[PeterCrackhead]

You can only become a billionaire if you exploit people.

[Basilissa]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

You can only become a billionaire if you exploit people.

So? God is totally OK with that.

[Johny Joe Hold]

Originally Posted by Basilissa

So? God is totally OK with that.

Excellent, Sister Basilissa. You have put Crack-in-head in his place but good.

[PeterCrackhead]

Originally Posted by Johny Joe Hold

Excellent, Sister Basilissa. You have put Crack-in-head in his place but good.

Funny Matthew 19:23-24 contradicts this statement.... I guess you pass over this verse.

[Johny Joe Hold]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

Funny Matthew 19:23-24 contradicts this statement.... I guess you pass over this verse.

Crack-in-Head, I'm really busy and prefer not to spend my time going over what I've learned in hundreds of sermons at Landover Baptist. If you would have spent your time there instead of sitting at home making up smart a$$ posts you would not make such huge errors in reading the Bible. But, OK, I will help you out.

First, you need to be reminded it is what the Bible says that counts. You are dabbling in the old liberal game of "what it means."

Sister Bass pointed you to scripture about owning slaves. Those passages tell us straight out that if one owns slaves and other property, is a rich person, God has blessed him. God has given him a prepaid passage to heaven.

Jesus tells us clearly in the passage you refer to that it is difficult to become rich. Think how difficult it was for President Trump to become a billionaire. He went through bankruptcies and did not pay people who did inferior work.

So, Crack-in-Head, please spare us your misguided sermons.

[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

You can only become a billionaire if you exploit people.

To exploit something is to put it to work, to make it useful. I guess you would prefer a world where nobody organizes people to make them useful, so we can all be equally poor together.

I write about the word "Exploitation" here, don't worry, it's only a few sentences, so it's compatible with your short attention span.

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

Sounds like a Christian theocratic wet-dream to me.

We do not commit Onanism, not even while unconscious. Please do not use this vulgar phrase again.

Do you plan on creating a secret police that enforces the Biblical Laws?

It won't be secret. And we won't need a new police force, the current one will do just fine:

[PeterCrackhead]

Originally Posted by Jeb Stuart Thurmond

To exploit something is to put it to work, to make it useful. I guess you would prefer a world where nobody organizes people to make them useful, so we can all be equally poor together.

I write about the word "Exploitation" here, don't worry, it's only a few sentences, so it's compatible with your short attention span.

No, it doesn’t... I prefer to keep my replies terse because brevity is a virtue on message boards.

[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

No, it doesn’t...

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition:

exploitation

n. The act of employing to the greatest possible advantage.

Merriam-Webster:

Definition of exploit
transitive verb

1 : to make productive use of : UTILIZE

exploiting your talents
exploit your opponent's weakness

Cambridge English Dictionary:

the use or development of something for profit or progress in business:

The awards recognize the best new products or processes suitable for commercial exploitation.

The exploitation of advanced technologies will be necessary for economic success.

I prefer to keep my replies terse because brevity is a virtue on message boards.

We'll be the judge of that.

Previously you said it's because you're using an ipad. Even ipads use predictive text which is very fast once you get the hang of using it. Why are you changing your story?

[PeterCrackhead]

Originally Posted by Jeb Stuart Thurmond

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language...Merriam-Webster...Cambridge English Dictionary:

https://socialistworker.org/2011/09/...n-exploitation

[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

https://socialistworker.org/2011/09/...n-exploitation

Well, when it comes to the final authority on the English language, I'll have to admit that Webster is trumped by the Socialist Worker...

Does the Socialist Whiner also explain why you changed your story on why you can't write more than a tweet at a time?

Originally Posted by Socialist Whiner

Marx

You're using an ipad touchscreen to recommend we follow every word of a guy who died before the invention of the typewriter?

Originally Posted by Socialist Whiner

...Every dollar collected by capitalist landlords

Every dollar? So you think electricity, water, and building maintenance just appear for free? In Cuba they do, sort of. No slumlords around here:



Meanwhile in Syria, oh wait, it's still Cuba:

Originally Posted by Socialist Whiner

Exploitation forms the basis of all the profits shared among the entire capitalist class.

