Ars Regendi Simulation Forum

@Helsworth
It really depends on what kind of equality you are talking about.
If you mean equality under the law then that is a factor of corruption and ease of access to political power.
Or if you mean income equality that would be because not every person values every other person and there labor exactly the same.
But if you mean equality of opportunity then that would be because the society that produces more makes life for a wider margin of people bearable and among that wider margin weaker people that would not have lived in the less productive society are given a chance.

Tribalism produces more equality because only thous with a strong will to live go on long enough to make the next generation in a society of surplus the members with a strong will more often then not end up in some form of high standing social or fiscal.

Thous families in agricultural societies have only 2 ways of keeping all that land.
1. By force of arms/armies
under this condition these families would need to offer there security forces some incentive to protect them so they would have to offer them a part of the resource pool in exchange for holding said land in the name of that family said landlords could do near anything they wanted with the land and people on the land so long as the families received there share of the product this along with a number of other landlords to hold the remainder of the land that the family could not hold personally created some of the oldest known forms of government.
(The unlimited privilege of that family and there landlords to use force in any way they see fit is the core nature of government)

2. By Moral guidelines/traditions
this might be called a form of proto-laws and in this condition depending on the how and the who of these laws could determine if it is just a form of nobles republic aka the unlimited authority of an oligarchy or the more limited authority of a Constitutional republic.
Building a society on force of arms alone can have only one beginning and that being the oligarchy given enough time even that society may evolve into something else.
But building on a framework of morals and ideals has a much wider margin for variety.
An important thing to recognize is that the law and the government are two separate things if the government is allowed to act above the law then it will grow corrupt and deformed from the founding intent of said law this also points out the critical need placed on how that law is formed.
For an effective set of laws to say nothing of the good or ill of these laws they must stem closely to the culture that will harbor them.
After all you can not expect a person who grew up in a law structure based on animist culture to easily accept the law structure of a Islamic or Jewish culture.

So no thous families did not keep ALL of the surplus they would have always had to use some of it to trade for other needed goods or to keep security loyal.

Most of the kingdoms in the middle ages consisted of a variation of the first option i described above.
As they were formed with a more militant need this resulted in the governments holding the unlimited privilege of the king and landlords to use force.
This legalized use of force by thous holding some form of government office meant that thous landlords are not private persons just because the hold of the king was not as strong is it would become later on.
A private person in that era was a rare thing limited to vagabonds and a few merchants that managed to make enough wealth for themselves to avoid becoming a serf or some other bound person to one particular lord or another.
The private person is not granted unequal favor or fortune by the government to whom they shares geographical residence with.
The landlords are granted the favor that they may manage and use the land they lord over as well as the serfs within to any means they choose this privilege makes them non-private persons.
With some exceptions taxes were impractical seeing as unless there was a desire to start a famine the amount of food taken from the serfs was enough to serve desires of the landlords and other nobles.
This made any place not able to grow enough food for thous living there less wanted unless the area had some tactical value or was good for bragging rights.

During the middle ages the Islamic world had more places that fit into option number two and so they had more tradition in law systems and as a result this made it easier to trust others as the penalty for bad reputation could mean the end of your craft and the end of your craft could mean death by starvation or some form of slavery.

Capitalism when the government does not dip in and grant favor or fortune to preferred players does not grow distorted.
Favor(protection from laws normally applied to all even government)
Fortune(Subsides)

Capitalism requires some form of option two it can not exist in any system that leans to much on option one.

A person could be considered a form of regenerating capital
and unless you embrace slavery every person owns them self besides your definition would be incorrect.
The closest correct definition based on the direction you took that thought in would be to say that the persons who know how to create capital most effectively rule.
Sort of a mouth full that one.
The power to create something far surpasses the power to claim it.

Three things to take note of about this post.
1. I am not Pro or Con Anarcho-Capitalism i was only explaining in my previous post the effects and my observation of the political leanings of this nation simulator.
2. Government and Laws are not the same thing.
3. All political forms decay with time and once they get far enough in that process they start doing things no one intended them to do.

Neoliberalism was tried in Chile under Pinochet and, more recently, under Menem in my own country. The results were disastrous.
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I admit I only skimmed the thread, that's my fault.

And I actually agree. I'm far from supporter of neo-liberal reforms in a way, that they're good. Why I think they should be enacted, is just because how bad and disastrous they are.
Unfortunately most of neo-liberals are aware of that and that's why they always go big government when their asses are on the line. Enforced neo-liberal reforms (without totalitarism of Pinochet regime) would move both politics and economy to new modes of organising, mostly self-managing. That I'm sure of.

@spitefire
Hunter gatherer societies weren't surplus based societies. They couldn't store food for rainy days. They needed to be constantly working to provide sustenance for themselves. They could not dedicate free time to other pursuits (be they scientific, religious, or technical), because they had so little time. And the nature of their survival efforts were extremely labor intensive. If they weren't united by a code of honor and justice, they couldn't depend upon each other to form proper hunting parties - and be efficient in the hunt. And the spoils of the hunt were divided equally. Whilst the agricultural society, one could store for a whole year with a bountiful crop, or more. All that free time gave the people the ability to engage in other domains. The surplus societies built the ziggurats and the pyramids, not the tribal societies. That centralization of surplus in the hands of a few is the root cause of social inequality.

Laws are enforced by the government. The judiciary branch is still part of government. The two primal functions of government were those of providing justice and protection for its people. When talking about history, one cannot skip on the history of money. The purpose of money has always been that of provisioning the government. The role of taxation is to move resources from the private sector to the public sector. Taxes don't finance anything; they just ensure a constant demand for the government's own money. And the idea of apolitical money is a blatant lie and most dangerous myth. All money (what the sovereign accepts as legal tender by law), all money, be it tablet or bone tokens, parchment notes, metal coins, or fiat - money is debt and it is always a government issued liability. (S-I)+(G-T)+(X-M)=0 The government deficit equals the net surplus of the nongovernment sector in a given fiscal year.
The great land owners kept all the produce of their lands. The serfs who worked the land got paid in grain very little. Those who centralized the stock of grain and barley, wood, and cattle - they decided when and where to circulate these things.

