by evilgenius » Wed 29 Jul 2015, 12:27:07
And now it's probably time to talk about the place of private property under post-capitalism. This has already been started upon, but left unfinished. The Soviet idealists believed what Marx said, that there wasn't any room for private property. They did an interesting thing. They collectivized farming, and it didn't work. Following Marx you would have figured that it would have been as simple as using the principles, such as division of labor and organizational scale, discovered by the industrial revolution. But imagine what it was like for your average peasant farmer, who watched what was going on(should he/she have been lucky enough to live long enough to get into a collectivized situation) and held their tongue concerning their knowledge of how to do things better. They knew that if they opened it they would likely get shot. The way that was going to be enforced upon them was the way that was handed to them, with no input from their corner. As it was, eventually, the plots in the yards of most collectivized peasant's living quarters were more productive per acre than any of the land they were forced to work.
Today there is a kind of impact upon private property which effects people as well. It is connected to land, but is not a dispossessing force per se. The thing that effects people the most, that reaches them in terms of the relationship between their property and the state is interest rates. Without even realizing it capitalism has already evolved to exact a relationship that deals with private property. Marx was right, for communism to develop capitalism would have to evolve into it.
The problem with this(never mind the usury), of course, is that the way it has been implemented it works only one way, from the top down, just like under collectivization. It works until you hit zero, and then it starts to try to take from savers rather than benefit the borrower. It's done this way because in order to incentivize spending, and therefore help create an environment wherein entrepreneurs are willing to borrow(thus increasing the money supply), it seems necessary to dis-incentivize people from saving. What better way to do that than negative interest rates upon savings accounts. It's not as bad as it sounds, assuming there is actual deflation, if the rate of negative interest is not as great as the rate that the money supply is shrinking.
I would argue, however, that there is a better way. Long before negative savings rates ought to be considered in a contraction, I think the state should move in on the side of borrowers. By lowering borrower's payment amounts in line with negative interest rate targets they would do the same thing as what they expect an attack upon the notion of savings to do, increase spending within the economy within which entrepreneurs are active. Further, if nothing is actually done to the real periodic payment to the lender, if borrowers pay less because the state is making up the difference between the coupon amount of the loan and the negative interest amount, then the theoretical size of the money supply captured in an accounting sense remains as it was. And while this is in effect it can be determined where there was actual destructive usury, such that the coupon amount of those loans can be lowered. This way, in a time of serious doubt as to the economic foundation for taking chances, entrepreneurs, and some home buyers, would actually be incentivized to borrow due to the opportunity cost of not doing so.
So, you see, the bank bailouts were truly capitalist in nature. Instead of taking that money and spearheading an action that would have sought justice in terms of the rate structure the state propped up the capitalists. Why not, though. That was what they perceived as the thing to do. They could only see the one way relationship that interest rates had with private property.
What is justice? In strictest terms it is about making an injured party whole. You can use the metaphor of the traffic accident to understand it. Whether the accident happened within a roundabout, the UK way of readily adjusted interest rates on most loans, or a signalized intersection, the US way of mostly fixed rate loans, justice demands that the accident be cleared and traffic restored. In the sense that we are talking about justice for a whole society we are talking about it being about restoring traffic. But another aspect of justice is to see when the structure of something necessarily leads to crashes. When that is the case then a junction must be redesigned.
