tripu @tripu@social.cleverlibre.org
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
Note to self on the sate of 🇪🇸 #Spain, 2/2:
Note to self on the sate of 🇪🇸 #Spain, 1/2:
4.
The post, as it's written, is demagoguery. It criticises roughly half the human population (arguably, the richest half) by pointing at an _individual_ who was once _the richest person in the world_, no less. It's facile.
As if all “capitalists” (eg, “poorer entrepreneurs in other countries, who are more likely to own (and rent out) their own tools”) shared _anything at all_ with Elon Musk.
It's like mentioning Osama Bin Laden and criticising his atrocities in the first sentence, to defend in the second one that “we” unite against all people who are religious. A huge leap. Bin Laden is not representative of religious people _at all_. (Musk, who has as much money as a small country, is not representative of capitalists at all.) And “we” would be happen to be a minority of people, since most people in the world are religious.
3.
Because there's a lot of regulation already to minimise externalities or to offset them, _there would be profits even if we regulated more harshly_.
If we made more companies pay more for their negative impact, profit margins would shrink. But to the extent those companies are producing goods and services that people ultimately need or want, there's no way we could push all of them entirely out of profit land at once (unless we're talking full-fledged socialism here, in which case I think there would be a whole set of much worse problems than “SpaceX is polluting the atmosphere and adding more debris to low-Earth orbits”).
If we banned more and/or taxed more, economic growth would be slower. Entrepreneurship would be more difficult. Competition would be fiercer. Products would be worse. And yes, perhaps the environment would degrade slower, too. But there would be still some profit to be made somewhere, necessarily, or else nobody would ever start a company at all.
2.
> _“There is no \*profit\* if we force capitalists to account for the negative impacts…”_
But we do already.
There's a ton of regulation, Pigouvian taxes, tax breaks, fines, crimes, sanctions, licences, permits, etc for that. Starting from the most banal and common of externalities (“you can't be noisy after 10PM”) to [regulation affecting SpaceX](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=regulation+affecting+spacex) (among others, the FAA has to certify launches and issue test licences to make sure that everything meets “all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements”).
Think how many externalities you are not allowed to cause, or you cause and are paying for, _just by owning a car_: limitations about (or special taxes for) emissions (CO2 and many more), speed, noise, insurance, power, size, type of fuel… It's naive to think that regular folks driving a car are subject to so many measures to try to minimise negative externalities… while the owner of the factory where the car is produced is free to do with it as they please, at no cost. _Of course_ he's “accounting for lots of negative impacts”.
There's a _quantitative_ case to be made, of course. For instance, “we should tax space exploration enterprises more”. Or “we should ban cars weighting more than two tonnes”. Whatever. But that's an entirely different message. And it's true for every policy around every topic: everything can be fine-tuned up or down.
> _“The number I cited was true”_
Well, it's quite impressive, how unequally distributed public stock is.
Yes, back to the initial statement:
> _“Capitalism exists on the back of an accounting scam. […] There is no \*profit\* if we force capitalists to account for the negative impacts we allow them subsidize at our collective expense.”_
My issues:
1.
That reads as if Musk and a handful other people are “the capitalists” getting a profit and generating externalities, while more than eight billion people (by implication, the “non-capitalists”) are not getting profits, not generating externalities, and subsidising the externalities of the former.
But I think you agree that roughly half the population are capitalists — according to the definition, I would say way more than half the population. (Statistically speaking, the author of the post, you, and I are more likely capitalists than not.)
And we know many non-capitalists (people who make a living mostly off their labour) make handsome “profits”, too (pilots, surgeons, executives, top actors, top musicians, etc). And almost everyone causes negative externalities in one way or another. The line is very blurry, almost everyone “makes a profit” (how else could they survive?) and almost everyone have some negative impact. It's like pitting “consumers” against “tax-payers”: most people are both consumers and tax-payers — it's not a tiny elite vs. the masses.
So the claim is a dishonest and misleading “them vs us”.
> _“I think that's not as true in the US as in other places”_
In the US, the majority of people own some stock: [~60% of families do](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Stock_Holdings;demographic:all;population:1;units:have).
