I'm sorry, but I just have to say this...

Having spent the better part of the day splitting time between laundry, kitchen duty, a 5-year-old with conjunctivitis, and general household duties so the Birthday Girl could bust her hump painting the OTHER birthday girl’s bedroom, I did manage to do some reading on our new friend’s BLOG.

Without making too much of a mess, I thought I’d post some of what I found most “interesting” here, in the hopes of initiating a dialogue with a real, honest-to-God liberal activist.

Mr. Pasley’s most recent posts have a lot of focus on “profit” as a bad thing. When profit is the sum of all existence (as it is for some people), then it most certainly can be a bad thing… I agree. My problem is from Mr. Pasley’s insistence that profit is the root of all evil in the modern world, and that he equates profit with “capitalism”.

“Capitalism” is a Marxist term… literally. The first time it was coined was in the writings of Karl Marx as he defined capitalism as the “highest” order of social organization contemporary with the author. It was a necessary step in the process of social development that any society would have to work through on the “inevitable” path to socialist equality… according to Marx, anyway. The modern definition of the term is a little more objective than Marx’s original… it is the PRIVATE ownership of the means, manner, and material result of production and distribution of material or economic assets.

Socialism puts the MEANS of production in the hands of the State. Communism puts the MEANS and the RESULT of production into the hands of the State, with only the actual LABOR of the individual as their own. Neither socialism nor communism requires an individual’s interest in the MEANS or the RESULT of production… only in the LABOR of that production. No private ownership of land, manufacturing, distribution, or utilization can exist outside of the organs of the State.

Let’s pretend I am a baker, and I bake bread for a living here in the US. I am expected to purchase flour, salt, pans and an oven (making the MEANS and RESOURCES of production my own). I then mix the flour and salt with water, place the dough in the pan, and bake the dough in the oven. The resulting bread is then MINE, which I can use to feed myself and my family, or I can TRADE for other needed items like shelter, additional food, clothing, or more flour and salt to make more bread.

So, I make bread day in and day out, and make a moderate living for myself and my family. However, I want my children to be able to live a BETTER life than I am living now, so I choose to stop making bread, and to instead dig ditches for a wage that is twice what I was making living on the fruits of my bread-making efforts. I am now SELLING my labor for a WAGE that I determine to be profitable to myself and my family. Had the wage for digging ditches not been adequate to increase the level of prosperity I deemed necessary to change my “job”, I am under no compulsion to change my job… I can always make my bread and live within my moderate means. It is completely up to me.

Now, let’s pretend I am a baker in the Soviet Union (the closest historical example we have to the “utopia” that Marx envisioned). The flour, salt, pans and oven I need to ply my trade are provided for me, but since I have no say in the procurement of those items, the quality of those items is also out of my ability to control. So, I make my bread. When the components are of good quality, the bread is good and people will buy it. That should mean that with good ingredients, I could expect to make a good living, but the PRODUCT I am making (bread) is not mine to sell or trade… it is the STATES, because they own the MEANS of production and thus, they own the RESULTS of production… the bread. They also determine at what PRICE I can sell the bread I made, rather than allow the people BUYING the bread to determine if it is good enough to warrant 25 kopeks a loaf, or only 10 kopeks if the bread is poor quality do to the ingredients that I had no say in gathering. The State may decide that, because there are twice as many loaves of bread as are needed, and the Government is running at a deficit, they will charge one ruble per loaf generate extra revenue, even though NO ONE WILL BUY THE BREAD at all.

(NOTE: If you think I am exaggerating in my example, the above situation happened no less than FIVE times between 1917 and 1927, and resulted in “bread riots” that killed an estimated 250,000 people across the former USSR.)

Thus, the only component of the production formula that is actually MINE is my labor. The bad part of this is that they don’t need MY labor to produce the bread… the State owns the oven, the pans, and the ingredients, so all they need is someone to mix the dough and put it in the oven. No consideration is given to quality (labor has no quality control inherent in its makeup), so almost no skill is required.

I can thus very easily be directed by the State to dig ditches instead of baking bread, based only on the needs of the State. They have lots of bakers, and not enough ditch-diggers, so I am fingered to dig… at the same wage as the baker. Where the job of ditch-digger draws a wage twice that of the baker in the US, in the USSR, the wage is determined by the State according to my “ability” to produce labor… not ditches or bread.

Now, I know this is a juvenile and terribly simple example of a very complex topic of study… but it works.

Mr. Pasley seems to think that the Industrial Revolution was a “bad” thing in regards to the development of society. Obviously, extreme examples of abuse or greed can be found, but looking at it from an historical perspective, what can we definitively say about the results of the Industrial Revolution on the common man?

Prior to 1800, the value of a day’s labor hadn’t changed much at all in the 1,300 years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire (with some glaring exceptions, I know… I’m making general statements here). As a rule of thumb, the wage for a day’s labor was a day’s keep (food, shelter and protection for one day). The “profit” came from an individual’s ability to “sell” his labor at a rate greater than he was spending it, and this was very difficult. This is why Bede writes of a “denarii deum” (sp?) in the 8th Century as the wage of a day’s work and it is still applicable and understandable to the readers of Poor Richard’s Almanac when they read “A penny saved is a penny earned”… referring to the daily wage of Georgian England.

Then, we look at post-Industrial England. No longer hampered by the fact that most of the arable land in England was owned by the aristocracy and able to earn a wage in the very busy and very profitable textile factories and iron works, the average wage in 1830 in England is 2s2d (2 shillings and 2 pennies, or just under 30 pennies). By 1870, the average was up to 4s3d, or 51 pennies.

Now, does this equate to instant wealth and prosperity? Obviously not. With increased wages we see increased cost in housing and food, both of these often supplied exclusively by the employer. However, monopolies and cartels are NOT something that pure “capitalism” advocates as beneficial to the system. Simply read Smith’s Wealth of Nations and you’ll see that he (and the age he stemmed from) understood the importance of a free market economy to the individuals’ well being.

I am perfectly aware that abuses and tragic examples exist of the failings of our own free market system here in the US, just as any free market system would have failings and short-comings. I am also perfectly aware the every single example of a socialist or communist system of socioeconomic ideology has failed utterly and completely to achieve its promised goals.

My questions to the critics of OUR system are these: Which ideology do you think has MORE examples of success and individual prosperity, socialism or free market capitalism? Can one find an equivalent example within a free market society to the 6-10 million people that died of famine and starvation between 1928 and 1936 in the Soviet Union? Is there a capitalist system failure to compare to the 19 million deaths due to malnutrition and disease in Communist China between 1949 and 1958? Where is the capitalist counter to the 1994-1997 famine casualties, numbering 1.7 million souls, resulting from the domestic agendas of the socialist programs in North Korea? Why is it that the POOREST 1% of the American population can still live a lifestyle that gives them access to better housing, health care, and dietary intake than 65% of the population of the entire Southern Hemisphere… at NO COST to them?

I want to see the undeniable examples of the horror of our free market system when compared with the socialist "ideal" I hear so much about... then I will honestly consider the converation as "two-sided" and rational in its make up.