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how money should flow (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 months ago* by to c/politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
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that's what money flow should look like.

community (town, city) donates money to people, who then use it to buy goods and services from companies (which make a profit that way) that are then taxed by the community.

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[–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago* (6 children)

thanks. i asked you to comment because i wanted to hear your opinion.

now, i don't fully understand your response.

about the worker cooperatives: the thing that keeps bothering me is: what if the company makes no profit? i.e. it is a common and very wrong assumption that big companies are mostly profitable. many very big companies have huge fluctuations in their income, some never turn profitable at all. now, if worker's pay is dependent on company profitability, i worry that they're in for a rocky ride.

government serves the interest of the ruling class which is the capital owning class

and this is just plainly wrong. i guess you're talking about the democrats from the USA here. yeah those suck but to generalize it to "all government" seems just flatly off to me. i've seen many government institutions do great good around the world, such as in europe.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I mean if a company isn't making profit then it doesn't have a viable business model to begin with. VCs throwing money at sketchy business ventures is precisely how we get bubbles and crashes. Meanwhile, for the bootstrapping case, the central bank could play a role of the VC where people can apply for a loan for their business idea and the bank floats them the money to get it started requiring that it's operated as a cooperative. If something is unprofitable to do, but is socially necessary then it should be operated as a state owned enterprise and the cost of operation is justified by the social value it produces.

    i guess you’re talking about the democrats from the USA here.

    No, I'm talking about any government in a capitalist state. While this is simply more obvious in the US, the exact same dynamic is present in European capitalist states. The government doesn't exist in a vacuum it's a product of the way a social system is structured. If you have a capitalist system, then it will create selection pressures for a particular type of government. Notice how you completely failed to address the specific mechanics I listed and simply dismissed what I said based on vibes. Try actually thinking about what I wrote and addressing that.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    I mean if a company isn’t making profit then it doesn’t have a viable business model to begin with.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall

    a lot of economists (and me) agree that all companies should eventually become unprofitable. then what?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (3 children)

    The context for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is having a capitalist system of economic relations. Profit doesn't need to be a driver of economy, that's simply a mechanic within a specific economic system that's currently failing. The point of an economy is to allocate labour and resources in a way that improves lives for the people living in a particular society. Using the profit motive to allocate resources is how markets do this allocation, but that's certainly not the only way to do things. A lot of economists (and you) should take a look at how alternative economic systems in Vietnam, China, and DPRK work. In case of China and Vietnam, you have a hybrid system where you have state planning and the state holds the commanding heights of the economy, while markets and private enterprise are used as allocators within that context. Meanwhile, DPRK has a full state planned economy combined with cooperative ownership. All three are outperforming western economic system by a wide margin right now, and they don't suffer from constant economic crashes we see in the west.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    admittedly i've never really looked into eastern contemporary economic models, largely because of how inaccessible they are to me as somebody who does not speak the native language; an important contentious point to me are the following two: what is the role of workers in cosmology, and how to deal with non-workers?

    • the first important question to ask is "what is the role of workers in cosmology"? in other words, what is the reason that humans are regarded special; why do we grant special rights and protection to humans, but not to other animals and plants. Where does this special role come from, and what conditions must be fulfilled to upkeep this role?

    the way i see it, humans are a kind of driving force of history in an universal market that is tended towards growth. i'm a huge fan of outer-space human settlements (such as mars settlement), and realistically, only humans can do it. other species cannot; so we have to do it and obviously get a reward for it, since we're doing it for all of nature, not just ourselves. plants profit from larger access to land as well. this justifies putting humans on a pedestal.

    • however, what happens to the humans that stay behind? i.e. those not willing to endure hardships to go on a space trip? as i see it, maintaining an equilibrium does not require humans; nature has existed billions of years just fine without us. then, what justifies that we continue to put ourselves on a pedestal? what is the deeper philosophical reason for this?
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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I mean there are plenty of books on the subject in English. For example, China's Great Road is a great primer on how Chinese economy works and its historical context http://rdcy.ruc.edu.cn/yw/PUBLICATIONS/Books/f87f6b3cda0d45bfb22c2d3da5b3db3d.htm

    And regarding the second point, I don't really believe in any sort of historical determinism. I don't think there's a purpose for humanity or that we need to spread life throughout the cosmos. It is something I'd personally would find interesting, but I don't think it's predetermined in any way or even more likely than us going extinct. The growth trajectory we're following right now isn't really different that from a bacteria culture in a petri dish where it exponentially expands to use up all available resources and then dies off.

    Also, I think it could be likely that humans are a transitional species bridging the gap between organic life and some other substrate that we create. It could be that future post biological life will bootstrap on silicon or some other engineered substrate. And that's what's going to colonize space because it will be able to engineer itself to adapt to the conditions of space and thrive there naturally. I don't see anything fundamental about biology that is necessary for intelligence, I expect that algorithms in our brains are transferable to other substrates, and that eventually we will build machines that can think in the same way we do and have similar type of conscious experience to us. These kinds of beings would be far better suited to space travel, and could thrive naturally in that environment.

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