andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> A few remarks: you mention "best technological innovations" this (and 
> some of your other statements) imply that innovation is or can be good. 
> This is an assumption not shared by everybody everywhere*.

  Thanks to innovations in medicine and technology people's life expectance
and overall quality of life has increased significantly. Someone could oppose
the idea, but that someone would be wrong.

  (And for some reason when speaking about innovation and progress in
capitalist countries, many people only think about the huge gap between
rich and poor people... in the United States. There are other capitalist
countries in this world besides the United States, you know. They might
not call themselves "capitalist" because that's nowadays a curseword, but
if they are based on free commerce and private ownership, that's capitalism
by definition. They might want to play with terminology in other to avoid
the hated C-word, but that doesn't change anything.)

> OTOH pure capitalism does not work either.

  I think that with the word "pure" you are implying that there's zero
governmental control. I think that's an unfair assumption.

  No economic system (or, more generally, any form of society with a
significant amount of people) can work without governmental control (because
of the nature of humans). Governmental control can always be implied.

  Of course a capitalist society needs a strong government to regulate
what people can and cannot do, in order to stop exploitation. However,
that's true for *all* forms of economy and society. It's not something
exclusive to capitalism. Thus I think it's unfair to say that "pure"
capitalism doesn't work, as if only capitalism could be "pure" in the
sense of no-governmental-control.

> Slightly related: we have a discussion here on raising the retirement 
> age to 67.

  There has been for some time discussion about retirement ages here in
Finland as well. I find it amusing how completely differing opinions there
are.

  Some people think that retirement age should be increased. The reasoning
is that in many fields there's a labor shortage, and people who get retired
are usually the people with the most expertise and experience on that
specific field. In many fields a 65-years-old is perfectly capable of keeping
working for a couple of years more.

  Other people think the exact opposite: Retirement age should be lowered.
The reasoning is that old people should give way to younger people.

  I think that the problem is that neither view works in *all* possible
fields of labor. There are some fields where there's a huge labor shortage
(eg. jobs related to eg. programming and web development) while in other
fields there's a huge amount of unemployment (eg. construction work and
similar). Often the former would benefit from older people with years of
experience, while the latter would benefit from younger people.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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