--- shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> but it's not just what you say below. what IF
> everyone made good
> decisions? there wouldn't be enough jobs around for
> all the
> college-degreed folks with no jail time, juvenile
> deliquency, early
> pregnancy, etc. etc.
>
> if everyone stayed out of jail, imagine all those
> people on the job
> market. if everyone kept their nose clean and stayed
> out of the
> underground economy, imagine all those people
> competing for jobs.
[Ws:] That is an intersting empirical question which, unfortunately, we cannot answer because we are not in a situation that everyone is making the right decisions - so we cannot observe what would happen. Thus far, capitalism cannot complain on the dearth of bad decisions, on which it can bank and profit, so to speak.
Of course, it would be intersting to see what would happen if everyone made the right decision - would everyone live happily thereafter or the ruling class would institute formal rules of assigning people to diffrent castes regardless of their decisions? Anything in between? Who knows - that is an empirical question that we are not in a position to answer, becaouse no society has ever experienced it.
Please also note that while capitalism banks on the existing bad decisions (which also include ordinary people succumbing to constant barrage of marketing instead of thinking on their own) - it does not create those bad decisions. Individuals do - or perhaps some do more than other. Your argument stipulates however that the systemic need for bad decisions and their consequences is also the cause of those decisions and consequences - which is pure functionalism AFAIK or a teleological argument that some futue state of the system causes the present empirically observable conditions. This looks a logical fallacy to me, unless you provide evidence of observable systemic causes (e.g. laws, institutional rules, identifiable actions, etc,) rather than individual decisions that can be causally linked to observable outcomes.
In sum, it is one thing to argue that capitalism takes adavantage and profits from the existing "vice" and bad decisions people make and quite a different thing to argue that it causes it. I believe the former, but not the latter, but I am open to be persuaded. It is still another question, however, whether taking advantage of bad decisions people make is a bad thing.
Some belive it is not, that using any situation as an opportunity to profit is a good thing aka entrepreneurship. I disagree, but these are just value judgments that cannot be proved or disproved in a matter of fact way.
Wojtek
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