"But it's not. That's a separate topic, however, and our exchange is too voluminous already :-)"
...You agreed to that definition 2 posts up:
I said: "In a non-democratic system of governance, the state is not, in my view, a public enterprise accountable to the public"
You said: "I agree, with the proviso that I believe the same thing is true for contemporary democracies as well."
"It would be if "ownership" really meant ownership and "rewarded for ... efforts" really meant that. But your reply in the other sub-thread suggests that "ownership" is a misleading term here and you're basically talking about a vote and a license to work. See that other sub-thread for details."
All you offered in the other thread was that ownership wasn't what I said it was; you gave no details as to what else it might be.
"This sounds like a mystical incantation: things will just automagically happen because... well... I dunno... they will just happen. Markets are not magical, they work through well-understood mechanisms that boil down to, crudely, price and greed. I still don't see how these mechanisms would work in your utopia. You seem to think that the way it should happen is through rationally convincing people to commit their labor to a project. That might work for small-scale gardening or, say, art. I strongly doubt it would work for e.g. mining or public toilet cleaning. And what happens when you were unable to convince the sufficient number of people to produce enough fertilizer and there is not enough food to go round?"
I don't know why you don't see that what I'm proposing and the current reality is the same thing, in terms of how the market operates. If some person or group of people proposes a vision of the Public Good which is too resource-intensive, i.e. pricey, to be carried out for all the people who would be involved in its production, it won't happen because most people would not willfully deprive themselves of what they feel is the price of their labor.
Though there's probably a large number of people who'd love to take a trip to space next year, it won't happen because we (that is to say, people who live in a system which operates according to market principles) don't currently have a way to organize enough resources to make it happen without also having to sacrifice a lot of other things people consider to be important, even though the demand is there. And your fertilizer/food argument is another example of an obvious non-possibility. It doesn't usually take much to convince people that they need food if they don't want to die. If they're unwilling to do whatever necessary to make sure they have enough food to survive, which again, seems not to be much of a problem now, then they'll die. I don't know of many (or any) famines caused by apathy.
Your "price and greed" are more technically known as supply (price of production) and demand (use value or, if you like, desire or greed). I feel I've been pretty consistent in framing my proposition in those terms.
"Oh, there are a LOT of redneck white males and they reproduce quite successfully. As its members die off, the group just hires their children, cousins, nephews, etc."
No, no; you don't understand. We're not talking about a community of rednecks; we're talking, in your specific example, of a group redneck white males who form a group solely because its membership is exclusive to people who fit those three criteria; no women are in this group because they are not included in what this group thinks is the Public Good. Hell, it doesn't need to be that specific.
Even if we talk about a group of white people, joined together for the purpose of promoting Whiteness, the population of such a group will eventually require more resources than were available in the original plot of land this group settled on. They will then have to branch out and interface with groups who don't believe in promoting Whiteness or that the Public Good is just for white people. That will eventually lead this Whiteness group in one of two directions: conflict, stagnation, and decline, or dissolution. This should sound like an entirely plausible situation, and resolution thereof, to anyone with a knowledge of 19th/20th century European imperialism.
"The problem is, there is a lot of demand for the lifestyle of a rich and idle leisure class, there is not a lot of demand for the lifestyle of doing hard, dirty, and dangerous things that the society needs done to keep its head above the water."
Which is why private property ownership is problematic. It allows concentration of power such that a few can enjoy the lifestyle of the wealthy class by virtue of nothing other than ownership of private property. Without that concentration of power allowed by private property, there would be no such thing as a rich and idle leisure class because the leisure class represents a sub-optimally efficient distribution of resources (you must be aware of the marginal propensity to save/spend)--in clumps here and absence there. People may desire to have that kind of lifestyle, but if the price of satisfying the demand for it, in an equitable fashion, is too high, and there's no individual resource clumps to pay for it, it won't happen, just like we don't have any group saying it's going to send a million people into space next year.
You agreed to that definition 2 posts up
I did not. You are making a logic error: thinking that { not(A) is_not (B) } necessarily implies { (A) is (B) }. That is not so. Here A="democratic system of governance" and B="public enterprise accountable to the public".
Your "price and greed" are more technically known as supply (price of production) and demand (use value or, if you like, desire or greed).
No, you misunderstand. I am using "price and greed" to mean the following: the market signals what it likes and doe...
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.