this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Capitalism is fine as long as people aren’t complete scumbags about it. Rare, I know. It’s a human morality proposition.
Capitalism is great, but it absolutely must be tempered by regulation.
The problem comes when the capitalist gains influence over the regulator, aka, regulatory capture.
Capitalists love regulations and do a lot to make sure financial laws are in their favor and make great use of government handouts they help orchestrate for themselves.
Yes, this is called regulatory capture.
Yeah, Senator Whitehouse actually wrote a book awhile back, Captured, that covers the topic very well. However, that book is also depressing because he illustrates just how fucking rampant it is in the US now.
To be a little more exact, capitalism is great, but only if each person has roughly the same amount of money, no matter what they do. That is what you're trying to achieve with regulations.
Capitalism could be amazing if the psychos of society didn’t constantly rise to the top then again the same could be said for communism and just about every other system we’ve tried.
That's because Capitalism rewards exploitative psychos, essentially by design
Any system has to give a group of people some authority to keep order the crazies will eventually work their way in and ruin it.
Doesn't communism do the same? In fact why the fuck do the crazy psychos rise to the top seemingly everywhere? Is this one of those "nice guys finish last" kinda deals or some phenomenon I've never heard of?
Evil only needs to succeed every now and then, good needs to constantly win.
I like to think there's a distinct difference, summed up like so:
Communism attempts to put the control and distribution of resources (capital) on the collective, ie everyone. Since everyone effectively owns it, it feels like nobody does.
Capitalism puts it on individuals. Nowadays, almost all of these individuals acquired their resource(s) by inheritance. If not, by dubious (morally questionable) means.
This is a simplification that may upset people on both sides, but it's about as clean as I can think to make it.
Note: the following is from the perspective of a somewhat average person living in the US.
My personal thought is that the democratic republic political system would ideally be coupled with the communistic (I'd prefer federated unions, ie federations, but speaking broadly) economic one. They seem to be natural matches.
However, it seems the coupling of said republic with capitalism causes significant and repeated backslides on social issues and education. Capital owners, after all, are most interested in maximizing gains while minimizing losses; this has led to a fairly high number of people being convinced to think that education is bad, especially university level education. Which, in turn, makes them compliant voters and eager workers, often severely underpaid. Which they, of course, have no idea of knowing since they likely have never left their birth town.
That's not to say that such things won't happen with communism. They should happen a lot less, but only if we put controls in place to combat abuse and overreach. In other words, regulations. Capitalism...might be beyond hope at this point, given how capital owners have been acting lately.
I don't know what will actually end up working, but I hope we try something new soon. Because this ain't it. Preferably before we extinct more species. Hopefully before we extinct ourselves.
I keep ranting, sorry for the wall of text.
And socialism is the middle ground that apparently no one with the power to implement it wants.
I do hope we see more of this bridging the gap with socialism, but you're right. To current capital owners, a new system will mean the end of being capital owners. Since they're defined entirely by their money/capital, to them it's a legitimate existential threat. Or so it feels like, it seems, given how they've been acting.
But fingers crossed for a more sane future. Hopefully.
Personally I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution. Each problem needs a different approach. We need to figure out how to have all these systems work in tandem.
Hey, I'm open to trying anything. The current biggest problem is oligarchs and power centralization though, which capitalism sort of encourages.
Without much heavier regulation, sticking with capitalism will essentially doom us all. We need more localized, equal resource management. We need logical transportation logistics, and we need more nationalized (federal) goods and services.
But I do agree with the spirit of your message. We do need to all be working together towards a shared goal, instead of...this.
It's because of the concept of successful ambition correlating with the lack of morals or integrity. It just so happens that people ambitious enough to do whatever it takes to rise through the ranks often have to be necessarily immoral to step on people to get to the top.
People who have others' best interests at heart simply don't take advantage of the opportunities as often because a number of those opportunities would involve unfairly stepping on someone else.
So to answer your question, yes, ambitious assholes tend to ride faster and further than good people. Kind of like how a large portion of cops tend to be former bullies.
It's because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.
It doesn't much matter whether it's controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn't even matter that much if they're smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it's pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.
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Want to say, "Communism" is democratic control of the economy. So ideally there is no "top".
Using some terms really loosely here to avoid a wall of political theory.
You're putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism incentivizes people to be scumbags.
So does any other economic model.
That is an absolutely meaningless statement.
As is capitalism incentivizing people to be scumbags, as trendy as that perspective is.
No, the competitive nature of capitalism definitely incentivizes people to do very shitty things to each other for personal gain. Or have you not heard of the Gilded Age? Or our current climate crisis? Or strike breaking? Or the incredible wealth inequality we are seeing today?
[edit] The Irish Potato Famine? The Bengal Famine? Belgium in the Congo? Sweatshop labour? Coups in South America for the benefit of fruit companies? Wars in the Middle East for the sake of oil? Clear-cutting of the Amazon? Any of this ringing a bell?
