get the maximum response from the audience. (It's also why he name-drops several Republicans, despite the fact that these fees are charged in localities controlled by either party).
Seen objectively, the issue is not actually with capitalism, since one of the major examples of fees hitting the poor are municipal court fees--which don't go to private companies at all. They are directly assessed by the local government to pay government expenses. But they're still hurting the poor. NPR had a great story about it recently:
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee...
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/08/fer...
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/04/deb...
I'd rather my taxes cover the true cost of the court system and the courts focus on reforming individuals rather than cost recovery.
I do agree that you shouldn't go to prison just for not paying your court fees, but if you drive drunk or sell drugs on the street I am not crying for you.
Only if those people persist in committing crimes.
So yes, "only if these people persist in committing crimes", but the government is making it harder on them to get their life back together after committing the 1st crime.
Alas, human nature is such that making it easy "to get their life back together after committing the 1st crime" decreases the incentive to do so. The main point of sentencing is to discourage recidivism.
I'm concerned about a subculture normalizing crimes, 1st or subsequent. Objecting to punishment with zero consideration of the cause thereof facilitates the underlying problem.
[citation needed]
This goes back to prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan supporting it to antagonise Irish Catholics.
When big business are in cahoots with government, to good or bad effect (usually bad) it's Corporatism, not Capitalism.
When businesses are in cahoots with each other it's called cartels.
Lets not pretend there is some pure version of capitalism that isn't tied to some special interest.
This is not a disagreement with you, by the way. But just as Rawlsian liberals can't postulate a government that's immune to corruption into existence, libertarians and market fundamentalists can't postulate businesses that don't co-opt government to entrench their market positions.
The less powerful the government, the less power there is to be had by co-opting it.
The less powerful ANY organization the less power. It's not exclusive to governments.
Not a monopoly. No real harm either. If you want to complain about where the money went after the transactions were made, that's another subject.
You're so set on arguing with me. I think it's best if you sat down.
There's nothing wrong with calling yourself libertarian and supporting some sentimentalized conservative version of government, but government by definition violates the "non-aggression principle".
I don't disagree with you either, in fact you've really only restated what I said.
You can't define your way out of that.
If you are trying to promote some sort of ancap/libertarian approach lets just stop here that view is in my mind as naive as a communist view and there is no basis for those kind of moral claims.
Again you can't define your way out of this.
It seems that many of the bad things which occur are ascribed to capitalism, when they should be attributed to the mixed (or socialist) economy we actually inhabit in the west.
The things that you are calling 'socialism' are the products of democracy.
A good line in the sand would be: whenever a government spends more of its revenue on social transfers than on the legislative, military, and judicial branches combined, it's either a blended or a socialist form of government.
No, lobbying is something intrinsic to any representative system. What can be tackled is the flow of money - once it's accepted that money isn't speech.
I think the original definition originated sometime in the 19th century, probably from Marx, and it meant the actual, real world system (this is different from communism, which designated an ideal).
I always understood it as an economic system based on two characteristics:
1. Private ownership of capital.
2. Labor as a market commodity.
I think these two aptly describe both 19th century and current economic systems, and I don't think this implies anything about symbiosis (or lack of thereof) between government and business.
Addendum: Maybe you mean free market, which, in my view, is a different thing. At least because it, like communism, describes an ideal, not an factually existing system (I am not aware of sufficiently closed economic system which could be considered to be a free market).
"Pay this fee to a 3rd party or you go to jail" isn't.
When one is dependent on "their minds & muscles", what that actually means is that they are forced to work in government approved income activities(nothing illegal) or face imprisonment or death. That doesn't sound much like liberty to me. On the other hand, those with enough passive equity no longer need to work in government approved activities provided by the asset class, and very much do enjoy the benefits of liberty.
That said, it is very obvious to are tied to an ideology(likely because it benefits you a great deal personally), and I won't spend any more time trying to enlighten you.
The original definition was prior to that, first used by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in a positive, anti-feudalist sense.
Those two are components of Capitalism, but by no means is is inclusive of the concept of central governance. When banks are centralised, they aren't privately owned.
When the money and currency itself is printed and distributed by a central regime, it isn't private. So when the value itself isn't private, then ownership of capital isn't private.
The terminology to best describe this hybrid of centralised ownership of currency and labor and partial free-markets are better described as 'Corporatism' or to be more brutal an 'Oligarchy'.
I think you're wrong. I looked around the Internet and it really seems that the word "capitalism" originated from "capitalist", first used by Marx in Communist Manifesto.
See e.g. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1005122700456
(I would be interested to see exact quote from Turgot, that uses the word.)
What you describe was called "economic freedom" or "economic liberalism". And I already said that, when I mentioned "free market". Markets obviously are prerequisite for capitalism, but they don't have to be free in this sense.
In the same way that the USSR wasn't communism. Does that matter if it's the result when you don't just deal with spherical humans in a vacuum?
(Technically, it should be called fascism, since it's the binding together (fasces) of government and business in an unholy union.)
But the big people in charge (or at least with connections) forcing the little people to send them resources? That's a pattern far older than the notion of capital investments, and dates back to our early primate days, before our most basic notions of investing in the future through things like, say, agriculture. So I say it's pretty much orthogonal to capitalism.
This sounds like feudalism to me, though I know the word has negative connotations, and is now associated only with the distant past.
The idea that communism or socialism is free from this kind of thing is ridiculous.
Oh, sorry, I was referring to the problems specifically described in the article, not to "the idea of making people pay for their own punishment" in any general sense. I should have been more clear about that, or maybe you should be more careful about setting up straw men.
Is that legal/constitutional?
Because a good number of their subjects failed to survive the administrations, these costs were often extracted from their family and relatives, retroactively.
On the director's commentary track for Brazil, Terry Gilliam notes that the inquisition's practice of charging fees for their (in)justice was one of the major ideas when honing the script and the storyboard.
"This new system of offender-funded law enforcement creates a vicious circle: The poorer the defendants are, the longer it will take them to pay off the fines, fees and charges; the more debt they accumulate, the longer they will remain on probation or in jail; and the more likely they are to be unemployable and to become recidivists."
http://www.amazon.com/Run-Fugitive-Fieldwork-Encounters-Disc...
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fee...
Sooner or later this has to end. I just hope it's not too violent when it does.
Tens of millions of people are without healthcare, getting their homes taken away and are unable to provide for their families.
To put it bluntly, they're desperate.
Also, America has a history of violence, an armed populace and a "I'll take what's mine" foundational attitude.
Combine desperate people with a history of violence, and you get Ferguson, New Orleans, etc. etc.
No doubt other science fiction authors and directors have tacked this topic as well.