It also points out how when more and more people colonized america, more water was being wasted and used up. Even though the people who originally used the rivers would know they can't use too much water, they felt pressured because of the new pioneers settling and using it instead. He even talks about how nothing improved even when the towns people tried to get the govn't involved.

Scarcity of resources are already factored in the cost of production. Basically, thats all you want the prices to be determined on... the cost of production. Which is the LTV. Which goes back to the criticism... if the LTV was true, then you should become a millionare by burying rocks, excavating them, and selling them after.

The value of a commodity is always going to be subjective. You have to ask yourself - who's deciding the value of my time? prices are based on how much ppl value the time put into making products. Before I can sell you a towel, I need to make one. Making a towel takes time. The price of the towel is based on the value of the time. The value is based on how much the seller and buyer thinks it should be. I would say thats the fairest and freest way of doing things.

And if you are against private property then ofcourse the tragedy of the commons is still applicable to you. Because rivers, and oil, and other natural resources become common property. Meaning anyone can take any amount water from streams.

In commercial transactions in my conception, there is no seller. The producer surrenders products to the market and the buyer purchases them at a not-for-profit collective, which is not actually owned by anyone. The person who makes the sale has no actual ownership claim of the product.

No, I want it based on the point at which the amount of a product that can be produced in a given period and the amount of that product that is desired for consumption in that given period come to equilibrium in order to try to avoid surpluses and shortages as best as possible, aka scarcity. Cost of production has nothing to do with my idea.

LTV as a base value system is moronic. It's an intersubjective value system that proponents consider to be objective. My system, on the other hand, is based on the only actual objective value that exists for the majority of transactions, and that is scarcity. I am not suggesting it is 100% accurate at all times, but it is, in fact, based off of objective values.

No matter how little I like LTV, this shows your lack of understanding of it which shows that you have absolutely no standing to critique it. As Marx said himself, an important factor in LTV is not just labor time, but SOCIALLY NECESSARY labor time. Do I agree with someone determining whether or not my labor is socially necessary? Absolutely not, hence my reasoning for not being a proponent of LTV.

Only in exchange. You eliminate exchange and an objective value for a product can be determined based on scarcity.

I don't give a shit about the value of your time. You are again assuming that I am a proponent of LTV, and I am not. Not all objective value systems are LTV. The system I propose isn't necessarily an "objective value system" though. It is a system that separates objective values, subjective values and intersubjective values and deals with them individually. My idea separates the amount of money one makes for laboring from the amount that the product is sold for in order to make the subjective value of the seller irrelevant, and only the collective subjective values of the consumers relevant, which become objective once demand becomes consumption. Basically, a product will only be priced in order to prevent shortages and/or concentrate resources to specific usages. People will then be paid based on the average prices of scarce items in a given economy unless they are independent, self employed workers.

It's not a free-for-all as you so stubbornly assume time and time again. It's those things can be collectively regulated, and often are much more efficiently regulated collectively. You've been on the same tired "tragedy of the commons" argument for years and it has never been relevant, nor will it be. There is plenty of evidence of collective maintenance being not only equal to, but often superior to private control. Not everything needs to be owned, nor should it be. That's how you lead to classical tyranny.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

If your system was the "natural" way to price things then you wouldn't need price limits because they would naturally find equilibrium. The only way prices have naturally found equilibrium was thru a free market system that had private property.

Over 800 million people are members of a co-operative.
Cooperatives provide 100 million jobs worldwide, 20% more than multinational enterprises.

UN proclaims 2012 International Year of Co-operatives: "Co-operative enterprises build a better world."
The UN has recognized that the co-operative business model is a major factor in realizing economic and social development. It has recently released the theme or slogan for the Year reflecting the impact of co-operatives worldwide.

So please, your arrogance and bias makes you doubt things that makes the world actually better.

Check this http://www.ica.coop

And check also this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

So please, keep theorizing while we actually build institutions that better our world.

dumbass

exactly this has nothing to do with capitalism

Your whole idea is debunked by these cooperatives, because these cooperatives are not privately owned nor they are private property, they are collectively owned by their workers, hence they are collective property. These cooperatives can function without private property in a free market, these cooperatives are living examples of such a thing, so your argument fails, i sound like a Mutualist and i might say i shift between Mutualism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, as Proudhon i think possession for active use and occupancy is the basis of property not non-labor property. So this trend which is occurring throughout the world will at one time in history will usurp traditional capitalism trough gradualism and dual power. Free market anti capitalism also called Mutualism, works and always worked, check these links http://www.mutualist.org/ , http://mutualist.blogspot.com/ . Check those links and stop being so dogmatic and close minded.

No. The collective is not an actual entity that has money, buys things, pays people for their labor, etc. There is no actual trade being made. These collectives would run on donations, b2b mutual aid agreements, etc. Money would actually be created upon the labor of an individual and deleted (wiped out of existence) upon use. The currency would be non-transferable. The collective isn't actually selling the products because a sale involves an actual exchange of money. The collective instead simply holds and displays the product until someone comes along and deletes some of their currency in order to purchase it. No money is transferred but the product literally belongs to no one (you can call it common property in that sense, but one still has to fulfill LTP to obtain it, so it isn't really anyone's property, but this is all semantics) until someone purchases it. Therefore, the collective is not the seller. There is no seller.

