Senor Barborito wrote:

Moab wrote:

Senor Barborito wrote:

Lufteufel wrote:

Senor Barborito wrote:

This might be why whenever I talk about what I'd like to see for an economy, I talk about a 'limited capitalist' (meritocratic earning yes, meritocratic earnings outside the $30,000-$75,000 range for all who work no) system devoid of inheritance or the ability for money to last longer than a year from when it was earned. The downside of this is that it makes investment, while not impossible, significantly harder than what we see in our current system. One only has to glance at the NationStates game we all played a few months back to see the nature of the problem - everybody has several ideas they want others to invest in, and it's impossible for the people who know what they're talking about to be heard above the ambient babble.

Judging by this description, you don't even have the faintest idea what the term "capitalist" means. Without large sums of capital in private hands, your system is not even remotely capitalist. Someone has to decide where and how to build the shopping malls, housing developments, steel mills, software publishers, automobile plants, chicken farms, etc. If large amounts of money can't be held privately, then only the government has the power to make such decisions. To reiterate, using your idiom: THAT. IS. NOT. CAPITALISM. You can argue that it's better than capitalism all you want, but you're not fooling anyone when you suggest that a simple tiered salary system--just like the one they had in the Soviet Union--has anything whatsoever to do with capitalism, limited or otherwise.

I was trying to put it into terms he'd favor. In my mind, I call it 'rewards-based socialism.' It's the same thing either way - a hybrid hoping to combine the push to perform of capitalism with the lack of the accompanying excesses.

Yes, large amounts of money can be gathered in private hands - you just have to convince a hell of a lot more investors. Gathering capital is less like giving presentations to a few wealthy investors and more like getting a massive petition signed. Please don't tell me that this is impossible, one of my family's friends raised $5 million to create his dot-com by talking to thousands of people, the overwhelming majority in the $50-80K salary range. Similarly, my own mother ran a funds drive for the new church building project for my family's church three years ago - and raised $1.7 million in about three weeks.

Larger amounts of capital (hundreds of millions) may be problematic depending on the amount they capture public interest, but if the public really wants that mall built, it will happen. Furthermore, the next fifty years, nanotechnology or no nanotechnology, are going to see a wealth of new extremely efficient construction/manufcaturing techniques - significantly lowering the barriers to manifestation of the public will.

The real problem here is the public. Better education methods, eugenics, genetic engineering, creation of a new country with an IQ test as part of immigration - I don't care how it's done, the public needs to be made far more intelligent and far less trusting than they currently are.

--SB

So, if we could just construct sko "Smart-Ray" that could make "the public" more intelligent, we would then be able to create a utopian society... BRILLIANT!

The society can have a better model regardless of the public's intelligence, and it would still work. The problem is, it wouldn't work nearly as well. The question is - assuming that the public will get smarter through any of the methods listed above, at what point will we cross the intersecting point on the graph where the public is smart enough that my model or any socialist model results in a better life for more people than the capitalist model?