Furthermore, a lot of government regulation of various businesses is liked by other businesses -- they may not like being regulated, but they might like others being regulated. This circumstance has caused some libertarians to come up with conspiracy theories to explain why some of their heroes are so willing to betray them. Conspiracy theories like claiming that big businesses are essentially government agencies or some such.

Furthermore, bbk is wrong about Communism. It is anything but egalitarian in practice, and it has a rich ruling elite, the Communist Party.

Personally, in the last few years, I've taken up cooking. It's surprisingly easy to learn and to get good at, and it's a practical skill that offers a very tangible sense of accomplishment.

Somewhat of a late reply, but remind me to harrass you for recipes next open thread. O.o

I wouldn't say I was projecting in light of what you said right there. You do have an anti-capitalist bias. Saying that we need a mixture of socialist and capitalist concepts is sort of just dressing up that bias to be more acceptable to others.

Quit trying to put thoughts in my head that simply aren't there. I don't have a bias against capitalism and my sentence doesn't imply that at all. You, do however, have a bias against socialism and socialist practices, which is why it is projection. Pointing out the horrible abuses that factually happened doesn't make me biased.

So has capitalism failed? Go tell that to someone in the middle ages who lived in a fief. Society has come a long way thanks to capitalism.

I'm not denying that the system we have in place today is better than fiefdom. What gave you the idea I would disagree?

Saying that it's been tried and failed seems rather simplistic to me. Saying that capitalism today is better than ever, but could be better yet, that is more like my view.

Then perhaps you should actually read my comments for what I'm saying and not what you think I'm saying.

One of my primary objections to early socialism is how entrenched it was in concepts of class warfare. It pitted the worker against the owner and rationalized socialism in terms of taking from the owner what rightly belonged to the "producer" of the wealth.

And a lot of this stemmed from the de facto class warfare that already existed, which capitalist business owners taking advantage of workers and abusing their rights.

This created situations where a production line worker who dropped out of high school was supposed to make just as much money as the engineer with a PhD who designed the products being produced - something that at its root is what was responsible for the eventual downfall of communist economies.

That would be true if the communist economies hadn't already been crippled by the oligarchy that took the place of the overthrown rulers in the power vaccuum that ensued.

This was largely an ideology of the uneducated masses protesting against their low standard of living, and fundamentally just about the immediate self interest of those workers.

Which makes some sense from the standpoint that a society needs lowly workers as much as higher workers. If everyone had a Ph.D. and was designing new trinkets, who would make them? Who would clean their offices? Who would serve/make their food? Etc. You can't simply look down on those who have less education with disdain and wish they would shut up and go away, because our society requires their services. If you take advantage of them to the point where they cease to be able to make a living, society will fall apart.

I still contend that none of this early socialism exists in modern social-democratic societies.

You can contend it all you want, and you can make divisions between "early" and "later" socialism, but you'd still be wrong. The practices and regulations that were put in place to protect the lowest workers were a direct result and consequence of socialist movements. Capitalism on its own didn't bring about anti-monopoly laws, regulations, etc, nor would it.

Especially gone are the crypto-Christian concepts of altruism that plagued early socialists, being replaced by pragmatism and common sense.

Again, altruism is not the same as Xian, nor is Xianity based on altruism. It is based on self-service to god and self-salvation through belief in god. That you continue to conflate the two does not speak well of you.

The closest we've come to a true capitalistic system didn't work. The workers were exploited, monopolies were formed, etc. We've since instituted laws and regulations to keep us from going too far in the capitalist direction.

I wouldn't say I was projecting in light of what you said right there. You do have an anti-capitalist bias. Saying that we need a mixture of socialist and capitalist concepts is sort of just dressing up that bias to be more acceptable to others.

So has capitalism failed? Go tell that to someone in the middle ages who lived in a fief. Society has come a long way thanks to capitalism. Saying that it's been tried and failed seems rather simplistic to me. Saying that capitalism today is better than ever, but could be better yet, that is more like my view.

But I don't hold onto a strong emotional attachment to the words. Rather, I tend to see socialism as an inferior word its historical grounds. It wasn't created by economists or philosophers, but rather by rabble rousers. Socialism was always heavily ideological. Emotive phrases such as "Capitalist sins" and "law of love" were printed in magazines with names such as Mother Earth, commune towns with names such as Altruia were formed, you could go on and on. Tolstoy even went so far as to accuse scientific progress of being a ruse used by oppressive governments to trick workers. And by oppressive governments, he meant capitalist governments. Reading through American socialist tracts, it's also evident that most American socialists considered the early USSR to be a great ideological success, fully ignorant of the injustice happening behind the scenes.