> _“Something like 90% of the stock market is owned by the richest 10%”_
Even if that were true (we don't know the exact figure), that wouldn't necessarily mean that the bottom 90% aren't investing according to the rules of capitalism, too: “the rich” own disproportionately more stock, but all the rest own disproportionately more little shops, industrial vehicles, professional workshops, tiny family businesses, etc. Yes, Fortune 500 companies are much, much bigger than nail saloons, family farms, taxi licence owners or small architecture firms, but the latter are much, much more numerous. It's not like the 10% own 90% of the means of production, at all.
> _“For your specific examples, I would say the person renting out land, shops or their taxi, are part of the old school capitalist class”_
OK, then definitely I think that, according to you, the majority of the population are capitalists.
> _“We're responsible for the actions of the companies we own stock in”_
I agree.
> _“Disobeying the police is civil disobedience in this case”_
I personally have a higher bar of “injustice” than that to call something “civil disobedience”. Like defending basic human rights. Participating in a “non-binding poll” isn't remotely that important, I think.
> _“It's a misuse of police resources also. There are crimes everyday where people are harmed and property stolen. That's what police is for, and not for preventing people from having a non-legally binding vote that doesn't harm anyone.”_
That's a good argument.
Bildu is the umpteenth reincarnation of the same ideology (and many of the same leaders). Just different names.
Notice that, by the same token, right-with party Vox couldn't possibly be defending anything about the Francoist regime, since Franco died and his regime collapsed _decades_ before Vox was funded.
I get your point. Yes, there's a distinction between public servants knowingly misusing public resources, and random people trying to “cast their vote”. The latter seems innocuous.
In practice, it's difficult to see how preventing misuse could not have an impact on random people: my understanding is that in most cases the police was trying to close those public buildings, and for that they obviously had to evacuate them first, and violence erupted when people disobeyed those simple instructions. In other cases, crowds were trying to block the police from approaching a venue to get it shut down. That's not “the public not breaking the law”: disobeying direct orders from the police is breaking the law.
So, no: the public wasn't innocent. If all those “voters” had done immediately as instructed by the police (ie, unlock those doors, disperse, exit those venues, get out of the way of the police), there would have been no violence at all. You obey the police first, file complaints later (that's good life advice, eg in the US). I say that as a classical liberal who believes in individual rights and wants a much smaller State.
“All kinds of protests are allowed”… but not necessarily inside classrooms of public schools that should be closed on a Sunday. All those people were free to go protest outside.
OK. Thank you for being a good sport, by the way.
Last question (I think) about definitions before focusing on the claim of the original post:
In your opinion, how much of businesses/land/tools does someone need to own to be considered a capitalist?
I'm asking because probably most people own pieces of that, in the form of stock, a private pension plan that invests in private companies, little shops they rent, a taxi that another driver uses during the night shift, a plot of land that other people cultivate, etc. Aren't most of us “capitalists”, then?
> _“That’s the solution. You have a child or two, and then send them off to be raised in #Japan until they’re eighteen or so, and have learned proper #manners. When they return and you tell them how absolutely awesome and special they are, they’ll look at you and blink, not understanding, and thus not believing, a word of it.”_
@Grizzlysgrowls @Sbectol @neil
Couldn't agree more.
I wrote recently in defence of buying cheap phones and keeping them _for a lustrum_ at least — for $$$, for mental hygiene, and for the environment:
Which one of the two?
(Again: I'm contesting your definition(s) not for the sake of controversy, but because I honestly think that will show that the post that started this thread is wrong.)
> _“What profits do you make from your investments? Are they greater than your wages?”_
OK, so first amendment to the initial definition. After that change, neither I nor most people I know are “capitalists”.
> _“Whether you're wealthy isn't as much of a factor”_
Second amendment: instead of “a wealthy person who…”, let's say “a person, usually wealthy, who…”.
