Daniel Bastos wrote:
> In article <4a8572e9$1@news.povray.org>,
> Invisible wrote:
> 
>>>> (I can't help noticing that not a single one of these systems makes 
>>>> sense...)
>>>   While the pages are humoristic, the "pure capitalism" actually *does*
>>> make sense to me:
>>>
>>>   "You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull."
>>>
>>>   That's rational behavior, looking towards the future and welfare.
>> Well, that's true I guess.
> 
> It makes perfect sense. But we don't have free trade. The most
> capitalist countries intervene heavily on trades.

The key issue, which a lot of people who are pure Libertarian fail to 
quite grasp, is that a) in a completely free system, you have no way of 
knowing if what they are selling you is what they claim it is, and b) 
intervention is only possible *after* they kill you with it. We see this 
in the nearly 100% free and open system of altie medicines. 90% of it 
doesn't do anything, 2% of it is being looked at semi-seriously as 
possible new medicine, 3% is pure placebo, and thus ethically unusable, 
and the other 5% is bought from other countries, or other untested, 
unexamined, and unreliable sources, with the result that it can end up 
with anything from copy cat pharmaceuticals (many *herbal suppliments* 
from China had those in them), to actual poisons, including arsenic 
levels, such as some "holy water" currently being sold, not here, but in 
some parts of the Middle East, which are well above *safe* levels.

You can't have a free and 100% open system, for the same reason that 
Communism is gibberish. People cheat, either by taking short cuts, 
selling things that are not what they claim, or even by trying to make a 
short term gain, while hoping that their poison will kill off anyone 
that might otherwise report on their cheating. In a communist system 
this means that some percentage will "need" things they can't have, and 
therefor won't be able to innovate with them, while others will not 
*produce* what is needed to maintain the rest. In a capitalist system, 
it means people will sell you dog shit and call it donuts, if they think 
they can get by with it, and without someone to stop them, they can just 
move on before you can catch up with them, and they don't care, since 
*they* made a profit, and you where a fool for not checking, while 
others... will steal, lie, and bargain their way up the ladder, which is 
"almost" as easy as just not bothering to do the work, and getting stuff 
for free anyway, under the other system.

In either system, you end up having to have people, whose job is to make 
sure that "other" people are doing their jobs. At that point, you no 
longer have either a pure capitalist or pure communist system.

In the case of China.. They tried to run "both" government and economy 
that way, and it failed, so they adjusted things to provide economy that 
is capitalist (more or less), while keeping the government tightly 
controlled within a limited set of interests, and equal to everyone. In 
reality, this isn't true though, since they do elect which group is in 
charge, making it a variation of a republic, and the only "major" 
difference between them and other such republics is that their parties 
tend to all fall on one side of the line, with respect to how they do 
things. Sort of the way that, in the US, the Democrats are drifting more 
and more right, in an attempt to find "common ground" with a party that 
is being overrun by people that the founders would have considered 
little better than the king we got rid of.

Heck, one of the wackos they "hired" as a leader of a US mercenary unit, 
to fight in Iraq, has even gone so far as to claim, publicly, that 
democracy is a failure, and that rich people are rich because they where 
ordained by god to rule over poor people. [sarc]It sounds strangely 
familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on where *that* idea was last 
seen in the world...[/sarc] And, Chenney.. what can you possibly say 
about a man that is writing a book in which he claims Bush "went soft on 
him", in the last few years of the presidency, and stopped listening to 
his advice on how to fight the evil Moslems, who some foreign power will 
on day "give" a nuke too. Yikes!

But, no. China is communist only in the sense that their parties 
"currently" have a very narrow set of ideas they subscribe to, a limited 
number of opinions, and still have a strong stance on certain things 
that have been traditionally the key factors that such "communist" 
systems have both apposed, and failed to rid themselves of, a) religion, 
b) non-conformity, and c) what ever they define as "morally 
questionable". In China's case this tends to be, well.. religions, 
speaking against the government, and porn.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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