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'Neoliberal capitalism' has contributed to the rise of fascism, says Nobel laureate
(www.abc.net.au)
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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~~produces~~ extracts wealth
Produces. Wealth comes from efficient allocation of resources - capitalist free markets are really good at it.
Efficiency under capitalism?
We waste tremendous amounts of food but people go hungry.
We produce absurd levels of clothing, much of which is destroyed and sent to landfills without being worn, but there are people who need it.
We have more houses than unhoused by a huge factor.
Capitalism optimizes for profit and profit only. Sometimes that leads to good outcomes, sometimes it leads to bad outcomes.
It's not "efficient" in terms of taking care of people's needs. It's only efficient in terms of producing profits for the owner and investor classes.
This waste may look big in absolute numbers, but probably isn't meaningful as percentage of total economy - we're wealthy so many of us can afford to be a little wasteful.
Usually bad outcomes are the corner cases - I'm perfectly aware that they exist (harmful monopolies, CO2, ect.) But it's the role of solid legal framework to deal with these issues.
On the other hand you have at best no idea what sort of pathologies can arise in alternatives to capitalism, and at worst it can be repeat of the of USSR or North Korea.
I'm used to shallow responses that regurgitate the capitalist realism everyone grows up in but this one is exceptionally poor.
We waste food on an industrial scale, it's not just household waste. Grocery stores dump good food all the time, sometimes going so far as to spoil it or otherwise prevent it from being retrieved from the dumpsters they toss it in.
You're also just parroting the notion that socialism means authoritarianism, there are many examples of non-democratic and pseudo-democratic countries with a capitalist economy, this is because the economic system is different from the political system.
The biggest irony with your (poorly thought out but strongly held) belief is that a socialist economy IS more democratic. Workers owning their workplaces and benefiting from their output and participating in decision making is more democratic and free than the petite dictatorships that make up a capitalist economy.
As a worker you are only hired and remain employed insofar as you produce more value for the company than you cost, that's a plain fact. This means that the people who own your company are taking wealth that you produce. This is the "freedom" you're blindly advocating for.
I wonder why you feel like you must be a champion for this exploitative system. You're being so submissive to your owners. What a good little worker.
My relative happens to work in the food trade industry. The only cases when they dump food is either when expiration date is passing, or when they suspect that frozen stuff was transported incorrectly - aka cooling/freezing chain was broken somewhere - in that case they just don't accept the transport - it's most likely dumped afterwards by the company delivering it.
Sale of expired food is forbidden by law.
Of course. Also as a worker I remain hired and employed as long as the employer delivers me more value (aka wage and other benefits) than his competitors. Otherwise I dump him just like he'd dump me.
The "best before" dates aren't expiration dates. They dump them only because they don't sell as well. It's prioritizing profit over feeding people.
You're very uninformed, but very confident.
In EU they ARE expiration dates. It's forbidden to trade expired food
I don't know anything about European regulation but food waste is still a major problem there https://feedbackeurope.org/results-of-eu-food-waste-survey-2024-edition/. In the US and Canada grocery stores throw food out if they think they can't sell it, even "ugly" fruit and vegetables.
Your point seems to be that you think grocery store food waste is a matter of too much regulation. I can't argue with someone who treats capitalism like a deity and works backwards from the axiom that capitalism is perfect therefore something else must be wrong.
You're the biggest capitalism simp I've encountered in quite some time. You come across like a libertarian, and maybe you are, if so I wish you had been forthcoming with that information so I knew not to waste my time trying to have a rational conversation with someone with an oxymoronic political identity. Nobody can rationalize their way out of such doublethink.
I thought it's a mater of public health and safety.
I can't ignore what I see. And I see, computers, airplanes, modern agriculture, and all the wonders of modern civilization.
I was a libertarian as a teenager, but with time I understood that every extremism is pathological. I'd say I'm a liberal now.
It's always gets personal with you people. You can't win the debate and you get angry.
Which part of my identity is oxymoronic? You throw accusations but you never give any examples.
The oxymoronic identity is libertarianism. It masquerades as anarchy but doesn't oppose capitalist oppression.
You don't seem to understand that what's profitable isn't always what's best. You are ignoring the scale of waste.
In the off chance that you're interested, here's a really accessible apolitical video about climate (likely from a liberal perspective, but apolitical like I said) that does a great job summarizing https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4GDLaYrMCFo. Liberal regulations might help there, but it's capitalist forces at play.
Regarding your "what about iphone?" comments, I'm sick of that tired argument and won't engage further. You might consider that there's been technological progress long before capitalism and even in recent history the Soviets outperformed the Americans in quite a few areas.
I'm not pro-soviet, but it's interesting that a serfdom-turned-communist nation that was brutally destroyed and lost much of its population in world war 2 was able to maintain global superpower status against a nation that was relatively unscathed and gained economically from ww2.
China is absolutely a capitalist nation, but they don't need American style capitalism to dominate the Americans in green technologies.
Attributing all technological progress to your vision of capitalism is pure worship, not fact.
I see a pattern here - you're operating on a twisted set of definitions - this isn't the first time I'm seeing this when debating people online
Particularly, you have completly different definition of anarchy. You probably consider it some sort of organized social system, but I consider it lack of any framework being enforced.
If you don't understand the difference between these definitions, you can't have any dialogue.
With the definition I use (and many other people BTW), basically anarcho-anything is an oxymoron. When somone talks about anarcho-capitalism, it's nothing but gibberish to me.
