Is Capitalism Democratic?

Many people, especially conservatives believe that capitalism is an inherently democratic system. The reason for that, they claim, is that consumers are a democratic force, and by their consumption choices they influence the supply / production, which is in a sense a democratic feedback loop.

This argument seems plausible at first, and holds some water. However, if we carefully compare what can be (and has been) accomplished via a true democratic process, and what can be accomplished thru this pseudo-democratic free choice system of laizzes fair capitalism, we come to the conclusion this consumerist system is a far cry from capitalism, and cannot, even in theory achieve the same results as a true direct or representative democracy.

!!The points are not clearly separated and not completely illustrated by the example!!

While consumer choice about a particular product seems similar to a democratic vote on a particular issue, there are several fundamental differences.

1. A consumer choice is made among currently existing options, and cannot directly create new ones.
2. A consumer choice, just like a vote, is made by an individual, but ...
   • Choices made by consumers collectively are different from those they can make individually
   • The collective vote on a particular issue can change the system in ways that are new.
3. The consumers are making individual choices in a disorganized way, while a decision in participatory democracy changes things in a directed way.
4. A democratic system can impose constraints on the market so as to influence consumer choice. On the other hand consumer choice does nothing to influence the democratic process.

For example, consider a rather typical situation, where there are two major stores in a small town that sell milk products and both sell only the milk with Bovine Growth Hormone. The consumer's choices are limited to not buying milk at all or buying the BGH milk. There's very little a consumer or a group of consumers can do to create new choices in the supermarkets (point 1). However their options in a democratic system are:

• Require all stores to carry non-BGH milk (point 1 and 2)
  • perhaps also require reasonable markup in prices for the new product to influence reluctant consumers' choice (point 4).
• Demand a break-up of two large stores into more smaller stores in order to enhance the chances that one of the stores will carry non-BGH milk as well as improve response to customer needs in general
• Push legislature to allocate funding for organic farming, which would make non-BGH milk more readily available (point 1 and 2).

How to compare languages and their difficulty

There are two major stages in studying languages:

1) Learning how to correlate the written language to pronounciation

2) Learning the grammar and vocabulary

For the languages I had experience with learning or simply read or heard about, below are my ratings. I tried to remove my Euro-centric bias as much as possible.

Language	Reading	Grammar
Chinese	Extremely Difficult	Easy
Danish	Difficult	Easy
English	Difficult	Easy
Esperanto	Easy	Easy
Finnish	Easy	Extremely Difficult
French	Difficult	Medium
German	Easy	Difficult
Greek	Easy	Medium
Hebrew	Difficult	Medium
Japanese	Difficult	???
Korean	Easy	Medium (???)
Russian	Easy	Difficult
Spanish	Easy	Medium
Tatar / Turkish	Easy	Medium / ???

Disclaimer (2004): OK perhaps there's really no such thing as an absolute difficulty of a language, even if you break it up this way. What makes a language easy or difficult is the perspective from which you are coming. That applies both to pronounciation and grammar.

Still, I don't want to give up completely on the notion of language difficulty. It's not really fair to say that everything is completely relative.

In reading/pronounciation we can talk about how consistent reading rules are. Consider for example alphabetical writing systems. Is there a letter for each phoneme in the language? If not, is there a combination of letters to represent each sound? Are those combinations consistently pronounced? If there are silent letters, are they consistently silent? Are letter combinations read in predictable ways or are reading rules infested with exceptions? These are the criteria by which I rated Danish as a difficult language to 'read', while Russian and Spanish as easy.

As far as grammar is concerned, we can compare such grammatical constructs as verb inflections / noun cases, adjective conjugations, concepts of tense, etc.. The more of those, the more complex. Or if a language X has a grammatical concept unknown in language Y, a speaker of language Y will have a hard time grasping X.

For example, a Russian speaker might have a hard time with definite / indefinite articles in English, while an English speaker might have difficulties with noun inflections. A Chinese speaker will have a tendency to have trouble with past and future tense, and a Finnish speaker will have trouble conjugating words by gender and making the distinction in the gender pronouns he/she/it.

Generally, a speaker of a difficult language should find an easy language easier (isn't' that amazing?), because he/she just has to simplify his grammatical constructs, instead of learning new ones. I suppose it would be more appropriate to say a language is difficult in this or that respect rather than as a whole.

Then there's other issues in learning a language, such as how formational a language's vocabulary is. For example, are words related in meaning similar to each other, differing only by prefixes, etc. or are they completely different (borrowed from different languages perhaps). There's the question of how easy it is to guess a word's meaning if you know its constituent parts.

Obviously, I'm not a linguist, and there's plenty of literature on this regard that explores these issues better and use more standard terminology. But these are my thoughts based on some exposure to several languages.

