On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 08:12:16AM +1000, Pidgorny, Slav (GEUS) wrote:
There are also companies that have created a lot of wealth publishing books that are out of copyright such as the Bible. If I found some examples of companies doing no business other than printing Bibles (and I'm sure that there are some of them) would that convince you that the Bible is "as capitalist as it gets
Yes - same applies to any product that is sold and bought on free market. Profiting from making goods and services such as Bibles, communist-themed t-shirts or free software support,
you do realise that there was buying and selling of things for thousands of years before capitalism was conceived of, or became possible? and that the free market is a conceptual ideal, not a real thing? or that a free market isn't required by capitalism - capitalism works just fine without one, and in fact due to the the concentrated accumulation of wealth, tends towards monopolies. regulation - government intervention - is required to prevent markets from diverging further and further from the ideal of the free market towards a market captured by monopolists.
Profiting from making goods and services such as Bibles, communist-themed t-shirts or free software support, is the essence of capitalism.
no, it isn't. capitalism is the use of private capital to amass more capital, specifically through investment in the means of production (factories, for example) buying and selling things is orthogonal to that - i.e. it's something that a capitalist can do, but isn't required. it's also something that non-capitalist individuals and organisations can do. i blame the americans and their idiot conflation of numerous concepts into simplistic sloganeering propaganda. it doesn't take long listening to enthusiastic but ignorant proponents of "capitalism" to realise that it's just a vague, catch-all word that roughly means "anything i think of as good - self-determination, democracy, wealth, mom, apple pie, kittens!". The opposite, everything bad and evil that happens in the world is labelled as "government" or "socialism". You may as well just use the words "Good" and "Evil", they carry as much meaning. this is not reality, this is ignorance espoused by the victims of decades worth of propaganda. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #46: waste water tank overflowed onto computer