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Sep 01

Competition Is Over-Rated In Capitalism

by Chris Billows in Business Beller 2 comments tags: Contrarian, Free Enterprise, Human Condition
One of the biggest criticisms I have heard from the anti-capitalist crowd (which I was once a part of in my younger years) against capitalism is that it is all about competition. Capitalism has no room for cooperation, or so we are told in the countless business and marketing books and courses (The Art of War) which focus primarily about how to beat the competition. Yet, this is a gross misunderstanding made by both anti-capitalists and pro-capitalists. Capitalism is not about valuing competition over cooperation. It is about having freedom to decide how to engage in the marketplace, either employing competition or cooperation or typically some fluid combination of both. Capitalism is the only system where voluntary economic cooperation can exist. Collectivist societies will place extensive social pressures on its members to “play nice”. This will determine what you are allowed to produce, who you are allowed to buy from, and who you are allowed to sell to. In a collectivist society you might not be allowed to sell your product to a particular region because they are not part of your social or ethnic group. The essence of being collectivist and having a common identity also means that there […]

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Mar 17

Credit Crisis Challenges Convictions

by Chris Billows in Business Beller 0 comments tags: Change of Mind, Corporate Corruption, Free Enterprise
I have re-watched the Credit Crisis video a few times and each time its message really hits home. Not only was the crisis created by collective greed, but also a sophisticated scheme to generate money without actually contributing much useful. It was all about getting rewarded without doing any heavy work. Sure sounds like socialism. It is a socialist ideal to have people have all their needs met with minimal effort on their own part. Only within socialism are people allowed to make poor choices and still get away with it, because after-all the larger community will take care of you. Yet what we are witnessing is not socialism in its pure form. What we are seeing is a kind of socialism known as State Capitalism. This is where governments in the US, UK, and other places prop up their banks and financial institutions. This ends up saving and rewarding many of the same people who created the credit crisis. Yet, just like in the video, the state stood aside and allowed this to happen and even contributed to it by keeping interest rates too low. The state has to step in because it helped create the crisis in an […]

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Jan 05

Book Review: Small is Beautiful by E.F.Schumacher

by Chris Billows in Political Ponderings 0 comments tags: Foolishness, Free Enterprise, Human Condition
It remains painfully obvious that this book is written by a crank. Only a crank would tell us that we need to rethink our consumption patterns, how we manage our economy, and our relationship with our environment. Going against conventional thinking is pretty fashionable today, but to do so in 1973 and still be so relevant is testimony of a crank who knew what he was talking about. E.F. Schumacher wrote this book in response to what he saw as the quickening and centralizing nature of modern society. He saw governments and businesses getting bigger and losing their essential and natural sense of scale, which is human friendly or simply “small”. Thus prompting the title of the book. It was through this book that Schumacher is credited with influencing green economic thinking from the 70s and afterward. He articulated the fundamental question about growth: “How much further growth will be possible, since infinite growth in a fine environment is an obvious impossibility”. Such thinking was radical, yet not socialist. Instead his thinking was the basis of humanistic, or human-centred economics. This book helped shift the tired and largely irrelevant debate of Left wing vs Right wing economic politics or big […]

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Oct 11

What the Disabled Community Teaches Us

by Chris Billows in Spirit Speculations 0 comments tags: Extrapolation, Free Enterprise, Human Condition
The movement to integrate peoples with disabilities into mainstream society is rooted in cultural awareness and technological advances that developed after World War II. What I find most fascinating is that the people who are the most physically dependent are actually messengers of a libertarian philosophy that generally runs counter to the values of the larger society. The Independence Living movement believes that everyone is entitled to live as independently as possible regardless of one’s physical capacity, each person should be enabled to exercise maximum control over their lives. It is not independence in a literal sense, but independence in a philosophical sense. The presence of people with disabilities provides a fresh perspective on how we can define what being a person means. People who are completely physically dependent are given control over their own lives to the fullest extent they can have. We have so much more to learn from their example – it can help us to understand life and liberty. The disabled community do not self-identify so strongly with their disability, but with what they are able to do. It is a magical transformation of perspective that all of us stand to benefit from. The hidden challenge […]
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