No, because there is no cost of production. The collective does not have to pay a dime for someone to produce. When they produce, they literally create currency. When that currency comes into existence, the only thing it effects is the prices of products in that economy. It does not cost any money to the collective or anyone else for that matter.

Good, you do understand the basics of economics. From your previous statement I was not so sure.

Yes, given an economy where currency is backed by tangible resources and traded on the market as merely another product, but that's not how currency works in this concept. No one "loses money" if a product doesn't sell well. That is not how things work in this idea. There is no profit made off of an item, nor can debt be created through production of an item, so there is no need to recoup the cost of production. There is no cost of production in this concept, as I stated above.

Indeed it is. I was making sure you knew that because in the last comment you made, you insinuated that supply and demand = the cost of production, which is absurd.

It may be difficult, but is it any different than what businesses already do? What makes, say, a CEO (or any other businessman) more qualified to try to predict demand than anyone else? And while determining demand may be ultimately subjective, it is based on things that are objective, such as past consumption and historical trends.

Who said anything about price caps? Prices don't just magically determine themselves on a market. Someone still has to determine them. I am simply taking price determination out of the hands of the few and placing it in the hands of a much larger, more directly affected group.

The Soviet Union was, basically, one big privately owned company.

That's how it works in every system except this one. Yes, labor time may factor into what someone is paid, but it does not get contributed to the price of the product. The price of the product solely rests on supply (based on the amount of natural resources that go into the production of an item that exist and the accessibility of those resources) and demand (based on past consumption levels, historical trends, etc.).

Basically each collective would hold regular meetings that are open to the public and people would have decision making power based on the degree by which they are affected by the decision. At these meetings, current supply levels would be determined and past supply levels and other factors would be observed and all of these factors would be used to predict future supply. Also, past consumption, product trends, etc., would be factored in to predict future demand. To prevent both shortage and surplus, the price of each product would be set by the collective at the equilibrium determined between supply and demand. Prices will then be reported for each product at a meeting involving everyone within an economic unit that wishes to get involved and an Average Price of Products will be determined. This number will be used in helping determine how much an individual will get paid, and it also begins the next round of this economic cycle as it has a direct effect on demand.

Yes, but unlike the values in STV and even LTV, the value system in the main aspect of this economy is based on truly objective values (past/current supply and consumption levels). They may fluctuate, but the point of economics is to allocate scarce resources, and the best possible way to do that is by supply and demand, and the best way to determine them is careful observation of past supply and demand levels and factors that may change them, not leaving it up to tyrants to make that determination based on their own personal values.

Not in the way you are thinking of it for the reasons I stated above, but in a sense, yes. And? Who would you prefer set wages? Tyrants?

Not at all the same. Again, it's either the people decide their own wages or someone decides for them. The only other option is self-employment, which I am perfectly fine with. That is where you get into exchange and subjective values though.

Proof only exists in mathematics. It may be evidence, but it is not proof. That said, I still don't have the internet and so I can't watch it now. If you find it posted on YouTube you can post a link for that and I will be able to see it though.

Look, there may be examples of collective ownership failing, but history speaks for itself. Homosapiens have been around for, I believe, roughly 40,000 years. In that time, only in the last few hundred has common ownership been supplanted by private ownership. Most of history has seen only two types of property: common property and personal property. Private property is a fairly new concept (probably about 4,000 years old) and even in the time that it has existed, it has only become such a widespread accepted concept in the last hundred or so.

And beyond simple historical reference, I can point to countless examples of successful attempts at common property. Sure, certain properties need to be better regulated and many are better off being owned as personal properties (though not private properties in my personal opinion), but the idea that commons always lead to tragedy is absurd and is counteracted by history. In fact most commons have historically been successful.

No true free market system has ever actually existed, especially with private property.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

hahahahahahahahahahhahaa

Owned by the Communist Party, the Soviet Union was actually called TOTALITARIAN for a reason, TOTALITARIAN a word J breakz doesn't know, was called like that because the people of the soviet union had no say in neither governing nor economic development. So J breakz, democracy and TOTALITARIANISM are different things, maybe there in America they teach you something else but democracy comes from the Greek language , demos means "people" and cratos means "power", democracy " peoples power", say it with me DEMOCRACY LOL
. The Soviet Union had no DEMOCRACY had no DEMOS nor CRATOS, it was a totalitarian state where a vanguard party, usually the party of Lenin ruled the DEMOS, this concept comes from Lenin's idea that the people are too dumb to RULE THEMSELVES to achieve true DEMOCRACY, they need to be lead to democracy and socialism by the Marxist intelligentsia, its called vanguardism. Ok ? Its ridiculous man, what me and Erik are promoting trough different perspectives sometimes is the same thing, its called DIRECT DEMOCRACY, i don't know how can you equate economic democracy with the Soviet Union, dude i live in ROMANIA a former "communist" country LOL people had no say in nothing here, in nothing at all, everything was done by a handful of people, usually the bureaucracy of the communist party. What does economic democracy has do with it? economic democracy represents the basis of those cooperatives i presented to you on economic democracy they work, mentioning the Soviet Union is ridiculous, are you Glen Beck ?