Public vs. private sector

Public sector	undermines profits of Private sector in the following areas
Public libraries	Bookstores, music and video stores
Public transportation and good road maintainance	Automotive industry, taxi and limo services, rental car industry, car insurance companies, accident claims lawyers
Public education	Private schools, for-profit schools, hooked-on-phonics and similar programs
Public healthcare	Health insurance companies, hospital executives, pharamaceuticals, health insurance specialists, billing companies, health insurance lawyers
Urban planning	Developers, construction companies
Environmental protection	Industrial polluters (developers, car manufacturer, chemical industry)
Labor rights protection	Labor rights violators (union-busters, job exporters), human rights violators

Religion and Hume's Dictum

Any serious organized religion / cult creates a culture of accepting certain facts without questioning and interpreting everything in the context of someone's divinity, even if it contradicts common sense. E.g. many Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama continues the lives of the previous Dalai Lamas in more than a figurative sense. Many Christians believe Jesus was truly resurrected. The Romans believed that the founders of Rome, Rimulus and Romus were actually carried in a female wolf's womb. The Vietnamese have a legend that the Vietnamese people are descendants of a dragon. The latter two legends seem more preposterous to take literally than the first two. But in reality there is no more reason to believe one legend more than the other. They all contradict common sense and Hume's Dictum

America's economic future

I just watched CNBC, and there are some bad news for the long-term future of America.

• Jobless claims are up - most states have lost close to 10% of their manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China
  • The effects NAFTA and WTO are beginning to surface
• CNBC cited "the cost of pension plans" as a big problem for companies,
  • In order to get profitability back to "normal" (which is in the double-digits), they're going to need to adress the "issue"
• Tech jobs are also being exported to India, China, Mexico, and Russia
• American exports are not doing too great despite the weakening dollar
  • An analyst on the show suggested that perhaps America should have a policy towards a weaker dollar
    • But isn't this the kind of policy the commentators pointed fingers at in Japan?
      • In addition to it causing further recession like it did in Japan, a weaker dollar will have more serious effect, because America has a huge trade deficit, and won't be able to afford its imports.

Other bad news aside from what CNBC said today:

• Credit card debt is still at an all-time high, which spells trouble if the recession sticks around
• Deficit spending is way up, which again takes money out of the pockets of people in the future
• A large chunk the money spent by the government currently is funnelled to corporations, whose main focus is overseas (such as the reconstruction of Iraq)
• My overall conclusion is that the future of the American economy is squarely in the hands of large corporations, but there is a conflict of interest
  • The comapanies would like for the domestic economy to improve so that the consumption increases
  • However, they would like even more to "cut their costs" by
    • exporting jobs overseas and
      • There's very little that's stopping them with NAFTA and WTO in place
    • undermining labor even further.
      • There's very little stopping them here as well, because
        • The labor unions are Weak / non-existent
        • The government is mainly on the side of big business has not been strict on enforcing international labor standards
  • America is still a rich country with rich people, so there is a long way down for the economy to go
  • The next target in the class war is the lower-middle class, which is going to be wiped out in the next 10 years.

Mandatory business tax

So here's what I think. America has one of the lower tax rates among the developed nations. What does this translate to? Several things:

• Poorer labor standards, lower wages
  • This results from a stronger position of big business with respect to the government and labor unions, which is made possible by excess capital saved by paying lower taxes
• Weaker environmental regulation / other types of regulation
  • This results from inability of regulatory agencies to keep up with various violations and fight big business in court
    • One example of this is the inability of S.E.C to effectively follow up on many cases similar to the Enron scam
• Weaker consumer protection
  • This is tied in with the weakness of regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect consumers rights, such as the FDA
• Poorer infrastructure for healthcare, education, public transportation
  • There is simply less money in the public sector, so this directly follows

The last two points are most visible because, they translate to REAL expenses, or what I will call a mandatory business tax. This is the tax businesses are able to impose on consumers because the former are in charge of the infrastructure. Consumers are forced to shell out for various essential items, such as healthcare / childcare, etc. in a society with a poor public infrastructure and weak consumer protection. You pay this tax to business, as a penalty for not having paid enough to the government (or to a government that represents its people). To figure out exactly how large this tax is, I tallied the expenses for the last 3.5 years (that's as far back as my records go), and calculated how much money I spend on things that should be free.