Have you ever done something and ended up saying "Wow, that was worth the work I put in. Actually, it was MORE than worth the work I put in!" That's profit. That's "exploitation". If what you make is worth more than the effort it took, you become a leader in capitalism. Then more and more people join you in producing things worth more than the effort they took to make.

If you've ever done something and then said "What a waste of time, all that effort and now I've got nothing to show for it" - that's a lack of profit. In capitalism you are kept safely out of the way. In leftist systems, you end up in charge of something, and now you're wasting other people's effort and leaving nothing to show for it.

Originally Posted by Socialist Whiner

"Instead of the conservative motto 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!'"

Resulting in crap wages and no work getting done. In 100% of experiments.

[PeterCrackhead]

Originally Posted by Jeb Stuart Thurmond

Meanwhile in Syria, oh wait, it's still Cuba:

Yeah, capitalism never leaves people in poverty...


I guess Mumbai missed your memo on how great capitalism is for everyone?

[Johny Joe Hold]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

Yeah, capitalism never leaves people in poverty...
https://images.indianexpress.com/201...-slums-759.jpg

I guess Mumbai missed your memo on how great capitalism is for everyone?

If ever a picture could describe a city of lazy people you provided it. All those shacks did not produce a day of honest labor. Here is a picture of what hard work and capitalism gives us:

[PeterCrackhead]

Originally Posted by Johny Joe Hold

Here is a picture of what hard work and capitalism gives us:

[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

I guess Mumbai missed your memo on how great capitalism is for everyone?

Wikipedia: After India's independence in 1947...the nationalisation of major industries and the banking sector...In the 1960s, the Communist Party of India formed India's first democratically elected communist government when it won elections in the states of Kerala and later West Bengal. However, when a global recession began in the late 1970s, economic stagnation, chronic shortages and state inefficiency left many disillusioned with state socialism...

Wikipedia: In the late 1980s and 1990s, India's government began to systematically liberalise the Indian economy by pursuing privatisation...

Also Mumbai. Love to see the equivalent in Havana.

CATO institute: What would the impact on social indicators have been had India commenced economic reform one decade earlier, and enjoyed correspondingly faster economic growth and improvements in human development indicators?...with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived...

In one decade Indian socialism killed as many children as Hitler murdered in the same timeframe, but it's Indian kids that died so the left doesn't care.

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

Hey, at least we got shirtwaists from the deal. Whatever shirtwaists were. That's your first clue that your data is obsolete. The second clue is that it happened more than a century ago.

Meanwhile, in Red China:

Xinjiang Movie Theater, Xinjiang, China, 1977 (667 deaths)

And instead of making shirtwaists, they were being bored to tears by movies like this:

[gamer4Christ]

Originally Posted by PeterCrackhead

I guess Mumbai missed your memo on how great capitalism is for everyone?

If poor people always make better music, then India must be very, very poor:

Damn you Indian economic reform! I want Sitar Beat Vol. 3!

[_The Earthling_]

Originally Posted by Jeb Stuart Thurmond

Have you ever done something and ended up saying "Wow, that was worth the work I put in. Actually, it was MORE than worth the work I put in!" That's profit. That's "exploitation". If what you make is worth more than the effort it took, you become a leader in capitalism. Then more and more people join you in producing things worth more than the effort they took to make.

He's not going to "get" this abstract stuff, and he probably also doesn't know or care what shirtwaists are. We have to speak about things he understands.

Take Polish porn. You take sex, something people will do for free, and you do it in front of a camera that you already have. No costs, little effort, and yet you end up with something valuable - Polish porn. That's profit. When you hear the word "profit", think Polish porn.

In fact, it's so profitable that you download it for free, yet they still keep making more. So if you like free stuff, support capitalism.

If you've ever done something and then said "What a waste of time, all that effort and now I've got nothing to show for it" - that's a lack of profit. In capitalism you are kept safely out of the way. In leftist systems, you end up in charge of something, and now you're wasting other people's effort and leaving nothing to show for it.

Communist countries never made porn, Cuba and North Korea don't even have camgirls. But imagine if you made a porn movie where you had fat ugly Americans screwing in swamp while mosquito bite them. Lots of effort for a useless product. That's unprofitable activity.

[Red Army]

It is evident to me that nobody here understand Marx, and that includes my friend Peter.First of all, exploitation occurs. It is when you produce something for others. And it happens both in Capitalist and Communist societies. And it is ok that it happens. It is the effect of working.


