Posted on 09/07/2001 8:51:55 AM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
Parents and non-parents alike should quake in fear at the methods in which our young people are being taught in school, both public and private. In the public school systems, we see all children learning in conformity with the "lowest common denominator," while in private schools, the children are brainwashed with the "community service" mantra and all other forms of political correctness. What is a capitalist parent to do?
Try going to your local Target and picking up, for less than 50 bucks, a copy of the CD-ROM "Roller Coaster Tycoon." This innocent-looking child’s game will provide all of the basic training in economics, marketing, and business management you could hope for in freshman-level college courses. The only difference is that this format makes learning these subjects fun, intuitive, and easy to understand.
Perhaps your children already have this game, and you haven’t really paid much attention to it. You should. Not only will you find it fascinating, but you might actually learn (or relearn) a thing or two. This is pure capitalism at its best: you design a theme park, complete with all of the real-life accompaniments (information booth, souvenir and food stands, walkways, queuing lines, restrooms, etc.), and try to satisfy customers.
The more interesting the rides, the better the food, the more efficient and well planned the layout, the happier the customers will be. The happier they are, the more money they spend. The customers’ happiness, however, is also somewhat dependent on how much money you spend designing and operating your park—just like real life. And, ultimately, the more money they spend, the larger your profit should be. (There is even a handy Profit and Loss statement available any time you want to "count your money," a nice intro to accounting for kids.)
Just as in real life, there are costs associated with all activities needed to build and maintain a business. You must take out loans to pay for your capital expenditures like roller coasters, infrastructure, and common areas. Your revenues are offset by operation costs (e.g., hourly expenses to run the equipment, personnel costs, construction costs, costs of food/beverages/souvenirs). Your revenues come from several sources. For example, there may be an entrance fee, which you set, to get into the park; each ride may have a cost associated with it; food/beverages/souvenirs all have prices.
The program is extremely flexible, allowing you to change prices "on the fly." Let’s say that it starts raining (the program is always tossing in changing variables, much like real life). You just go in and raise the price of umbrellas and make a killing. (This was my seven-year-old’s idea.) It is extremely logical.
In addition to weather (is it hot or cold, rainy or sunny, what is the forecast?), other game variables include queues for rides/attractions, and how the rides are designed. (You can really micro-engineer the coasters for maximum effect; there is even "vomit," which must be cleaned up by your maintenance crew if the rides are too violent.)
It is up to the player to act—or react—to these variables. If your queue is very long for one particular ride, raise the price. Depending on the price elasticity, you may be able to increase your profit per hour with fewer riders. (Again, a lesson imparted to me by my seven-year-old.)
There are some effective marketing lessons imparted as well. Each customer in your park has a number, and by clicking on your customer, you are treated to a host of marketing information, such as how the customer is feeling (happy, sad, frustrated, hungry, bored); how much money this customer came with, has spent and has left to spend; what types of rides the person likes; why the customer came to the park; etc. You can respond to these bits of data in appropriate and effective ways (e.g., quickly plop a hot dog stand down near a hungry person).
There are also "marketing awards" that pop up periodically, depending on the overall opinion of your customers of your park, such as "value for the money." These awards will affect the customers attending your park, and it is important to maintain a good reputation and develop brand-name capital. Other, more subtle, marketing-type decisions include where to locate various kiosks and rides for maximum exposure and value to your customers and how to lay out your park for efficient flow of customers and their dollars.
Finally, there are innumerable real-life features of the game that any of us would be hard-pressed to explain to an elementary-aged child. Employee efficiency, for example, is called into play when various rides break down and your current maintenance staff is nowhere to be found (i.e., wandering around, taking a break, in the wrong part of the park).
You begin to lose revenue immediately until the ride is fixed, so you end up hiring more staff—at an additional expense, of course. You are given objectives at the start of the game, so you have a goal to work toward. And the most important lesson of all is learning the concept of "what price the market will bear." I doubt if any of these concepts are being taught in schools today.
The idea of teaching these valuable concepts to children in a rational, nonthreatening, and interesting way should be attractive to any parent or adult who cares about the future generation and its ability to understand some basic principles of economics and business. Let’s help our children realize that "learning" isn’t about preventing loggers from chopping down rainforests and figuring out how to recycle dad’s beer cans; it is about logic, thinking, and using their brains to solve problems. I’d allow this software package to take the place of a propaganda-spouting public school social studies teacher any day of the week.