One of my primary objections to early socialism is how entrenched it was in concepts of class warfare. It pitted the worker against the owner and rationalized socialism in terms of taking from the owner what rightly belonged to the "producer" of the wealth. This created situations where a production line worker who dropped out of high school was supposed to make just as much money as the engineer with a PhD who designed the products being produced - something that at its root is what was responsible for the eventual downfall of communist economies. It's quite literally the physical labor of "making" things which was seen as the primary source of all wealth, with little or no emphasis given to either scientific research or capital. This was largely an ideology of the uneducated masses protesting against their low standard of living, and fundamentally just about the immediate self interest of those workers.

I still contend that none of this early socialism exists in modern social-democratic societies. There is none of that irrationality. Especially gone are the crypto-Christian concepts of altruism that plagued early socialists, being replaced by pragmatism and common sense. You don't see too many people decrying science as a tool of the capitalists anymore, or decrying ownership itself as a means of robbing the worker from the fruits of his labor. Everything that is left of socialism in those nations can be classified as either an efficiency of scale or an investment in human capital.

But it's only necessary to think of them as such when one assigns a very strong good/evil dichotomy to these words. I think you've shown that you do that.

Nice projection, but I do no such thing. I've said that the best system uses elements of both, which means that I don't view them as evil or good (else I would stand against the evil). Nor did I say that Capitalism is about hoarding currency; wherever did you get that idea?

On the contrary, you are the one whose comments border on "We are capitalist (yeah) not socialist (boo) and we are the best, and those other countries are the same as us with different political structures because socialism is handouts and all handouts are bad." You are the one who presents black and white situations where all atruism is bad, all handouts are bad, etc. Take the log out of your own eye before you try to criticize others.

Though I'm sure everyone figured that out. ;)

As for the concern over the wages of doctors, they are incredibly over-paid in this country...I would glady allow for a decrease in doctors wages. And the arguument that they would stop giving as much quality work has yet to be proven. I don't see that happening.

First of all Eric, most doctors pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical malpractice insurance per year as a legal requirement to practice medicine. My father has practiced Orthopaedic surgery in the state of Ohio for nearly forty years, and these premiums keep going up. Just a few years ago it was something to the tune of $200,000 annually, and the doctors must pay these fees out of their own pockets.

Secondly, most doctors have 11+ years of schooling after high school, so I don't think that a six-figure income is unreasonable given the extensive amount of education and training they have received (this is, of course, to say nothing of the massive debt that medical students accumulate as a result of all that education and the high level of stress involved in their work).

Because of all these disadvantages, there are many less dedicated people going into medicine, and those that do only wish to work part-time or limit their practices severely in order to be able to make a decent living. If these doctors could help everyone, I'm sure they would, but they are simply financially incapable of doing so. You obviously have a very poor opinion of doctors, but at the end of the day these are people that need to eat, too. So when you say:

People will always need to be healthy, and there will always be a need for that service.

A day may come when there are no more doctors to provide that service. There are many problems with the American medical system; doctors getting too much money is not one of them.

Shifting gears now, this one's directed at spaceman spif:

They're in line with the astronomical lawsuit settlements, though! I personally know some primary care physicians who quit because they could not keep up with malpractice insurance costs.

Glad to see someone knows the score. The following is an excerpt from Randy Cassingham's The True Stella Awards, a book all about real frivolous lawsuits and their consequences:

According to Newsweek magazine, U.S. docors order up between $50 billion and $100 billion of unneeded tests, consultations, and other "defensive medicine" to protect themselves against lawsuits - which is enough to provide medical insurance to all of the estimated forty million Americans who have none. Worse, the magazine points out, studies show that the vast majority of medical malpractice cases don't result in lawsuits, while about 80 percent of medical malpractice cases that are filed are bogus (152).

My personal feelings on this run quite deep, but let me just say this:

Shame on anyone who wants to belittle, scapegoat or exploit a person who has taken a dedicated oath to preserve life.

Whether a system is capitalist or socialist, communist or fascist, democratic or totalitarian, they all share one common characteristic: a crippling, extensive bureaucracy. One may want to start there if any real reforms are to be made instead of perpetuating an antiquated blame game.

The closest we've come to a true capitalistic system didn't work. The workers were exploited, monopolies were formed, etc. We've since instituted laws and regulations to keep us from going too far in the capitalist direction.

Speaking of which, have you heard of micro-loans?

I sure have. I spent a couple weeks modeling them in a developmental economics course. You must be specifically talking about the Grameen banks, because other forms of micro-loans have been attempted for years without much success. What makes Grameen loans different is that they let the lender asses a "credit rating" by taking features of social networking into consideration. They help fill a gap in rapid urbanization when full-fledged financial and governmental institutions haven't been formed to take up some of the roles that were once played by extended families. As altruistic as they are, the real reason why they are so successful is because they let lenders asses risk correctly and they have a very good repayment rate.