This country is great and capitalism is why - make your case

Seth wrote:
Bloo Driver wrote:

Will this discussion come down to semantics about how something can't be defined but is defined but isn't really defined?

Cuz that's one of those total shockers.

Totally depends on what you mean by "cuz."

Men are the real victims in all this.

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
Seth wrote:
Bloo Driver wrote:

Will this discussion come down to semantics about how something can't be defined but is defined but isn't really defined?

Cuz that's one of those total shockers.

Totally depends on what you mean by "cuz."

Men are the real victims in all this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuz

cheeba wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

That's quite a bit stronger than what it looks like you're arguing now, which seems to be "this country is great, and capitalism played some role in that".

Capitalism played the major role in that. Capitalism is not the only reason the US is great.

More seriously, if you're unable or unwilling to define your terms, that makes substantive discussion awfully difficult.

It would require dozens of sources and thousands upon thousands of words to define these concepts. If people are unable to look up capitalism and socialism and get a basic understanding, I'm not paid to teach you.

This is a significantly weaker claim than your initial one, but is probably much more defensible (though I think my formulation is probably closer to the mark, and may yet be where we end up).

Being able to clearly define your terms for the purposes of making an argument is a pretty fundamental skill. I'd genuinely hoped it'd help focus the conversation here.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

If I'm being even half-honest, Cheeba, China is a great example to support your argument. Pretty much the second it switch to a quasi-free market capitalist economic model, the economic growth has, how can I understate this, kinda exploded. No doubt capitalism is an outstanding engine for achieving economic greatness.

Yes.

But I would argue that capitalism is not the defining factor that leads to national greatness.

That's fair. I disagree, but that's fair :). Actually, I'd say capitalism is the driving factor that leads to greatness. The great act wouldn't be defined by capitalism.

SixteenBlue wrote:

Edit: The reason I bring this up is not to be insulting but to point out that it really defeats any purpose of discussion with you. When your knee jerk reaction is to simply decry people that disagree as uneducated, you show you're not willing to argue in good faith.

Oh I agree I'm being a bit condescending, but I've been insulted a lot on this forum and I'm just using the tone I have received. Also, I seriously don't understand how people don't know about things like corporate-university collaborations. That's not an attempt at being condescending, that's bewilderment.

GG, Bloo. You nailed it.

MISANDRY

cheeba wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

Edit: The reason I bring this up is not to be insulting but to point out that it really defeats any purpose of discussion with you. When your knee jerk reaction is to simply decry people that disagree as uneducated, you show you're not willing to argue in good faith.

Oh I agree I'm being a bit condescending, but I've been insulted a lot on this forum and I'm just using the tone I have received. Also, I seriously don't understand how people don't know about things like corporate-university collaborations. That's not an attempt at being condescending, that's bewilderment.

I expect that people know about them, but you haven't made the case that the existence of corporate partnerships with public universities are the reason those universities are great (or even that it played the major role, to pre-empt the next fallback position for this component of your argument).

Posting a photo of a solar car that has sponsorship stickers on the side isn't actually the same as showing any kind of a causal relationship between capitalism (here, in the form of corporations) having some partnerships with universities, and any greatness those universities have attained.

cheeba wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

Edit: The reason I bring this up is not to be insulting but to point out that it really defeats any purpose of discussion with you. When your knee jerk reaction is to simply decry people that disagree as uneducated, you show you're not willing to argue in good faith.

Oh I agree I'm being a bit condescending, but I've been insulted a lot on this forum and I'm just using the tone I have received. Also, I seriously don't understand how people don't know about things like corporate-university collaborations. That's not an attempt at being condescending, that's bewilderment.

You ignored the part where I said that people DO know about these things, they simply view them differently than you. If you think that's bewildering you obviously have no intention of exchanging ideas with anyone else.

Also personally I think "they started it" is a weak defense, but fair enough, I guess. I'm also aware of the irony that this is coming from me.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Being able to clearly define your terms for the purposes of making an argument is a pretty fundamental skill. I'd genuinely hoped it'd help focus the conversation here.

Sorry, definitions are not that easy. Just look at the numerous trans-gender threads here to find a definition of man and woman to see what I mean. If that's such a complex concept, how can you expect an entire economical system to be defined easily?

cheeba wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

Being able to clearly define your terms for the purposes of making an argument is a pretty fundamental skill. I'd genuinely hoped it'd help focus the conversation here.

Sorry, definitions are not that easy. Just look at the numerous trans-gender threads here to find a definition of man and woman to see what I mean. If that's such a complex concept, how can you expect an entire economical system to be defined easily?

Maybe give it half an ounce of effort, instead of linking to wikipedia and dropping the mic?