They may not have called it capitalism, but they certainly did teach their kids whatever was necessary to carry on the family business.
Citations from the Oxford English Dictionary--
1823 Coleridge Table-t, 27 Apr., The poor-rates are the consideration paid by ..capitalists for having labour at demand.
Perhaps my choice of words was sloppy; I continue to maintain that Marx popularized the term capitalism as it is currently understood today. In his Individualism and Economic Order, Hakek specifically stated that he disliked the term because of its marxist overtones and preferred to use "free market economy." I don't have the book at my fingertips, so unfortunately I can't give you an exact citation.
Here is another modern conservative/libertarian economist discussing a leftist economist:
Heilbroner has been a dedicated "democratic socialist" for most of his life and was for many years the Norman Thomas Professor of Economics at the New School. He is perhaps the only economist in the United States who holds a chair named after a socialist political leader. He has long favored a large public sector and Keynesian deficit spending. He hates the term "free market," adding, "Markets aren’t free. They depend on government."5 He prefers the Marxian term "capitalism."Russell Kirk also had this to say about capitalism as an ideology here :
What, then, is the mission of Third Generation conservatives, young men and women who seek to preserve the Permanent Things, those elements in human existence that were not born yesterday? It is not to promulgate a "conservative ideology": for conservatism is the negation of ideology. Ideology is an attempt to govern all life by political slogans; while American conservatives believe that no mere political formulas can make a people content. Conservatives take for their guide in politics what Edmund Burke called "the wisdom of the species": that is, the experience of human beings in community, extending over many centuries. Thus, American conservatism is a cast of mind and character, not a neat body of political abstractions. Ideology is political fanaticism, an endeavor to rule the world by rigorous abstract dogmata. The dogmata of an abstract "democratic capitalism" may be mischievous as the dogmata of Marx.Here's even more on Kirk's views of "democratic capitalism."
Excerpt fromOriginally posted here.
MARKS OF MARX, By Balint Vazsonyi
http://www.founding.org/html/column45.html
Both the word “capitalism” and the thesis that economics determine the political structure come from Marx and have no foundation in reality. Nonetheless, we have adopted these views with the fervor of a gospel and even the least Marxist among us uses them as the basis for rational argument. As a result, we are bound to make costly mistakes on a grand scale. Until recent times, the interested researcher looks in vain for the word “capitalism” among the pages of the father of all reference books: the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is nowhere to be seen in the famous Eleventh Edition, and the essay in the 1968 edition is written in purely Marxist terms.Indeed, those are the only terms in which such an essay can be written. Marxists have tried to disseminate the myth that Adam Smith had coined the word, but of course he couldn’t have: he was engaged in creative thinking, not in political warfare.
The suffix “-ism” at the end of a word almost always indicates a theory to which reality has to conform. Our free enterprise system is the very opposite of that. Best described by Friedrich Hayek as the “extended order of cooperation,” its complexities preclude any organization by mortals. It is the result of man’s creativity unleashed by the removal of artificial constraints.
Marx simply needed an “-ism” to be seen opposite his own “-ism” to justify the war he and his followers conduct in the name of “social justice.” A glance at the ingredients of his “capitalism” would persuade any rational person that America’s course invalidates it even on paper. Marx’s capitalism depends on a class that possesses nothing but its labor, called the proletariat. The ownership of a single over-the-counter share of stock transforms one into a “capitalist.” Case closed.
That leaves us with the still greater trap of viewing the economic structure of a society as the “foundation,” and all matters political and cultural as the “superstructure.” Marx, again.
Since Marx’s world of the future relied on the confiscation of people’s possessions, he had to tell himself, and the rest of us, that such a development would produce the “desirable” effect in all other realms of life. How generation after generation in free countries — supposedly governed by common sense — buys into the doctrine of foundation and superstructure is a measure of the immense intellectual conquests of socialism.
Hakek s/be Hayek.Here's another discussion of another conservative economist, Wilhelm Roepke, and capitalism:Discussion of Heilbroner is by Mark Skousen.
