Re: [ox-en] Apple trees (aka capitalism) are bad. What about barter exchange?
- From: Amine Chadly <amine.chadly gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:38:29 +0200
Hi list !
Patrick's point is exactly that, instead of having everybody producing
enough food for everybody to afford food,
some farmers are paid to keep the production from decreasing the
prices too much.
Another example of "alimented" scarcity in Europe are the milk quotas
we have where farmers get paid not to
produce more than a certain quantity of milk per year. Quotas that
they had to increase dramatically during the
high increase of milk price that was over what some have decided as
the 'right' price (wonder what happened
since the prices dropped again).
For the first time, I am not sure I can agree with something you wrote
Stefan and it's regarding free software ;-)
You can sell free software (gpl doesn't require you to produce/give
your code for free,
but to make the source available and accept free redistribution of it
- look at http://www.elivecd.org/Download/Stable
for example, it's a linux distribution for which you have to make a
donation to access to the stable version of it).
Besides it's not because you have a free usable software for a
particular need, that you will not have a $$$ alternative that
actually
has a bigger market share.
Earlier someone said that credit is a good thing, and I can't agree with that.
I think it actually just could be one central root of the problems.
There is nothing easier to maintain a 'nasty' situation where people
having money
don't have anything more to do to gain more than just lending that
money. The interest (rate) is the culprit there.
Don't you think that it's just because it's kinda difficult to find
something easier (and juicer) than that, that all the money was driven
away
from investment into productions to go to financial engineering
products. And the current economical problems aren't actually coming
from
bad credit ?
I wonder if a solution where people would have to just be a partner
and get parts of the benefits (or just take the loss) of an actual
adventure
wouldn't be a partial fix to avoid reproduction of the current
problems. But then it wouldn't solve the problem of companies that
just sell their
future (firing their r&d and cutting investments) to focus on the
immediate profits.
Finally isn't greed the central problem ? ^ ^ ?
We might just be looking at an ethical problem ?
Evgeni, sometimes reading from great ancestors makes it easier to
avoid mistakes. But one should not just sit around and read,
it would be such a waste ! Experiments are a good thing (tm :-) so
keep it up !^^!
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:10 PM, Patrick Anderson <agnucius gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Diego Saravia <diego.saravia gmail.com> wrote:
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Given the productive capacity of today we already could have abundance
of many, many things.
do you have examples?
The 2008 US Farm Bill once again pays farmers to NOT grow for the
purpose of keeping prices above costs.
The exchange system prevents this and must do so
to continue it's operation.
That is true for *Capitalist* exchange - where profit as treated as a
reward for the current owners.
But exchange itself can be unmixed from the treatment of profit.
Profit cannot be handled 'correctly' unless we can stop using it to
pay investors.
We can stop paying investors with profit when we start paying them
with *product* instead.
But an investor would not be happy with a payment of product unless he
is also a future consumer investing for that purpose.
The purpose of production is product, not profit.
Trade and the treatment of profit are two different things.
Trade is not evil in itself, but appears to be because it is usually
associated with the Capitalistic mistreatment of profit that
concentrates wealth into the hands of the few even though it is the
payer (the consumer) who should receive that ownership.
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--
Amine Chadly
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de