Capitalism with no Government

[JamesHunt]

I was just wondering what the world would be like if we got rid of Government and let it be run by pure Capitalism. ie, there was no competition laws, mandatory taxes, minimum wage etc... would it eventually sort itself out?

[trish]

No weekends. No vacations paid or otherwise. 18 hour days every day of the week but Sunday, 52 weeks a year. Paid in credit at the company store. Child labor. Families in servitude for generations. Just look at how corporations behave in third world nations. We've been through that and it did sort itself out. People forgot. But they may so find out again what is was like and how much pain, cruelty and hurt it took to sort it all out.

[Stavros]

Presumably the armed forces would be raised by subscription...? You would have small armies paid for by local people. Maybe they could be paid for by private enterprise with a guarantee of branding exclusivity: the Iowa-McDonalds Airborne Division; the Texas-Apple Rangers; The Washington-Microsoft Parachute Regiment; and so on. They would probably give themselves tax breaks for defending local communities. Gosh, is it Monday already?

[hippifried]

would it eventually sort itself out?

Nope. It'd just devolve back to feudalism. But then again... Maybe if the labor unions took control before the full monopolization... Of course that'd be a monopoly too.

[russtafa]

What about us fascist types where do we fit in we want to get rid of all the above

[Stavros]

Your problem, Russtafa, is that with no government there is no state, with no state there is no fascism: as Gentile, the Italian theorist of Fascism put it: Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Hitler's German variant, National Socialism is rooted in a concept of the state as an historical emergence of the National Socialist state as the will of the people -the expression in politics of their desire and reason combined- he presented himself as a 'wise leader' (don't laugh) whose sole service was the state and the people (=Everything I did I did for Germany). There is some historical provenance for this in Hobbes Leviathan, and Plato's Republic in some structural sense of absolutist authority ordering the state as a rational body/machine. If that is too academic an explanation, then without government and the state you are, in common parlance, fucked.

[Ben]

I was just wondering what the world would be like if we got rid of Government and let it be run by pure Capitalism. ie, there was no competition laws, mandatory taxes, minimum wage etc... would it eventually sort itself out?

[Ben]

I was just wondering what the world would be like if we got rid of Government and let it be run by pure Capitalism. ie, there was no competition laws, mandatory taxes, minimum wage etc... would it eventually sort itself out?

Interesting question. Milton Friedman advocated so-called free markets. Not entirely though. He said there was a role for government.
Oh, I think, um, Somalia has absolute free markets. Per capita income is about 600 bucks. So, America would slowly turn into Somalia -- ha ha ha!
Leo Panitch, a professor of political economy up there in Canada, said that what we are bearing witness to with so-called free market principles and neoliberalism (privatization, free capital movement, cuts in public spending) is essentially, in his words, a - race - to - the - bottom.

[russtafa]

Your problem, Russtafa, is that with no government there is no state, with no state there is no fascism: as Gentile, the Italian theorist of Fascism put it: Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Hitler's German variant, National Socialism is rooted in a concept of the state as an historical emergence of the National Socialist state as the will of the people -the expression in politics of their desire and reason combined- he presented himself as a 'wise leader' (don't laugh) whose sole service was the state and the people (=Everything I did I did for Germany). There is some historical provenance for this in Hobbes Leviathan, and Plato's Republic in some structural sense of absolutist authority ordering the state as a rational body/machine. If that is too academic an explanation, then without government and the state you are, in common parlance, fucked.

yes truly great thoughts.the state will look after you and you will look after the state and those out side of the state are fucked or those that reject the state are fucked

[trish]

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

__John Donne