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Originally Posted by Ambiguous
You have addressed camraderie among individuals as well as comraderie among members of the same group when there are other, similar groups present -- neither of which I have disagreed with. But what you haven't addressed is how a large group shares that unique sense of comraderie when there is no comparable alternative group.
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There is no comparable alternative group to the human species, really, unless you want to use lower animals, and human beings still feel a unique sense of camaraderie under the right circumstances. We as the human community don't need some other community to compare ourselves to in order to establish that sense of brotherhood, of similarity. I'm not sure if I'm addressing the point you're looking for, though.
Anyway, the nature and scope of camaraderia can be discussed by us, but we should also look at its value. You brought this up in response to danielpalos' suggestion of a world federal government--do you mean that such an institution should be avoided to preserve nationality or that it is unworkable because of nationality? Or am I missing the mark again?
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Originally Posted by Ambiguous
No, you're not right. I meant exactly what I wrote, otherwise I wouldn't have written it that way.
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This is why I asked.
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Originally Posted by Ambiguous
To your first inference, it's the difference between a government that establishes loose guidelines under which businesses may themselves operate, and a government owning or controlling businesses with the intent of handing autonomy over at a later date.
To your second inference, any sort of mixed economy is going go to contain bits and pieces of multiple economic systems. We generally label an economy as a whole based on the predominant system. But that does not preclude us from addressing subsets of the entire economy as being closer to one system or another.
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I understand better now. What about China's progress into a freer market, then? It is certainly a mixed economy, and the Communist Party refers to its programs as socialist. However, that state's experiences would seem to contradict the idea that a government will never truly establish a market economy on its own. I don't know the degree of regulation imposed on businesses, but in 2005 70% of China's GDP was in the private sector, whereas no fully privately-owned firms existed in 1956. Also, the reforms of the past decades have transferred much of the state planning of pricing and allocation to the free market. I don't know a great deal about China's economy, and there is definitely a lot of government intervention, but I just wanted to suggest that it is possible for a government to relinquish control to a market-oriented system.