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Liberal market economies are the worst except for everything else that we’ve ever been able to pull off. Criticize it all you want, but unless you can formulate a form of Marxism that doesn’t just devolve into a dictatorship of the nomenklatura, your criticisms are empty. Liberal market economies are terrible, but that’s the best we have and the only choice is to figure out how to make them less bad. The Nordic model seems like a big improvement on the US model, and it’s beyond me why anyone on the left would wouldn’t make that their lodestar. Stop tilting windmills.

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Aug 24Edited

What's also weird is the defacto claim that the exchange btwn labor and capital is exploitative. This is an assumption that isn't true. Further, not sure how exploitation is absent in even the 'purest' forms of what is euphemisitcaly called Marxism.

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I think it devolves to that, in the absence of a regulated market for labor. (Hence, I'm a dirty Liberal.)

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That's due to how Marx calculates surplus value i.e. as Richard Wolff explains straightforwardly here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VcgarDdIBA

(You may well already know this - I just don't think it's quite right to call it an assumption - more of an equation that arguably leaves out some factors).

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So if an equation leaves out 'some factors', of what use is that equation?!?

Hint: it's worthless.

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I think you are overstating the negative aspects of free markets/rule of law/equality under the law/individual rights considerably. Most people in the US do well, or well enough, and far better than at any other time or place in history.

Marxism is inherently coercive and admits of no countervailing or competing systems. Which is why the dialectic has such an enormous body count.

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