Here are the main portions of the mandatory business tax, about which I know a thing or two thru experience:

• Transportation (car)-
  • I never wanted to have a car. It is possible to not have a car in a mid-sized city like Columbus, but it is extremely trying to live without one. You end up either relying on other people who have one or spending exorbitant amounts of time for getting to places inaccessible via public transportation. So your choices are
    • Don't get a car and be miserable / dependent / limited in job options / limited in shopping options
    • Get a new car and pay "out the ying-yang" for the car itself and especially insurance
    • Get an old car and pay "out the ying-yang" for the repairs, and still thousands for insurance
    • Additional expenses include towing, tickets, parking permits, registration fees
• Healthcare -
  • As we all know, healthcare in America is not free, so this entails:
    • Paying a lot for health insurance
    • Paying a lot in co-payments / deductibles
    • Waiting in long lines to have a 15-minute appointment, and being charged for 1 hour of the doctor's time.
    • In case something happens, where serious medical treatment is needed, paying a certain percentage of the enormous bill(s) you receive in the mail
      • This includes
        • Fighting with your insurance company over every penny
        • Fighting with your provider over services you didn't ask for and didn't need, but that were performed on you because you were unconscious
        • Handling dozens of pages of paperwork and as if you were a full-time accountant
          • In the meantime you familiarize yourself with
            • deductibles / co-deductibles / co-payments
            • in-the-network providers and who's out-of-network providers
            • all kinds of other fancy insurance terminology
      • If you're organized enough and have enough time on your hands, you can beat back half of the charges
      • If you're poor enough, you can have some of the charges written off.
      • If you're neither, you're fucked, because your choices are:
        • Pay now and be broke
        • Wait for collection agencies to make your life a living hell and pay later, after you can't take it anymore
        • Wait for collection agencies to make your life a living hell and still don't pay, in which case you ruin your credit
• Housing (Rent & landlords) -
  • I lost at least some money to every landlord I've been with except one. This is very typical in college, and happens frequently because:
    • Landlords have more money and legal resources and thus have an easier time going to court
    • Students typically have neither the time nor the money nor the legal expertise to go to court
    • There are laws on the books regarding landlord-tenant relations of two types
      • Laws designed to protect the tenants, but are hard to enforce because
        • The tenants don't have the time or resources to find out about their rights
        • The tenants don't have the time or resources to fight for their rights, even if they know them
      • Laws designed to protect the landlords, in which case
        • The landlords know their rights or have lawyers that do
        • Will have an easy time with using the law to their advantage because of the resources they possess
• Local phone service -
  • This is a travesty, because in reality local phone service is so basic it doesn't cost but several cents a month to maintain.
    • However, every time you move into a new apartment, you're charged a "connection fee", as if somebody needs to actually install a new line in your house.
    • Also within each regular bill you're charged
      • a "local number portability fee"
      • a "Network access surcharge"
      • a "federal access charge"
      • a "line charge" in the amount of 1/3 of the bill
        • Pardon my french, but what the fuck is a line charge? Or can I get a "local service" and without actually having a phone line?
• Deregulated utilities -
  • Utilities, such as electricity and natural gas, which are often deregulated by state and local governments, even if there is a near-monopoly in the area
  • As a result, the prices initially drop to make consumers feel that they made the right choice, but soon they slowly creep up.
  • In times of crisis (drought, severe heat, prolonged cold) the prices go up
  • After the crisis is over with, the prices stay high anyway
• Overpriced textbooks -
  • Due to a monopoly of publishers and / or exclusive deals with universities, college books are very expensive in America.
    
  • Since students are required to buy certain books for certain classes, textbooks prices should certainly be regulated

Overall, across the first 3 categories, I paid 23% of my income in mandatory business tax. I did not include the expenses from the last two categories, because it is hard to estimate exactly how much one overpays for deregulated utilities and overpriced textbooks. I estimate this would make the total mandatory business tax at least 30% in my case.

	Local phone service	$1,000
Automobile	Car insurance	$3,200
	Maintainance	$2,000
	Car payments	$800	(excluding 2 cars from my parents for $5000)
	Gasoline	$716	(could have been much more, but I drive little)
	Towing	$370
	Parking permits	$338
	Parking tickets	$385
	Registration fees	$263
	Subtotal automobile	$8,072
Healthcare	insurance	$2115	(not including me being covered under my parents insurance for a while)
	copayments of all sorts	$730
	prescriptions	$850
	eyecare	$300
	deductibles	$270
	hospital copays	$200
	Subtotal other	$2,350
	Subtotal healthcare	$4,465
Housing	money lost to landlords	$80	in 1999 for unclean carpet
		$200	in Sep 2000 for misc items, which were simply normal wear and tear
		$300	in Sep 2000 for not being able to prorate the rent (2/3 of the month for free)
		$200	in Sep 2001 (deposit for an apartment for which I never signed a lease)
		$385	in Sep 2002 for failing to give 30-day notice
	Subtotal housing	$1,165
	Total lost over 3.5 years	$14,702
	which is	$4,200	per year
	My annual income is	$18,150
	percent mandatory business tax =	23.1%