Four Types of Capitalism

Arnold, you fail to address the relevant question: Do these simple classifications facilitate our understanding of different economies?
We can always pick up just one characteristic to argue that an economy fits into a category. I have not read BLS book, but I have read NWW several times and I have yet to find any insight on the cases they mention.

There is exactly one type of capitalism, under which a small minority of exploiters appropriates the surplus created by labor, leaving just enough for the actual producers to survive. The exploiters dispose of the surplus to meet their private interests, regardless of social needs. Any other "definition" is a childish denial of documented fact.

What about comparing with the Marxist definitions?

Heh, I was a bit late, David Kendall just did it!

However, Marxists also have definitions for state-capitalism and state-socialism and without recognizing it, Lenin and Bukharin both admitted that state directed "capitalism" was essentially the same as socialism, just with a different guy at the helm. Hence Bukharin's dreaded Leviathan is exactly what they got when they implemented Lenin's Utopian vision. Oops.

"There is exactly one type of capitalism, under which a small minority of exploiters appropriates the surplus created by labor, leaving just enough for the actual producers to survive. The exploiters dispose of the surplus to meet their private interests, regardless of social needs. Any other "definition" is a childish denial of documented fact."

Awsome, not only do we have a rather strong center left presence on this blog, but it looks like we may have our first full blown marxist. Here's to a happy near future of grand amusement reading Mr. Kendall's posts.

Hassett's contention that Singapore is a free-market economy is laughable. The amount of government regulation, subsidy, or outright ownership in Singapore is banana-republicesque. For example, almost no one owns their home on the island - the state owns almost all of it, and assigns housing.

It so happens that the Singapore political class is really good at economic governance, while most banana republics are headed by a grossly inept political class.

- Josh

I think that growth is in part a function of the amount of change. China may not be as free as the USA but China is much more free now than it was 30 years ago, not so the USA, so the growth in China is much more.

There follows a post made to the WSJ publication of this discussion.

To this observor, our social order does not function economically as an ideology.

Capitalism:

The uses of “…ism” and “…ist,” in any discourse carry implications of describing things in ideological terms rather than by analytical definitions. That conveys physical and emotional conditions of the kind we associate with nazism, fascism, Islamist, and even the benevolent, Catholicism, Romanticism, etc.

Our present system of modes of production and modes of exchanges of goods and services (distribution), and the relationships between them, continue to be described (seldom defined) as a form of “ism,” based on descriptive terms applied to ceratin of its elements by antagonists of the system, such as Karl Marx.

The systems we have today, in which entrepreneurial enterprise thrives, are based on freedom of access and openness (freedom) of choices, determined by individuals, within an open society. Commercially, the choices are expressed through prices, which reflect the exchange of services for services, both changed and balanced by forces of “competition.”

Here again, we should clarify what is meant by the term “competition." Competition is not necessarily an intended "contest" or "conflict," but, rather, a description of the results of forces put in motion by diverse choices, regardless of the intentions of those making the choices.

Example: When the people of Market 2 are willing to pay more and pay sooner for widget X for their children (or have the means to do so), than the people of Market 3; and the maker of X decides to satisfy Market 2 first, the people of Market 2 are not intending to "compete" by contest with those of Market 3. However, a competition has occurred.

In a social order of open choices (depending on the degree of openness) that is more often the nature of commercial competition than the form exhibited by outright contests.

Perhaps some term like resultant competition vis a vis contesting competition, would better describe the nature of what occurs in open, non-fabricated social orders, and what is disrupted when there are attempts to create constructs to achieve something other than what free choices in an open social order will produce.

Entrepreneurial enterprise generally seeks to open access to choices, or to increase choices, or both, thus generating resultant competition.

Our system, and any other like it, in which such enterprise can be open, in an open society, is not an “ism.”

R. Richard Schweitzer
S24rrs@aol.com