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If you have authority to reshape basic norms of current society what are the things you wish to remove / add ?
Lets talk about problems of current social structure and solution to construct a better society. Basic norms of society can cover general belief, monetary system, method of education and everything.
Topics:
social transformation
John Allyn
Barry Palmer 50+
Lejan . 30+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
i guess not, because if you knew what it means, you would not worry about it multiplying. it would be a wonderful thing if it did. alas, it refuses to multiply, and we have to work hard to accumulate it.
Lejan . 30+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
let me do that for you. excerpt from wikipedia:
"In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital are those already-produced durable goods that are used in production of goods or services."
so you believe that durable goods, like tools, machines, buildings, half made products just multiply on their own. and that would be a bad thing.
Lejan . 30+
Further classifications of capital that have been used in various theoretical or applied uses include:
Financial capital, which represents obligations, and is liquidated as money for trade, and owned by legal entities. It is in the form of capital assets, traded in financial markets. Its market value is not based on the historical accumulation of money invested but on the perception by the market of its expected revenues and of the risk entailed. ...
Krisztián Pintér 200+
you can twist it all day long, but the fact remains a fact: capital don't grow automatically. it grows in able hands. and when it does, we can celebrate, because that's civilization.
Lejan . 30+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
and now you claim that i twist the definitions. my god! you lack the understanding of basic terms in economics. how do you plan to understand the monetary base if you can't tell apart money from capital?
Lejan . 30+
So again, I was using colloquially terms to describe what I would remove from the given society and if this drives you nuts I just can't help you. In my native language German it is common to use the term 'capital' as I did and no economist would complain as they can classify the context. So I can't help you if you refuse to understand what my intention was, even though I tried to make this point more clear to you.
And because this sort of debate is not adding any useful content here I hope you'll get over it one day that I dared to degrade your holy definitions of economics language... ;o)
Krisztián Pintér 200+
what would you remove in layman's terms? try to avoid using economic terms. explain in some detail what is that thing that you want to remove, because it is certainly not capital.
Lejan . 30+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
Lejan . 30+
Fritzie Reisner 100+
When you say that you don't like interest rates, are you saying that if one person lends another money for one year so that the other person can use it to launch a business, the person who borrows should not give the lender anything for the use of that money? Or are you saying that the lender's return for lending to the entrepreneur must be in some tangible form (like goods or a share of the business) rather than as a monetary payment for the use of the money over a certain period of time?
Lejan . 30+
the given concept of interest rates is related to the existing monetary system which itself is based on debts only. Unfortunately the given rules in this system are based on exponential growth of those debts, caused by interest rates. The moment I pay back my debt with this 'extra' charge, someone else has to contract a debt to actually 'create' this extra money, which wasn't there before if I was the very first person who was lending money the very first time.
Exponential growth in debts does not effect society much at the begining, as it needs some time to gain its momentum for its negativve impact. Yet at the moment it gains its critical value, it accelerates that fast, that the whole system has to fail. Those events can be seen in the US and in Europe at the moment, and both haven't even reached its maximum nagative impact yet, because it gets feed with billions over billions of tax money and even more debts get created as well.
Our current economy has suffered, suffers and will suffer over and over again by this inherent system error, which is also the cause that wealth will more and more concentrate around a minority of people and leaves the majority behind and runnig faster and faster in the 'hamster wheel'.
In my view, the monopoly for the creation for 'money' belongs to the people of a nation only and not in private hands. By this a loan for someone who is starting a business does not need to have any interest rates, as its positive impact to the society (jobs, goods, innovation) is reward and beneficial enough for the good of the nation and the people who form it.
Those thoughts frequently met with hostile reactions from neoliberal sides, yet I am quite certain that we could create a better system than we have today, which would serve better the majority of the people, insead just a view on top of the pyramid.
Therefore I would remove the exponential growth of depts (interest rates, compound interest, etc.) for a more stable world.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
With a part of that $1100 dollars, he could pay me back for the use of my money. It seems fair to pay me back something for giving him the loan, as my lending him the money prevented me from opening my own shop to make a sell wooden puzzles. Had I used it myself, I could probably have earned $1100 as well, but I leant it to him instead, foregoing my best alternative use of my money.
He did not need to go into debt to pay me back. He just ran his bakery, which he couldn't have launched without the loan from me.
I see no exponential growth in debt here.
