For you PollstersFollow

Apparently Varus is still living in the same decade that he reached puberty in.

Time to be a man of the 21st century, bud.

Debo,



***** over? That's how "you" liberals think. Just because someone is successful in no way means they "screwed" anyone over. "You" losers seem to want to place your f*cked up situations on anyone but yourself and the decisions you've made. Here's a thought if you can't afford a house don't buy one.

CBD,



Debo sarcasm,



Sounds to me like Debo is pegging every millionaire as a slimy businessperson willing to ***** over the "other guy".


CBD,



lmao...yes your problems are yours and no one elses and they are your fault.





How do you get that from this;




To summarize you are an idiot who wants to blame his problems on anyone but himself.

Yeah, I don't know why I wrote that. oh well.

BullShit, he has an okra garden, he is entirely self-sufficient. His job as an insurance salesman is purely philanthropic work.

Hell, you could put together a harem of pre-pubescent male prostitutes with that kind of cash.

It's far more accurate to say the exploitation of opportunities. I make a lot of semantic arguments, but I say this because capitalism is mostly about efficiently allocating resources and finding Nash equilibriums. It's not about ******** over other people to benefit yourself. It's not a zero sum game, not most of the time.

Business laws and regulations are about shifting those equilibriums into desirable places.

Edited, Jun 24th 2009 5:43pm by Allegory

Alright. The goal of all players involved is to make money; to make the most money possible. This can involve exploiting people. It's possible to make money exploiting people. I can run a water company that charges abnormally high prices and uses unsavory tactics to keep out competitors. But it is also possible to make money without exploiting people. I can sell a good or service where the value to customers is more than the value of the money they spend (necessarily anything you voluntarily buy is) and the cost of the good or service to me is less than the value of the money I take in.

What I'm really looking to exploit is an opportunity. This may or may not involve exploiting people. It's not a zero sum game. It is possible for both the customer and business to gain in a transaction, because different good have different worths to different parties. It's the same general concept you learned about in macroeconomics. If The U.S. can produce cotton more efficiently than it produces corn, and China can produce corn more efficiently than it produces cotton, then the two benefit each other through trade.

Capitalism efficiently allocates resource sand achieves Nash equiliriums by have millions of people testing out millions of ideas. People constantly and naturally search out the best opportunities to exploit. Capitalism is about letting natural tendencies sort of the situation. If you shake up a bag of potato chips the whole ones will tend to rise to the top while the broken bits sink to the bottom, you don't need to manually sort the chips into the bag. It's about letting individuals figure out what's best for themselves. Each player is seeking his maximimum sustainable utility, Nash equilibrium.

Regulations and laws are about artificial interference. They're manually sorting the potato chips into the bag. The problem is that it's difficult to do that on anything less than a macroscopic level. Can you imagine instead of sifting flour you would have to pick up and examine each granule?

However, sometimes nash equilirbriums hit snags. It's important to understand the concept of "local maximum," and "absolute maximum," as the terms exists in mathematics. In capitalism people tend toward overall maxim utility through trading, but they can get caught on local maximums in the same a rock rolling down a hill might get caught in a hole within the hill. The hole is slighter lower than the immediate area, which keeps the rock from rolling out, but it's not the absolute lowest the rock could be.

In an economy with zero regulation you could have businesses like protection rings. They do provide some utility, and they are a nash equilibrium because the shop owner can't afford not to pay them and the mafia doesn't want to give up easy cash. But society would be better off without such operations.

Regulation and interference is about smoothing out the hill so the rock doesn't get caught on a local minimum, but it able to naturally roll down to the absolute minimum. It's about shifting the costs so that the Nash equilibrium equals the best outcome for all parties.

That why we invented shifters for flour. It'd be impossible to sort flour granules entirely by hand, but without shifting we still get lumps in the flour, even if we shook up the bag.

I hate using metaphors so extensively, because I feel it is a very weak way to make a point, but I'm hoping that you already know what I'm talking about and that all I have to do is give hint to what I'm trying to explain.

Edited, Jun 25th 2009 9:36am by Allegory

you think our healthcare is worse then in the USA? maybe if you're rich.

The two are neither mutually exclusive nor dependent upon each other, though.

On that note, neither socialism nor communism preclude the exploitation of people, either.

There is no need to merge people working and people being exploited. Sure sometimes people would be, but often they are simply working. I have a job, and I don't feel I am being exploited at all.

UK and Canada are still having problems, they are just far more apparent in other countries. Here, you could be waiting for several months for something while in the USA you could have it that afternoon. I can't say in the UK, I haven't looked at them really. A question of more spending and not having enough doctors (many move to the USA because they can make a lot more money in the private sector) is also a problem.