Private credit has always existed. But private tallies and debt tokens are not LEGAL TENDER. Money is always a government issued liability. People deciding to overthrow their present government, or migrating toward another region for a better life - aren't against government. They simply want to organize elsewhere a better government, one that will actually serve them.
Threat and reward have always been required to move humanity forward. Voluntarism never could have created cities or the necessary infrastructure to increase the population and provide for those new souls.
The trade between one who owns capital and one who doesn't own anything is never a FAIR trade.

And as for "equality of opportunity" vs "social justice". It's all bullshit. Equality of opportunity cannot exist without proper public institutions ensuring that these provisions are respected and ENFORCED. Also, ensuring equality of opportunity on paper is one thing, ensuring it de facto is another. Such legislation belongs to the realm to the micro realm. The realm of unemployment belongs to the macro realm. I can set a fair start for 100 dogs to go fetch 90 bones in a big ass room all I want. I can ensure that every dog is treated equally. But at the end of the day, 10 dogs will come home without a bone. A macroeconomic problem (unemployment), cannot be solved with a microeconomic solution and vice-versa. In order for all the dogs to come home with a bone, I have to increase the supply of bones by 10. Elsewise unemployment will never be solved. Unemployment is a monetary phenomenon; taxation creates unemployment of money paying jobs - and public spending employs the unemployed previously created by taxation.

Capitalism as a system, can be practiced by private agents or by the state itself (state capitalism).

@pp789
You are seriously mistaken, sir. Neoliberalism is what allowed the present crisis to unfold. The orthodox neoliberal established is the one that said "the great moderation is the greatest thing we've done. And the future outlook is really good." They said that one year before the crisis started. Neoliberalism is the religious economic ideology that believes in austerity, that believes in "horse-shit and sparrow theory". Raegonomics and Thatcherism - causing unemployment, tightening the belts, financing Pol-Pot against the socialists who overthrew him, et all. It is the (neoliberal) establishment that's bailing out the corrupt banking establishment, the one that's increasing taxes, the one that's cutting social spending, the one that's fermenting theft through economic exploitation. The one that sends in the jackals in case the respective government isn't adhering to their tyrannical provisions of so-called "economic freedom".

Alright i am going to stop this verbal wrestling match before it starts i hope by pointing out why you have not been able to convince me of your line of reasoning.
If i do not try and stop it before it gets to far along i could end up for a whole week or more spending 4+ hours composing messages in an effort to find a line of reasoning that will allow you to understand me.
My personal real world experience has shown to me that your conclusions are wrong.

That might be overly blunt but if i do not put it simply it will get lost in convolution.
Trying hard not to continue making post...grr stop typing.

We'll disagree to agree then. If you won't explain what exactly you believe I say is wrong, we can't have a proper debate over it. Because I can't properly address those points if I don't know what they are.
If you disagree with what money is, you should consider the fact that for 5000 years humanity had time to decide what is and what is not money.
Oh, and if you're concern is about the big bad state infringing on "private freedoms", this excerpt from Yanis Varoufakis is my answer to it.

I will gladly send you David Graeber's book, Debt the first 5000 years as pdf via email; if you are interested and have time to read. Just PM me your mail address. Graeber's an anthropologist. And as for the sectoral balance question, it is a matter of double-entry bookkeeping - NOT ideological opinion.
Happy holidays.

I guess I'm still misunderstood. What I meant it, that if neo-liberals would actually take their ideology seriously, it would mean that not only would crisis unfold, but it would also be way worse that it was, given that they always preach austerity and no government involvement, when they talk about other countries, but always back out of these demands when they had to enact them in their own.
Everyone from Regan to Merkel did the same.
But only if they would take their ideology seriously, if we forced them to take it seriously, the aftermath of it would disqualify neo-liberalism for ever, but also, that I'm almost sure of help to move society towards self-management and some kind of anarchism.

If you want to read entire books on this topic, there's Žižek, who centred most of his new books around the idea of taking ideology seriously, to such extreme that it almost becomes parody. I think that's what we needed in the last crisis.

I thought you were trying to make the case for neoliberalism by claiming that the active neoliberal establishment isn't really neoliberal. I'm glad it was a confusion on my part.
I get now what you were trying to say, and I agree.
The thing is, the orthodoxy doesn't know its own laws (those that it preaches)!
Steve Keen explains it very easily here.

I understand why you'd think that. But closest thing to a libertarian I came is being a generally "left-libertarian".
I do support general policies of various libertarian and neo-liberal parties, because I believe that in the end those policies are needed for any kind of anarchism to be enacted.

Also in my tl;dr post I wrote my entire political evolution, and I was most of the time more left leaning and socialist/marxist. I still subscribe to ideas of self-management and of autonomia (mostly Italian marxist movement from the 70's which was close to various modern anarchist and post-anarchist thoughts)

Libertarianism isn't the same thing as anarchism at all; Anarchism is when there is no plausible or tangible central government to tell people what to do and everyone fends for themselves and focuses on self-management. Libertarians believe that people should be Autarkic and "free" to a maximum extent; different levels of libertarians define "freedom" differently. But anyway, libertarians do believe in central government and bureaucratic presence, but as limited as possible to protect rights, stop monopolies, and defend the country vs. Anarchism which is there is no government at all and people are "on their own" to put it bluntly

I take it Helsworth that i have to write a message in this or some other public area to tell you i sent you a private message.