Lejan . 30+
The concept lays much deeper in the system itself and the only document I know in English, which describes it to some degree is part of a video called 'Zeitgeist Addendum'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewGMBOB4Gg
This video is highly controversial and I can only advise to watch it with wake skepticism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_movie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_Addendum
Regarding the US monetary system which is described I can only assume that it is stating the facts. For the banking system in my country it does uncover the working principle so far and I keep analyzing this topic to get a better understanding why our economy fails repeatingly.
Yet even though I consider the style of the Zeitgeist presentation to sensational, it does sketch the concept I was ponting at faster than I was able to write it to you.
As you are from the US I would be interested in what you think about the given examples and if they apply, as they claim, in your experience, in case you are interested to watch this video.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Oops, I didn't realize it was two hours long and described as anti-semitic. I will try to find an online summary of the monetary system part.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
There were a number of assertions that I remember, and you can tell me whether these were some that raised questions to you.
There was a claim that market systems must inevitably lead to corruption. This is an unsupportable claim, so the lack of support in the video is understandable.
The meaning of this surprising claim was more clear when the speaker went on to define as corruption actions that have the effect of displacing employees or small businesses. For example, innovations that allow things to be produced at lower cost without sacrifice of quality that involve replacing some workers with technology count in the film as corrupt. Similarly, when a large business moves into an area and people start shoipping there rather than at the boutique businesses in the neighborhood, this phenomenon is seen as corrupt.
I don't think one can legitimately call these corrupt.
One claim from the excerpt that is true of the economy of the United States is that advertising effectively lures consumers into buying things they do not need. Advertising is much more about persuasion through images than about sharing useful information so that potential customers can make rational decisions. I don't think anyone disputes this.
Another thing that is true is that mass-produced products are increasingly built not to last.
There tends to be a tradeoff between the price of an item and the quality of its crafting (which also suggests in most cases the length of time before one would need to replace it). This fact may suggest that the poor and middleclass are more likely to consume these shoddily constructed and short-lasting versions of things.
I don't remember hearing about interest rates for lending money. Interest reflects the fact that money has alternative uses.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Lejan . 30+
sorry that I wasn't clear on this two hour movie where the chapter of the monetary system is located.It begins at time 6:57 with 'Modern Money Mechanics' and ends at time 25:00 and gives a pretty good understanding how money gets created and what negative effect interest has in the system.
By taking the explained concept into your bakery example, you became 'the bank' and would be able to create this $1000 simply out of nothing. Then you would claim your interest rate based on what? The baker itself is actually creating something of real value every day and works hard for a year to pay back the loan + the interest. By comparing the created real value and working effort in between you, the bank, and the baker (not ba(n)ker!) :o) who do you think got the short end of the stick? It took you less than 5 minutes to generate the numbers in your computer and to transfer it to the bakers banking account, yet it took the baker a whole year of hard labour to pay those numbers back. So is this a fair deal? I don't think so, yet it is the underlaying principle of the monetary system of all modern nations.
And who is actually paing for your (the banks) interest rate? It is not only the baker himself, it's the people, the customers, who are bying bread at a higher price as necessary.
So what ever you buy for yourself, you are not only paying extra for the profit of the producer and the salesman, yet also for the banks which had the smallest effort from all, yet the the highest profit in the long run. To me this is a parasitic 'lifeform' and a burden for all working people.
So if money was an exchange system for 'work' only, like a 'service in return', there wouldn't be any billionaire as 24/7 was a natural constant for anybodies income.
In some areas new 'exchange systems' and local currencies got installed to find a way out of the world wide debt race and I hope it will spread out for the good of the people so that they find time again for their lifes.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Or what if I made $1000 worth of bakery equipment, but my friend the baker lived 3000 miles away. So I sold it to a local baker for $1000 but then sent my friend the baker the $1000 rather than the machine I worked so hard to build.
Lejan . 30+
This conept works more like a form of 'risk capital' what brings people working together, what usually can be a good thing...
James Zhang 30+
1) Be more understanding
2) Be more curious
Krisztián Pintér 200+
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Krisztián Pintér 200+
Ian Sheane
James Zhang 30+
Tanka Poudel
James Zhang 30+
Ideally and in my opinion alone, everything should be open-source'd. If everything is open-sourced, then the government's only job is to protect our welfare and regulate our open-source usage. Government should basically just make sure no one's being totally abusive.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
I guess what I am saying is that it would be great if the inclination to be condescending or scornful of "the other" were , as you say, removed as a human inclination.