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Originally Posted by roachboy
call it my residual marxist because it is. i would argue that economic activity is public activity. all of it.
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Was it in this thread or another that someone made a babysitter analogy?
I think it's relevant to bring it up here, to understand how far this notion of 'public' goes. Hiring a babysitter is economic activity, no?
If a babysitter and a parent contract for babysitting services, is it proper for the government to forcibly shape the contract in any way? What ways? At what point would government intervention go too far?
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even shareholder investments--first because the distribution of wealth within a given social order is a political question, second because the money invested is going into entities that are themselves engaged in public activity, and which can and should be held politically accountable for that activity.
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How far does this go? Does the mere fact that I vote - a public activity if anything is - open my property up to government regulation/control above and beyond the factor of external costs?
Is it always proper for politics to concern itself with the distribution of wealth? If that's what your saying, why do you think that?
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that this is even a question is an index of how far things have degenerated ideologically over the past 40 years or so in the wake the shift away from nation-state oriented capitalism--which undercut trade unions--which undercutting enabled capital to jettison the political redefinitions that the trade union movement had forced it to accept--redefinitions what made very fundamental types of corporate activity into conflict areas--at stake in these conflicts were questions of power--implicit in these power conflicts were questions of who *should* shape the nature and distribution of profits (for example)--behind this were basically antithetical views of what profit comes from--for investors, then as now, it seems that wealth would be generated by investment; for trade unions, wealth is produced by labor. this is a version of the backstory behind my arguments here--probably should have explained this more (in retrospect at least), but figured i would try to keep the thread geared toward the op. so now is as good a time as any.
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Degenerated, heh... you say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to.
To me, it's obvious that it's a combination - both investment and labor produce wealth. Either can enhance the wealth-producing capabilities of the other. A large assembly line is much less useful without multiple laborers to put it to use and multiple laborers' efforts are much less useful without labor-aiding machines.