Warp wrote:
>   Capitalism endorses competition. People will strive for bettering their
> own lives (to get rich, famous or otherwise in a better position in life).
> While this sounds (and somewhat is) a sign of greed, in the grand scale of
> things it's actually greed that benefits the society as a whole: By bettering
> his own life, this person is pushing forward progress, indirectly bettering
> everyone's life in average.
> 
It only does so as long as competition is *possible*. The problem is, 
any place a bottleneck exists, you get 1-2 people, or corporations, 
which swallow up everything in the bottleneck, and then they get 
everything, and everyone else scrambles for the scraps. This is only 
made *worse* when you add into it the, fairly recent, rise to prominence 
of libertarianism, which takes the existing belief in innovation via 
competition, mixes it with social anarchism, and predicates that a) 
there is nothing wrong with companies either swallowing the bottlenecks, 
or even making ones up that shouldn't exist, because the guy with $5 and 
an idea can *somehow* magically overcome the company with $5 billion, 
and 50 lawyers, all dedicated on making sure that a) they can own the 
idea, even when they didn't come up with it, b) the idea seems to 
somehow "undermine" the economy, or c) the guy with his $5 will never 
see anything *close* to a market for it.

Its like arguing that the sheep farmer can make himself rich from a new 
fabric, when everything from his sheep farm to the markets its sold in, 
are *owned* by the people in the castle a mile away.

You have to have a mixture of both. A recognition that "some level" of 
equality is a necessity, or you run aground of your own success, by 
reducing everyone to a state where they can't afford your own product. 
Walmart is a good example. You want quality, for a good price, and which 
doesn't break in five minute from buying it, you **don't** buy Walmart. 
But, 90% of their employees make minimum wage, and no tips. Any of them 
with families get **help** from management to fill out government 
subsidy forms. The only they they can afford is what Walmart sells, and 
the result is one of two things - 1) The quality has to *drop* to make 
up the difference, or 2) their own employees, if the quality where 
raised, wouldn't be able to afford their own products.

This result came from trying to satisfy 99% of the country, and finding 
that 19% of them already couldn't *afford* anything better. Now, 50% of 
them can't. The people buying what would have been considered the 
"poorest" quality 50 years ago (as in things like a toaster they used 
for 20 years before replacing it), are now 20% of the population, not 
90%. This isn't progress.

Or, lets put it another way, since this is an example from the "other" 
side of the fence, where fairness becomes "unfair" to the company. 
Cars.. For most of my fathers early adult life, and teens, it was $1 per 
*pound*, for a car. Now, its $50 per pound. Why? Because the workers 
robbed the company, instead of the company robbing them. Same problem. 
You need some perception of "equality", which includes the rest of the 
people in your country. If you don't, and you are a worker, you scramble 
to get every dime you can, until half the country can't afford what you 
just manufactured. If your are a company, same thing. You can't create a 
state in which you either have to lower quality to the point where 
people consider everything you sell to be crap, but have no choice but 
to buy it, and support "innovation", or "progress". All you do is hang 
yourself with your own rope, until your money supply gets cut off by no 
one being able to afford the crap any more than they can the decent stuff.

You don't need socialism for things to work. You do need either 
companies to recognize that they *have* a social obligation, not just 
one to their own gains and profits, or someone who *recognizes* the 
social obligation, and is willing to say, "Stop screwing everyone." What 
we have now is companies that don't, for the most part give a crap, 
lobbying politicians, how own stock in the companies, often get hired by 
them, if/when they retire, and who also **don't see** their own social 
obligations. If everyone scrounges for the list dime, you end up with a 
world of people with stepped on fingers, two people with bags full of 
dimes, and **nothing to buy with it**.

That has been the whole mess with this health care debacle. The 
insurance companies use their **own**, self owned, company to determine 
what it "costs" to perform a medical procedure, and that is where the 
term "premium" comes from. They underrate the cost, drive up the 
premiums, then get people in congress to argue that, if it costs $100 to 
do something, they say it costs $80, and your therefor have to pay, due 
to their lie, $20, that isn't *fair* to them, and you should be paying 
$25. The governments response - One side says, "OK, there is no way in 
hell we are, at this point, going to get them to stop lying, or using 
their own internal company to rate the costs, so lets provide some 
direct competition, which *doesn't* lie about it.", and the other side 
screams, "Making us charge the customer what it actually costs like that 
is wrong, and the reason isn't because we just don't want to pay it, its 
because government run programs are **socialism**." Sigh...

>   Someone might want to get rich and famous by making a beneficial invention
> or developing something useful in order to sell it for millions. If he
> succeeds, he gets filthy rich (which was his goal), but as a side effect
> the overall quality of the society got increased because now there's a new
> invention which makes everyone's life easier.
> 
They can't. As I already said. They have three options. Go to another 
country, find enough money to do it themselves (or inherit it), or 
**sell it** to some company that gives them 1% of what its actually 
worth, who then makes themselves rich by taking in $100,000,000 for 
every $1,000,000 the guy that invented it does. Yeah, he gets "rich", 
sort of, but not without everyone that is already rich making 100 times 
are much, for doing nothing, other than happening to already have the 
factory needed to manufacture it. Oh, and selling it at a store that 
pays its people so little they can never *ever* hope to try to do the same.

>   What people want is unreasonable. Basically they want to eat the cake and
> keep it too: They want all the benefits of innovation and progress which
> comes from competitive capitalism, but without the competitive capitalism,
> so that everyone owns the same amount. This just doesn't work.
> 
That isn't reasonable. You have to have some compromise, or it just 
doesn't work. Ann Rand and their ilk are all idiots, and the current 
economic mess is squarely at the feet of the nitwits that fell for it. 
Its the flip side of socialism. If everyone has the same, there is no 
reason to innovate. If 5% of the population has 99% of the resources, 
its not **possible** to innovate. You did nothing but replace the 
"state" with "corporations". The average person is still being screwed, 
only worse, because corporations are under no obligation, theoretical or 
otherwise, to bother with the "well being" of anyone other than their 
own stock holders, and, only as much as "necessary" to their customers. 
Problem is, "necessary", in the later case is based solely on, "Enough 
people will buy it.", not on quality, content, or intrinsic value.

>   It's not a coincidence that the best technological innovations are created
> in capitalist countries which endorse free commerce and private ownership and
> entrepreneurship.
> 

Its also not a coincidence that such markets produce 500 times as much 
total crap, by comparison, either. There is a difference between 
"innovation" and "marketing". The later is more important to capitalism 
than the former, by a *huge* margin. Sometimes.. it even manages to kill 
the former, when a better option is available.

-- 
void main () {

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

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