In light of different definition, consider this:
Libertarianism has nothing to do with anarchy - it's a system that minimizes state intervention to the absolute minimum, leaving as much to free market forces as possible, providing only minimal legal rails for enforcement of agreements.
There's no paradox here if you run with that thought process.
Oh my sweet summer child.
Exactly, capitalist markets are really good at extracting resources from the land and labour from the people to make a profit, they just don't know where to stop until it's too late, unless they are regulated.
They're also getting increasingly more efficient at funneling profits to the top, rather to the greatest value producers: labourers. This is wage theft. Get it all the way to 100% and you have slavery.
Though important to note that slavery does not just meant you don't get paid. Though I don't think anyone needs a splainer on that.
You're trying to paint production in a negative way, while in reality competitive markets converge to most fair prices
Law of supply and demand dictates that too low wage will fail to attract workers, while too high wage will result in product that is too expensive and won't attract customers willing to buy.
It's a beautiful, self regulating communication network that pays well for stuff that is in demand and pays little for things nobody wants
No, it is you who are seeing the world as just markets, as if markets is what produces wealth, as if labour were just a pesky cost that you can't get rid of.
As the pandemic showed, it is workers that produce wealth and are essential. Markets have their place, but need to be controlled so they don't kill the people who power them.
Also: markets fail very often when the incentives and structure are not aligned with the socially desired outcomes.
You got it wrong - workers alone won't produce anything. You need everything: Workers, managers, accountants, capital, financial system, machines, supply chains, logistics, customer acquisition and so on. Each one of these parts is crucial - wealth is only produced if all those elements are correctly allocated.
Half of these things are provided by separate companies, which have their own complex structures, that together create wealth producing market environment.
"I'm a worker so I produce wealth!" Is a harmful simplification. Skilled worker without all that backend isn't worth a jack shit. This is why there're so huge wage disparities between poor and rich countries - workers may be equally skilled, but the backend that supports the work in the poor country simply doesn't exist.
There're corner cases that cause issues - but this is why we have legal framework to fix them - antitrust laws, regulation of relations between employee-emplyer, consumer protection, green energy incentives and so on
I agree all of that is needed to produce products in a modern economy, but I disagree with the share of profit allocated to managers. The only reason the allocation of profit is so skewed is because the manageriat abuses their power. They are supposed to be enablers of productivity, not little tyrants.
You're missing the part of the picture: There are also workers with specific skill sets who are paid extremely well. You don't hear about them, because they don't complain.
But the question is why? Why workers with certain skills really well paid, while others aren't?
The answer is misalignment between availability of types of work, and availability of workers with appropriate skills.
There's no magic solution that would fix this - core issue is education system that produces surplus of one type of skilled workers and not enough of other types. The end result are huge wages for rare skills, and very low wages for common ones
Fixing that problem requires radical reform of how people pick their career patch and it would take many years for benefits to have impact.
No, I'm saying people need to be paid a living wage to keep the social peace. You may externalize that responsibility from your enterprise, but someone is going to have to address the mismatch between wages and cost of living.
You want an economy that rewards the 10% best, that is good I guess...but the inevitable 90% of "losers" that are still essential for production will get out of your control if you keep punishing them and forcing them into a race they never win (particularly when the social elevator breaks and poverty becomes transgenerational)
Everything in "Cost of living" basket is delivered by the same economy that tends towards reduction of prices - assuming it's healthy competitive market. I believe that at least in case of US, housing market and Healthcare are particularly corrupted, which drags prices up.
I don't believe there are 90% of "losers" if you said bottom 10-20% earners in the society, I'd might agree - there's always some percentage of people who can't make the ends meet.
This is the economic version of "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum." An economic "law" is an idealized description of how things work when there are no confounding factors, not a rule the real world is compelled to obey. It turns out the real world is full of confounding factors that make the law too unreliable to predict—or even admit—things the rise of fascism.
On paper yes, but Jesus Christ, look around you. It's only beautiful if you overlook its fatal flaws.
You really live in an imperial bubble.
Colonial capitalism captures countries in one way or another and keeps wages depressed in those countries so that the finance sector can extract wealth. Non-wealthy people in the imperial core live in relative privilege off the table scraps.
Your argument only works when you forget about the rest of the world and discount imperial hegemony.
Too low wage and the government will top up those being underpaid by their employer, effectively passing on part of the burden of pay to the tax payer.
If wages rise too high, the government will always step in to make sure it doesn't continue.
Its highly externally regulated and ultra manipulated by the people who buy labour and own for their money. Sadly, some people still beleive in the "invisible hand" blessed be its name story.
What do you mean by that? If you mean progressive taxation then I agree - IMO this is an inevitable result of democracy - in particular one citizen one vote rule.
Progressive taxation of middle class and spending that money on benefits for poor is a way of buying votes. If you can buy multiple votes of poor people at expense of one middle class vote, it's a winning strategy.
Progressive taxation is fair: someone who makes 0 from the way society is structured pays 0, because the system is clearly not working for them. Someone who makes the average wage contributes accordingly, but they are not a winner. People who are doing very well are paying a premium to society for creating the conditions for them to be doing so well.
Too bad that when you go even higher the effective tax goes down again due to all sorts of accounting tricks and outright evasion.
Pesky voting rights! For too long have the ultra wealthy had to suffer under the dictatorship of the majority. Votes should cost money and there should be no limit to how many you can buy.
Yep, nothing inefficient about an intern commuting via plane from South Carolina to New York everyday because it's much cheaper than living in New York. /s 🙄