On Sunday, December 29, 2002 at 13:19:06 (-0800) Eugene Coyle writes: >Agreed, they want profit -- but they talk "competition."
Yes indeed, and they (corporations) are very good (read, they have lots of money to pay for exquisitely detailed propaganda services) at pretending that what they crave is competition. What left wingers should want, in contrast --- aside from abolishing wage slavery of course --- is competition as Adam Smith envisioned it, which would lead to a society of rough equals toiling mightily to make life better for everyone. Competition has all sorts of nasty features and effects, but atomized capital is better than its concentrated, noxious forms. Large-scale enterprise should be owned by the public. Corner bakeries can be owned by mom and pop. BTW, I have been thinking about profit and its relationship to interest. Being ignorant of much of economic history, I imagine that the relationship is something noticed before. Be that as it may, as I see it, profit is nothing but perpetual interest. As far as I see it, you are entitled to a standard rate of interest on your money that you give out for productive purposes, since you do incur risk --- money is essentially security. But once your initial investment is paid back, and once you have gotten a socially accepted rate of interest in addition, any further return in the form of profit (aside, of course, from wages paid to you as a worker) should not go to you, but to the business, and each employee who contributed to it should have a say in how it is used. Did Marx write about the relationship of profit to interest in those terms? Did anyone else? Bill