Problem is who gets the profit of this exploitation.


For example: when in a hypothetic communist Arab country, some workers go everday to the oil exploitation, and make billions a day in profit, you are not expecting that they get billions every day, aren't you? If so, no worker would want to work in a, let's say, shoe shop, for cents a day. This would create a new class of uber rich, while mantaining the rest of society in poverty.


So who gets the benefits of exploitation is the real question. In capitalist countries, it is the owner of the company. Mostly other companies (investments firms) but also mom & pops who own little business are getting more than what they work for, if they have employees.


In bureaucratic pseudo communist countries, the bureaucrats get it. Like the Castro in Cuba, and the CP in China.


In a communist society, the profit is evenly divided among all the society and becomes common property, and workers together decide the destination of it.


But exploitation occurs in every society there is.


Even Sundar Pichai is exploited by Google, and you would not tell by the car(s) he drives.

[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Originally Posted by Red Army

...some workers go everday to the oil exploitation, and make billions a day in profit, you are not expecting that they get billions every day, aren't you?

Lots of oil workers basically do, judging by how local separatist movements always pop up the moment a place strikes oil. Scotland, Texas, Alberta, those are just the ones that came to mind.

I wonder if the "resource curse" is not a real thing, it's just that when you have oil, you also usually need a dictatorship ruthless enough to crush the inevitable separatists.

That's politics for you. Politics makes people dumb. Dumb dumb politics. Which brings us to...

Originally Posted by Red Army

In a communist society, the profit is...common property, and workers together decide the destination of it.

Have you ever watched what happens when multiple people must together decide the destination of ANYTHING?

Politics. Politics. Politics.

We need less politics, not more.

When you have needs that you want satisfied, where do you go for quicker results? City hall or a shopping mall? Pennsylvania Avenue or a hipster boutique street?

Under communism this store would actually be black market. Which is not as cool as it sounds.

Which would you rather be doing? Browsing Che Gevera t-shirts on Amazon with one-click same-day shipping, or trying to convince a Texan roughneck that no, he didn't actually put that oil in the ground himself?

Just another day in paradise.

90% of politics consists of people complaining about the state of politics. 90% of commerce consists of people contently buying things they judge to be worth the money - and the other 10% consists of rants ending with "...and that's why I'm going to do business with someone else". You can't do that in politics, the only other viable political party is at least as bad.

Consider that an average grocery store in a capitalist country has 40,000 items, for sale every day.

Now imagine if instead of that, we voted every 2 years on what everybody will eat for breakfast. There's only two parties: the burnt-toast party and the cold gruel party.

That's the difference between commerce and politics. That is why we want as much of life as possible to be moved from the realm of politics to the realm of commerce, and not the other way around.

[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Originally Posted by Jeb Stuart Thurmond

That's the difference between commerce and politics. That is why we want as much of life to be moved from the realm of politics to the realm of commerce, and not the other way around.

The Spectator talks about another "magic quality of business. It is the only area of human activity where you get paid to change your mind.

In politics, in punditry, in academia, there is great value attached to consistency. Changing your mind risks loss of face. Your ability to deliver plausible generalizations counts for a lot. There is social pressure to adopt the dominant frame of thought....

[Commerce] actively rewards heterogeneity of thought. The more prevalent a belief is among your competitors, the greater the gains to be had from disproving it. When everyone else zigs, it pays to zag."

This is why the clever-but-useless class attack the merchant class for being meanies - instead of trying to be polite and go along with the herd, business is all about standing out and zagging even though the current fashion is to zig.

[MitzaLizalor]

Originally Posted by Red Army

when in a hypothetic communist Arab country etc.

I'm not sure how hypothetical you're thinking of. The nearest thing would be the Ba'ath party wouldn't it? If it still exists. Iraq, Syria, Libya at one time, never did too well, oil notwithstanding. By my standards "not too well" barely scratches the surface. Horrendous catastrophic nightmare would be nearer the mark – but of course, you wake up from nightmares.

Did you notice in Brother Thurmond's post the following (10 second) excerpt?

What do you think happened to anyone thinking "it's right to rebel" under Mao's regime? Would you rather have been rebelling there or under Saddam or the current regime in Syria – the latter two being Ba'athist administrations?