For it showed a way around or through the frozen dialogue between the adherents of old-style capitalism on the one hand and of a government-run economy on the other, to which much of the discourse among academic economists of that time seemed to reduce. In this textbook Roepke argued for the rejection of socialism and the reconstitution of the market economy as the only economic system compatible with human freedom. The market economy for which he pleaded, however, differed fundamentally from the system which, under the vague and emotion-charged label of "capitalism," had persisted in Europe until the 1930s and then perished of its own degeneracies. Capitalism for Roepke was a highly imprecise noun, freighted with the ideological ballast of the nineteenth century which gave birth to the term, and even today carrying the value tags, positive or negative, of whomever happens to be defining it. In contrast, the market economy, at its core and unencumbered with labels from the right or the left, was for him a term embracing those universal human behaviors associated with acquiring and using economic resources and famously codified in the laws of supply and demand. Indiscriminate mixing of the concept of a market economy with "capitalism" results in the attribution of qualities to the market mechanism that properly are only ascribable to some specific capitalist societies of the past, notably those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, the market economy that was installed in West Germany after World War II-and which the Germans chose to call a "social market economy"-represented a deliberate attempt to divorce the market idea from historical capitalism. The lasting achievement of Roepke's friend, Ludwig Erhard, was his abstraction of the powerful concept of the market from the institutional matrix of nineteenth century capitalism in which it was embedded and his demonstration that the market can yield a quite different result within a different institutional framework.
Helpful insights. A real education can be wathful for the ideology of Capitalism.
I was very impressed by what this game was teaching him.
He was thrilled to be making "money" after he put up a hamburger stand next to his rollercoaster because on customer said he was hungry. Soon that hamburger stand was making money hand over fist. I took that oppurtunity to explain supply and demand.
He was very upset to realize that he was paying "good money" to the workers, only to have "very messy, litter ridden paths", he wanted to know why I thought that that people wouldn't do the jobs they were paid to do.
I think this is a great game and teaches great work ethics, and how you have to rely on others sometimes, even when you have the greatest of ideas.
Much better than games based on the Seattle riots, IMO.
independentmind [post 28]: " Perhaps my choice of words was sloppy; I continue to maintain that Marx popularized the term capitalism as it is currently understood today."
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Your original claim was that Marx coined, ie. originated, the word capitalism. Now you abandon that claim and assert that he merely popularized the word. Fine. We can deal with this new argument, but let's not pretend that you are just "continuing" your first argument.
I'll cut to the chase and save us both some time.
The following statement is by Walt Sheasby, a well-known progressive activist and student of Marx [emphasis mine].
The term "capitalism" first made its print appearance with William Makepeace Thackeray as late as 1854 in Newcomes, and it never entered into ordinary legal and economic theory, only being popularized by radical movements at the turn of the century.
By the way, I enjoyed all the quotations you provided -- even though they failed to substantiate your original or your fallback position.
The word capitalism (Kapitalismus) appears nowhere in any of the published works of Karl Marx, only in a handful of his letters just before his death. He neither "coined" the term nor popularized it.
Of course, none of the above in any way detracts from my concern that many self-identified conservatives today think of capitalism in terms of an ideology-- and have no problem doing so.
You won't have to. I'll hear about it in the news. There are relatively few words whose coinage can be discovered, so etymologists must usually settle for a word's earliest known appearance in print. It's been conjectured that Thackeray picked up the word capitalisme while in France, so you just might find a citation pre-dating his if you look in, say, Dictionnaire historique de la langue francaise. While you're there at the reference desk, you may as well take a look at Etymologisches Worterbuch des deutschen Sprache ("Kluge") and "Etymologisches Worterbuch des Deutschen ("Pfeifer"). Another thing you might ask the reference librarian is to help you research the earliest dates that published literature, including periodical literature, began publishing more than a scant number of titles and articles that included the word capitalism in their titles. You could do the same thing for titles of books and articles in French and in German. Once you determined which of these authors were the most widely read, quoted and reviewed, and which of the periodicals were in widest circulation, you would have a pretty good idea who actually popularized the term. I would suggest focusing on the year 1902. It may save you some time.
It looks like the games' makers have also figured out capitalism =)
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