Can you prove capitalism is the source of any of those problems vs just plain human greed?
If we want to attribute every negative event to it, well what about the positive events? Did it cause the light bulb to be invented, the telegraph, the computer, the printing press, satellites, etc, or was it just the economic system at the time?
Capitalism doesn't make people greedy, lots of people just are.
Beyond that, you can beat on capitalism all you want but until someone comes up with a viable alternative, it's what we've got.
Literally the point of capitalism is to utilize greed and enlightened self-interest to (supposedly) drive innovation and expand production. Greed is central to the whole ideology. "Greed is good". You are making a false distinction. How can you support an economic system you don't even understand?
I'm just going to block you...
Edit: Using a movie clip as if it's some kind of enlightened source is just absurd. There's no part of capitalism that says greed is good. Capitalism is a system not an ideology, let alone an ideology that can be captured by a freaking movie clip.
Guess what, still no better system proposed, still no answer for whether the good things get credit or just the bad.
There are many better proposals. Communism, anarchism, socialism, etc. What i personally think is best is some form of democratic socialism, where literally everything is controlled democratically. Companies/firms all fully employee controlled, democratic government obviously, etc. Nownininow you're gonna say "oh but socialism and communism have already been tried and failed look at xyz countries" and to that: every instance of socialism or communism has either been authoritarian and therefore always going to be bad or got fucked over by outside influences, or sometimes internal ones. Probably the best historical example that was good was the Soviet union in the very beginning in the first few weeks or months when worker control flourished, but then Lenin fucked over everything and became authoritarian.
If you think anarchism is viable I literally don't know how we could ever in a million years agree. That is a ridiculous proposal to me beyond words, up there and equivalent to free speech absolutism.
Ignoring that, explain to me how you're going to keep democratic socialism from going off the rails if we can't even keep democratic capitalism from going off the rails?
Edit: In capitalism at least greedy people have an outlet that isn't the government. In a socialist society, the only way to be greedy is to control the government. I don't think it's coincidence that every socialist society has turned into an authoritarian state, I think it's an inevitability.
That doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from socialism or anarchism, but they are firmly non-viable strategies by themselves.
I don't personally, but it is another proposal, that's why I mentioned it. There are some parts that seek decent but I have not read up on full explanations enough to understand the theory behind it.
The question was very open and there's a lot to explain, so sorry for the text wall I ended up making
As for keeping stuff "on the rails," more or less just more of the stuff we should be doing to try keep capitalism on the rails. Regulations and regulatory agencies and government bodies, and better electoral and government systems. And on top of that, the workers being in control will eliminate a lot of the motivations for businesses to do 'bad' things. Treatment of workers and profit distribution most obviously, but also things like quality of product or service, because the workers are also likely either direct consumers of it as well or more closely linked to direct consumers.
As for government and democratic improvements, since I'm assuming we are comparing against the US, we have a pretty shitty democratic structure and even governmental structure to some extent. First and foremost, the two party system and first past the post voting. Systems like ranked choice allow for a much broader set of parties and corresponding values to be expressed in governance. Other things like how shit of an institution the Supreme Court is, the electoral college, etc. A more European democratic model is much better. Also, a great example of how Europe has an much better control on capitalism is to look at how a lot of tech and internet protections and regulation is almost exclusively European. Things like requiring all devices to have USB-C, all of the GDPR which is the giant data privacy regulation that requires things like letting users obtain a copy of all their data, and also delete it among many other things. Also something I've seen recently is that by in think it was 2027 all smartphones will have to have removable batteries which is amazing.
Basically democratic socialism would be taking all the good stuff Europe does and cranking it up to 11, plus a few other things.
Edit to respond to your edit: perhaps, but how does a greedy person then get elected? The whole point of democracy is that you elect people who represent you, and also have checks and balances in place to limit any given individual or group from overstepping their power, a can be removed if they are causing harm.
You literally claimed there are "many better" proposals, and listed two... One of which you yourself don't agree with, but only listed because "it's another proposal"? That's not a proposed better system, that's a red herring.
The same way they always have? They run for office and people vote them in? Do you think anyone in Ohio actually thought this guy was going to take 60 million in bribes?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/former-ohio-house-speaker-sentenced-20-years-prison-leading-racketeering-conspiracy
Why aren't people removed currently when a majority of the country seems to agree a lot of politicians that are in Washington shouldn't be?
Sure, but these same improvements could be made to our current system; why can't we even get that done?
[needs citation]; genuinely not to be rude, but this is literally the same spiel everyone that's anti-capitalist gives. It's nothing of substance, it's entirely unproven. Even assuming it's true, you must assumes that you'll even be able to put and then keep the workers in power. Also, which workers, all the workers? Representatives for the workers? etc. That's a lot to take for granted.
By all means.
Everything is perfect if the premise is that there are no problems
You can say the same thing about many ideologies: socialism, communism, capitalism. All are great in theory. But humans exploit any system they can. That is their nature and purpose.