SixteenBlue wrote:

You ignored the part where I said that people DO know about these things, they simply view them differently than you. If you think that's bewildering you obviously have no intention of exchanging ideas with anyone else.

I honestly don't think people here do know about these things. If you know about these things you can't say something like, "capitalism really won't let corporations invest in basic research" or the "stickerz!" argument.

I tried.

SixteenBlue wrote:

I tried.

IMAGE(http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/3548103/but-why-o.gif)

Hey you all, check out this picture of a russian spy drone... IT HAS NO STICKERS!! In Soviet Russia, you don't even NEED no stinking stickers!!

IMAGE(http://www.defencetalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/russian-uav.jpg)

cheeba wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

Being able to clearly define your terms for the purposes of making an argument is a pretty fundamental skill. I'd genuinely hoped it'd help focus the conversation here.

Sorry, definitions are not that easy. Just look at the numerous trans-gender threads here to find a definition of man and woman to see what I mean. If that's such a complex concept, how can you expect an entire economical system to be defined easily?

Here's my 30-second stab at it.

Capitalism (ˈkapətlˌizəm), noun: An economic system providing for private profit (either as individuals, or as collectives through entities like corporations) from the production of goods and services, at prices which are determined by the market. For the purposes of our argument here, this doesn't preclude regulation by government entities, and encompasses both the stakeholder and shareholder strains of capitalism.

I can also finish making your argument for you, if you like.

cheeba wrote:

No, Boogle, it's not moving the goalposts. My argument was that capitalism and our universities are inextricably linked. For evidence I showed a bunch of corporate sponsors of a solar car team. People didn't get that and just saw, "ooh stickerz!" It is not moving the goalposts to say they are not just stickers.

Did anyone study at the Ford Automotive Science & Technology lab at the University of Illinois? Gold star to anyone who guesses why Ford is in the name.

To continue picking on Ford, what about the new Battery Lab they are opening at the University of Michigan?

I saw these types of sponsorships first hand at my university, so I'm surprised no one else here is aware of this stuff.

Ford donated $1.25 million back in 2000 to help build the Ford Automotive Science and Technology lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 2000 the federal government gave the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign $193 million in research grants.

If you have other information about donations or investments that Ford made in the ensuing years, let me know. We can compare those numbers with what Uncle Sam dropped: $214 million in research grants in 2002, $266 million in 2003, $275 million in 2004, $290 million in 2005, $265 million in 2006, $253 million in 2007, $267 million in 2008, and $288 million in 2009, the last year I have current data on.

And to continue picking on Ford, it's a massive stretch to say that are opening a new Battery Lab at the University of Michigan. The actual price tag of the Battery Lab was over $8 million. Ford's kicking in just $2.1 million (again, tax deductible). The primary backer of the Batter Lab is the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which is a state-funded group that promotes economic development. They kicked in $5 million.

And, by the way, Uncle Sam gave the University of Michigan $636 million in research grants for 2009.

cheeba wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

For example, OG Slinger talked about CalTech on the previous page as being a counter-example to the notion that capitalism is the reason American universities are so well-regarded.

It took about 2 seconds to find this on one of CalTech's websites: "Caltech uses seed funding from private donors to nurture the kinds of risky but potentially revolutionary early-stage research projects grant makers rarely support."

Link. Every top university has a large amount of corporate and private involvement.

I guess you must have missed this text, which was right above what you quoted:

Typically, over a third of all Caltech proposals will receive funding. Success rates for proposals submitted to our leading research sponsors—the NSF and the NIH—exceed national averages for these agencies.

NSF is the National Science Foundation and the NIH is the National Institute of Health.

But all that's boring, so I'll just leave this pretty picture that I found here.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/oPAZB3P.png)

The thing about definitions is that they help others to see the point of view that you are arguing from.

cheeba wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:

Being able to clearly define your terms for the purposes of making an argument is a pretty fundamental skill. I'd genuinely hoped it'd help focus the conversation here.

Sorry, definitions are not that easy. Just look at the numerous trans-gender threads here to find a definition of man and woman to see what I mean. If that's such a complex concept, how can you expect an entire economical system to be defined easily?

Nope, sometimes they aren't that easy, but that is why philosophical texts often spend half their page count trying to define their terms. You clearly hold a idea in your mind of what the term capitalism means, and what the term socialism means, and it seems you expect everyone else to simply intuit what exactly you mean by these terms in spite of the complexity you now claim they hold. Either they are simple enough that "basic knowledge", as you put it earlier, is enough to get everyone on the same page, or they aren't, in which case you have to start by defining your terms as Dimmerswitch did.

