- Capitalism and Alternatives -

If your you I'm me and he's him, who are they?

Posted by: Red Deathy ( Socialist Party, Uk ) on April 15, 1999 at 17:17:41:

In Reply to: Im me and me too posted by Gee on April 15, 1999 at 11:34:07:

: With your knowledge of English history you will appreciate the scorn (born of fear) poured upon factory men by the landed gentry. If the others saw to it that men without aristocratic pretensions could rise, then which order is the present crop to stand against? That would be floggin a dead horse.

Precisely, whilst they could liberate society from aristocracy, what can tehy do now, because they are in charge, and they can't give up teh reigns of power...

: It hasnt, observe the bus and travel company in Scotland started by brother and sister (i forget the name) and the 700 other millionaires in your Times study who started off like the average Joe.

If that be Stagecoach, I hasten to add that:
1:Theya re the biggest pair of predatory monopolists you could meet, they give out free rides to drive rivals out of business, and then hike prices.
2:They have benefitted magnificently from teh asset stripping of teh British government privatising teh state run bus services.

Self made? Hardly....

:As for 'bag men', there is always a group of capable people behind those millionaires. Are those people 'bag men'? The amount of millionaires in micosoft (due to Gates contracting with writers) suggests not, even better Carnegie used to make 'pomising' employing partners (ie stock owners) and made many men rich that way (eg Frick). Those people wouldnt have been able to do it without eachother, but it is the driving force of the 'millionaire businesspeople' that makes those partnerships possible. The chicken does come before the egg.

And there are enough such millionaires who make a hell of a lot of money, off their better partners hard work. no one man can earn a million pounds...I find your hero worship and allegence to 'the great man theory of history' disturbing...

: Why not? Where is the line which states mankind cannot advance the usefulness of a given material? There may be one, but why when every trend suggests otherwise.

Because one day, either the next tech advance will cost too much, or it'll come a year too late to help....

: Using the same logic, when a new company starts in Minnasota the friendly dragon waves to the people of Hull? Rover would not have existed had it not been baled out constantly by stolen property (tax) orchestrated by the governemnt. It would have died prior to BL days, or perhaps survived on its merits. Regardless the British economy would have been healthier if if was not drained to support dogs, that same money would have been invested into more promising business. In all likelihood those Rover employees could have been working for Midlands Future Electronis Plc. Supporting dead companies via tax backfires, I think you know that. The best support to gove is not the French favor/disfavor method (so in France the car industry is relatively strong, but many othes are enfeebled), but a seperation of govt from the boardrooms.

However, because of government policy, we have very little manufacturing industry left here, and without manufacturing, wealth creation, we're screwed. The reason these firms get propped up is because Govts. know the social consequences of their failure, if Rover had failed twenty years ago, the damage would have been as great. People are strangely reluctant to live by market fulctuations...

: It is investment in that it enables those companies to raise more capital for investment themselves. Part of it specualtive gambling, and gamblers often lose - more fool them. Most investment into stock means the company can raise capital to improve itself.

But in times of a declining rate of profiit, or an over production crisis, such investment is counter-productive...

: Corrections, like the famous 1987 one and the more recent one arent that bad. Within a year process were back to their previous high. Its a long term investment.

Hurt a lot of people that year, a lot of jobs went because of it...

: Why? the individual is not defined by his diseases! The individual is the mind, no man can know the mind of another. Shared illness and molecules are not relavent. Even where one person is taught everything by anotherr, the teacher can still not know his mind, cannot lay a single claim to it.

I always thought we knew an indivdual by their body- considering your ideas are not your own, considering ypour language is not your own, your meaning is not your own, you are effectively denying that the individual as you concieve it, exists...I may not know your mind, but it is not seperate from mine...

: The claim of the community can only be the claim of a number of individuals in that group of people.

Why not all the individuals?



Follow Ups:

The Debating Room Post a Followup