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this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Is the communism that you voted out the Marxist-Leninist, "people's revolution turned authoritarian state" kind? I'd get rid of that shit, too.
There are lots of other stands of anti-capitalism (eg, democratic socialism, anarchism) that are probably worth exploring. Even if we stick with capitalism but soften it with socialist policies, that's still way better than the minimally regulated capitalism we have in the US.
Haven't seen any proposal that would reconcile incentives of large number of egoistic actors. This sort of thing simply doesn't exist.
The economy for the common good is one.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386481877_Economy_for_the_common_good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_for_the_Common_Good
Discussion about 16 minutes in. https://sceneonradio.org/s5-e11-change-everything/
Also cooperatives exists, and in many ways are more successful than their traditional capitalistic counterparts, providing a system to help "reconcile egoistic actors" by rewarding cooperation and solidarity rather than competition and utility maximization.
I listened to the discussion so far. The proposed system is still capitalism, but with some tweaks. IMO rather clumsy tweaks since there's no clear definition what common good even is.
And instead of some point system, you can just collect taxes to finance welfare for citizens, which is exactly how EU economies work. In most cases taxation is progressive so it's not like rich CEOs aren't paying exponentially more than avg citizen.
In the US, progressive taxation gets called communism, lol.
But yeah. That's kinda what I meant with my original comment. The more progressive EU economies are, to my understanding anyway, outcomes from the more reformist socialist traditions - using the existing democratic government to round off the excesses of unregulated capitalism. And I would take that any day of the week.
IMO income tax in general does more harm than good. My opinion is that government budget should be financed by taxing consumption.
If you're trying to build your wealth and take advantage of compounding interest, income tax (especially capital gains tax) absolutely crushes it.
@BlackLaZoR @vonbaronhans you might be egoistic, but don't assume people broadly to be so
Point is every society has significant number of egoistic actors. You can't design a socio-economical system with assumption that everyone will just work for "common good"
@BlackLaZoR the difference is that in a hierarchical system (like capitalism, where capital concetrates), those egoistic people tend to be at the top of society.
Capitalism is a horrible bad solution to dealing with egoistic people
First, Egoist =/= Evil and Altruist =/= Good
Worst criminals of history often justified their crimes with "higher need" or some other noble goal.
Second, it's the best solution that has been proven to work. And it's the best solution because it aligns incentives.
@BlackLaZoR the world is facing extinction level global warming and crossing various other planetary boundaries. Capitalism is literally destroying the foundations for human life on Earth
Not really. You can already see the shift from fossil to renewables because they're cheaper. 40% of electricity globally comes from renewables + nuclear already, and renewable power covers all new demand every year.
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
It's not that capitalism cares about environment it just happens that fossil is getting progressively harder to mine while renewables (especially solar) are getting cheaper due to economics of scale.