According to my Facebook feed:
America = Great
Capitalism = Great
Things not Capitalism = Bad
So America = Capitalism, evidence to the contrary be damned.

Spoiler:

America + (Capitalism - Things to keep Capitalism in check) + offerings to keep the people Capitalists are extracting profits from relatively content = Good enough for many, Great for some.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Hey you all, check out this picture of a russian spy drone... IT HAS NO STICKERS!! In Soviet Russia, you don't even NEED no stinking stickers!!

IMAGE(http://www.defencetalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/russian-uav.jpg)

Yeah, but it's Russian technology. Note the carefully positioned fire extinguisher.

LouZiffer wrote:
Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Hey you all, check out this picture of a russian spy drone... IT HAS NO STICKERS!! In Soviet Russia, you don't even NEED no stinking stickers!!

IMAGE(http://www.defencetalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/russian-uav.jpg)

Yeah, but it's Russian technology. Note the carefully positioned fire extinguisher.

In Russia, drones sticker you?

I'm going to throw out a perspective. Then I'm going to go away for a while, my wife has a headache and I need to make her a nice cup of tea and give her a shoulder rub, so feel free to tear me apart as you see fit.

There is pretty clear evidence that the market is a good economic driver. Allowing experimentation free of ideology, cronyism and corruption leads to innovation. The problem is that as individuals we are not particularly good at noticing those negative factors or checking them within ourselves. Without a strong institutional counterbalance it seems those factors can creep into any economic system. It should be noted that Communism is rife with all three of those negative factors, in spite of the fairly pure ideals that originally drove that line of though.

When corporate income taxes were much, much higher than today, private companies still existed and still made money. However some of that wealth was leveraged by the government back into the nation at large. Now, we've got a system where private enterprise gets to keep far more of the wealth generated within that enterprise, and much less wealth is being cycled back into the system. Instead trade secrets are jealously guarded, shareholders are willing to slash and burn to provide a dividend to themselves, and most insidiously corporations are able to drive government policy through direct donations.

Sure a company will throw a few million dollars at a research institution here and there, but as OG's graphic illustrated it's a tiny part of the pie. Within that system we've seen public works gutted, basic education scorned, general healthcare largely ignored, and of late a fight to roll back the environmental conservationism that at one point the nation saw as a reasonable goal. Now everything is too big, too expensive, too long-term to take on. All that accumulated wealth instead goes to perpetuating the three roadblocks to experimentation I mentioned at the beginning. So yeah... a lot of people see capitalism as bad right now, because we are experiencing the free market unfettered by the social conscience that a functioning elected government can activate... as the government has basically been taken over by those forces as well.

When I read your posts that capitalism makes America great, and that all these young socialists just don't understand how it plays a role, I see someone who is living 60 years in the past when our post-war production capacity allowed us to leap far ahead of other nations, many of which had to rebuild from the rubble. I see someone looking for any proof that our productive capacity has not dwindled through decades of neglect and manipulation.
Sure, we've still got tons of wealth - we gained a HUGE head start thanks to the fact that most of the world was a burning husk in 1946... but the free-market aficionados were so good at setting up Communism as the bogeyman that we lost sight of the need for counterbalances. We've gradually pushed away from that and are now in a place where the tantalizing promis of the unfettered market has become one and the same with Communism - an anchor dragging down a country that once seemed economically unstoppable. In this climate, when you say capitalism made this country great and socialism makes you scared I think a lot of people assume you are buying into that bogeyman ideology.

By being defensive and saying it's basic knowledge and refusing to be more definitive with your terms, you're perpetuating that sense.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I've seen the following points made and generally agreed upon (outside of Cheeba, I guess)

1) Capitalism + government forces == a really good system where great things happen
2) Government forces have been in decline lately
3) The system isn't working lately

So shouldn't the conclusion be that capitalism is the problem and government forces are what actually drive great things?

SixteenBlue wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but I've seen the following points made and generally agreed upon (outside of Cheeba, I guess)

1) Capitalism + government forces == a really good system where great things happen
2) Government forces have been in decline lately
3) The system isn't working lately

So shouldn't the conclusion be that capitalism is the problem and government forces are what actually drive great things?

That strikes me as a little simplistic*. The lack of fair and regular oversight is the problem. If you have a cow and the fence isn't keeping the cow on your ranch, the problem is not the cow.

(*edit: so, obviously, I will counter with an oversimplified metaphor!)

imbiginjapan wrote:

Sure a company will throw a few million dollars at a research institution here and there, but as OG's graphic illustrated it's a tiny part of the pie.

Sure. The rest of the pie comes from taxing the capitalism.