With the amended definition, an executive with a salary of $500K/year is _not_ a capitalist, then. A popular influencer who earns from advertising deals and YouTube monetisation isn't a capitalist either. Airline pilots, top surgeons at private clinics, engineers with salaries above $200K/year, the Vienna Philharmonic's first violin… none of them are “capitalists”.
> _“People who own businesses/land/tools that employ other people where the business owners(capitalists) gets the profits and others get set wages”_
(Yet another definition)
With this definition, my grandparents (relatively poor peasants in a small Spanish village) were all capitalists: they owned (little plots of) land, and some tools, and they (intermittently) employed other people (labourers), eg to plough and during harvesting. My dad, who owned a small driving school, worked on it long hours, and at times employed one other person, was a capitalist, too. Lots of ~~small~~ minuscule business owners who toil day after day are capitalists, too.
Which definition it is, then?
And, are you comfortable with how that definition sorts out people into “capitalists” and “non-capitalists”?
/cc @LeftistLawyer
Yeah. No tax money means no public schools used for that, no printing ballots with public money, not an hour of work from a public servant devoted to that. That's the “misallocation of public funds” charge. That's why I say it made sense that the police worked to stop it all.
Also, your Michael Bolton analogy doesn't capture the gravity of the situation. Imagine half your fellow citizens voting to decide whether they'll stop considering _you_ a citizen or whether your family and friends will become alien, foreign, overnight. I bet you wouldn't be so cool about allowing people to vote about whatever, confident that since it's void it'll have zero impact in your life.
I disagree in principle. For two reasons:
Elections and referendums cause nuisance (traffic jams, build-ups, noise, disruption to public buildings and institutions), divert the attention of the police, require many public buildings to be open, employ public servants, and waste public money and other public resources. Random people should not be allowed to keep the doors of public schools open for hours arbitrarily, or to invite the masses to enter public venues without authorisation.
Most importantly (as I outlined in my essay), I think that a referendum that tries to settle an unethical question is itself unethical, and participating in it in any way is unethical, too. So it has to be prevented. A thought experiment to see this point: imagine that the question to be decided, instead of “do you want Catalonia to be independent”, were much more absurd and obviously wrong, like “shall we keep women in cages and use them as slaves” or something of the sort. Would you be comfortable with masses of delusional people happily going to cast their vote? I surely wouldn't. Yes, I know the referendum will be void. But I want the police to prevent the farce from even taking place.
But I concede that you have a (strategic) point: the net effect of having the police try to prevent voting was probably negative. I too suspect they went too far.
tripu
boosted
Educating myself:
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I'm contesting your idea of “ethnic groups” in contemporary Spain because:
* “Ethnicity” is a very contingent and politically-motivated concept; think of how we have classified the “races” in the last centuries, how arbitrary (and “racist”) it all was — and is. [“There has been constant debate over the classification of ethnic groups”.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_contemporary_ethnic_groups)
* There's no formal definition or set of criteria universally accepted, as opposed to real, meaningful scientific categories.
* The closest translations into Spanish are _“grupo étnico”_ or _“etnia”_. Nobody in Spain uses those words to refer to anyone living in Spain (only exception: gypsies in Spain are commonly considered an _etnia_). _Not even Catalan or Basque separatists_ talk in terms of “ethnic groups”. Thus my surprise when you introduced the concept in the debate.
* Ultimately, the concept it's pointless. Sorting out people by “ancestry, history, homeland, language or dialect and cultural heritage”, and granting different privileges to those groups of people, or prioritising the demands of some over the others, is regressive and against Humanism. Especially so when all those groups already share a common state, a Constitution, a military, a wealth redistribution system, a continuous chunk of land without internal borders, a cultural religion, and a language.
Apparently, the [_Vaqueiros de Alzada_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaqueiros_de_alzada) are one of those distinct “ethnic groups” in Spain. I'm sure some of them have made demands similar to those of Basque and Catalan separatists. Whatever new “rights” we grant the Basques and the Catalans, we must automatically grant to the _Vaqueiros de Alzada_ too, or else we would be rewarding the Basques and the Catalans for having been violent and acting against the law. It's all very absurd.
Technologist, Spaniard, male, 42
Joined May 2020