When I read your posts that capitalism makes America great, and that all these young socialists just don't understand how it plays a role, I see someone who is living 60 years in the past when our post-war production capacity allowed us to leap far ahead of other nations, many of which had to rebuild from the rubble. I see someone looking for any proof that our productive capacity has not dwindled through decades of neglect and manipulation.

Production capacity isn't as important as GNP. The basic measure of a nation's power in political science is GNP.

imbiginjapan wrote:

Nope, sometimes they aren't that easy, but that is why philosophical texts often spend half their page count trying to define their terms.

Right. And I'm not doing that. Plus the way this forum goes, any definition I posit will be manipulated and I'll have to spend about 10 pages of posts saying what I did or did not say in the definition.

Bloo Driver wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but I've seen the following points made and generally agreed upon (outside of Cheeba, I guess)

1) Capitalism + government forces == a really good system where great things happen
2) Government forces have been in decline lately
3) The system isn't working lately

So shouldn't the conclusion be that capitalism is the problem and government forces are what actually drive great things?

That strikes me as a little simplistic*. The lack of fair and regular oversight is the problem. If you have a cow and the fence isn't keeping the cow on your ranch, the problem is not the cow.

(*edit: so, obviously, I will counter with an oversimplified metaphor!)

It definitely is simplistic. I guess I'm just saying that if something needs a fair amount of oversight to actually function correctly, maybe it shouldn't be worshiped as the solitary solution to all problems for 300+ million people.

By government forces though, I don't just mean the regulation. I also mean taxation and government run programs as well. Earlier it was said that there would be no money for the government programs without capitalism, but that's not really true. There'd be no capital for those programs without taxes.

Edit: Cheeba actually just made this point. So what I'm saying is, maybe it's not capitalism that really led us to great things. Capitalism without the taxation means all of the grants in the image above are gone. So while capitalism did generate that money, it didn't do anything to actually support the research. The government did.

cheeba wrote:
imbiginjapan wrote:

Nope, sometimes they aren't that easy, but that is why philosophical texts often spend half their page count trying to define their terms.

Right. And I'm not doing that. Plus the way this forum goes, any definition I posit will be manipulated and I'll have to spend about 10 pages of posts saying what I did or did not say in the definition.

I can commiserate with you there. I can only suggest that failure to accurately communicate lies with the writer, not the reader, so in this case it would be your responsibility to help our perceptions match your intent.

SixteenBlue wrote:

It definitely is simplistic. I guess I'm just saying that if something needs a fair amount of oversight to actually function correctly, maybe it shouldn't be worshiped as the solitary solution to all problems for 300+ million people.

By government forces though, I don't just mean the regulation. I also mean taxation and government run programs as well. Earlier it was said that there would be no money for the government programs without capitalism, but that's not really true. There'd be no capital for those programs without taxes.

Edit: Cheeba actually just made this point. So what I'm saying is, maybe it's not capitalism that really led us to great things. Capitalism without the taxation means all of the grants in the image above are gone. So while capitalism did generate that money, it didn't do anything to actually support the research. The government did.

Sure, but that's a little different than "the problem is capitalism". I think the overall best way to look at capitalism is like any other raw force - it needs to be harnessed, not allowed to just do whatever it will. By that logic, I agree with you that what "led" America to greatness can't be really attributed to capitalism any more than a car can be congratulated on driving someone down a road. It's a factor, but the basic statement of "capitalism is what made America great" is an exclusive statement, which is bogus.

Bloo Driver wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

It definitely is simplistic. I guess I'm just saying that if something needs a fair amount of oversight to actually function correctly, maybe it shouldn't be worshiped as the solitary solution to all problems for 300+ million people.

By government forces though, I don't just mean the regulation. I also mean taxation and government run programs as well. Earlier it was said that there would be no money for the government programs without capitalism, but that's not really true. There'd be no capital for those programs without taxes.

Edit: Cheeba actually just made this point. So what I'm saying is, maybe it's not capitalism that really led us to great things. Capitalism without the taxation means all of the grants in the image above are gone. So while capitalism did generate that money, it didn't do anything to actually support the research. The government did.

Sure, but that's a little different than "the problem is capitalism". I think the overall best way to look at capitalism is like any other raw force - it needs to be harnessed, not allowed to just do whatever it will. By that logic, I agree with you that what "led" America to greatness can't be really attributed to capitalism any more than a car can be congratulated on driving someone down a road. It's a factor, but the basic statement of "capitalism is what made America great" is an exclusive statement, which is bogus.

I guess I kind of shifted my point there. Capitalism is the problem was kind of stupid. I really should have said "government funded programs are what made America great." They just happened to be funded by capitalism, which is a pretty reasonable tool for the job.