It’s the best system when combined with strong regulation and good social safety nets. I wish everybody would focus on those things falling down and needing to be fixed instead of pretending we’re going to throw the whole system out tomorrow.
It’s the best system when combined with strong regulation and good social safety nets.
Sure, it's just too bad it's also a system in which the most powerful are incentivized to cut regulations and destroy social safety nets.
This utopic version of capitalism sounds really nice, but it's fully incompatible with the actual reality of capitalism.
This utopic version of capitalism sounds really nice, but it’s fully incompatible with the actual reality of capitalism.
All it takes for capitalism to work flawlessly is... checks notes... a fundamental change in human nature, where we no longer feel greed.
EZPZ. Best system ever designed!
(don't tell anyone that this would equally make communism work)
If a socio-economic system incentives greed to the point where a person who is not greedy is literally unable to succeed, can you really say that greed is human nature?
This perverse incentive, however, is at least limited to a very small group of people, whose influence, with the correct exercise of state power, can be contained.
In a capitalist economy or capitalist-like economy, everyone's individual self-interest aligns with the collective self-interest a good percentage of the time, so relatively little state intervention is needed to keep it working well. The problem with alternative economic systems is that it is in almost nobody's interest to work for the common good, either because of a collective action problem (in communist or communist-like systems) or other reasons. That is why governments in non-capitalist countries are comparatively more heavy-handed with their application of state power. They have to do so in order to maintain their system when it is in nobody's interest to do so on their own.
Without addressing the more obscure systems which I do not know enough about to give an informed take, the difference between capitalism and communism is that the former works by assuming the worst of everyone and the latter works by assuming the best of everyone. And humans acting in large groups tend to act shitty and selfishly.
almost nobody's interest to work
Except that doesn't really add up in reality. People do want to contribute. People do want to feel useful.
A lot of today's most important functions are done by people who do it out of a love for the field, not because they're paid well to do it. I'm thinking teachers. I'm thinking academics. I'm thinking people in certain medical fields such as nursing. A lot of these jobs frankly suck compared to other ones, and the list isn't limited to these.
Hell, I work at the place I do because I like the idea of working with what I do than just going private, even though I'm literally losing out on lots of money doing so.
And then you got stuff like the wealth of Free And Open Source software that people develop because they like to contribute. You got wikipedia. You got so many things people do just because they want to contribute, the list is almost endless.
Humans are wired to be pro-social. We could absolutely make it work. If anything, capitalism stands in the way of this goodness!
when combined with strong regulation and good social safety nets
🤣 I’m not disagreeing with the sentiment but to think we’ll see those anytime soon is a bit of a sad joke. I think too many people in power have made too much money for anything but a sundering to change their minds and allow themselves to be regulated and work for the good of all, instead of themselves.
In a slightly different vein of thought, I think there is truth to the sentiment that fascists don’t cede power willingly. I get that we should focus on things we can change that aren’t unimportant, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a fascist government being voted out.
The only thing making stronger regulation impossible is self-defeating apathy.
The hard truth is that none of us here in this thread are out in the streets rioting because we are fed, housed, and have a job to get to. We talk about capitalism as if it only benefits Elon Musk but we’re all riding the same bus. He just has a better seat.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have been to local protests (and the use of the word rioting suggests you might be of a different persuasion than me, and that’s ok). And for the record, I didn’t disagree with you. I grew up under capitalism and knew a brief period where capitalism wasn’t completely fucking over the lower and middle classes but that was before the US came out of the fascist closet.
It’s the best system when combined with strong regulation and good social safety nets.
Both regulation and social safety nets run counter to the concept of a free market and a free market is central to the definition of Capitalism.
That's like saying "The best form of travel is unrestrained forward acceleration" with the caveat that it must be combined with the ability to break and steer.
Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, was pretty clear that a free market still needs protection.
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation...
Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.
The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits. It deserves to be remarked, too, that it necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the proportion which the demand for labour requires. If this demand is continually increasing, the reward of labour must necessarily encourage in such a manner the marriage and multiplication of labourers, as may enable them to supply that continually increasing demand by a continually increasing population.
Modern neoliberal capitalism is mostly based on Friedrich Hayek who thought that any regulation to the market is harmful. Smith is long overdue.
During a party meeting, Margareth Thetcher literally pulled out a book of Hayek out of her handbag, slammed it on the table and declared "This is what we believe".
No, it’s like saying that the best form of transportation is some form of forward locomotive force kept in check by brakes and steering. Like, you know actual cars.
Basically you’re looking at a Toyota Corolla and saying “What? Some of its parts move it forward, and some of its parts stop it from moving? That’s a total contradiction! It’s central to the definition of a car that it move forward!”
Yes regulation and social safety nets run counter, that’s the point.
There’s no one concept which makes for a good system in a totally undiluted form. Pure centralized economy: disaster. Pure capitalism, disaster.
Capitalism tempered by regulation and socialism: a balance of economic dynamism and humanist restraint.
The core of your argument seems to be that the only form of capitalism is unrestrained capitalism and we just don’t agree on those semantics. I believe a free market system can be governed and taxed to support social welfare. You believe that capitalism can only be unrestrained. Well, my version of reality is everywhere we look: both Europe and the US are examples of free market economies with some safety net and regulation attached. Europe is stronger on the latter two but the US is hardly at zero.
Capitalism is inherently about vice exploutation and getting around rukes, though. You can't say 'capitalism but virtuous'; that's nonsense. 'Capitalism but restrained' translates to reality as 'caputalism but only fir the first five minutes before breaking everything'.
Look at the scandinavian countries. Arguably the best example of how to do capitalism, regulation and socialism. Seems to work out for their citizens.
So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon's rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can't really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn't get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don't really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what's going on in Cuba, which isn't perfect, but is interesting.
You lost me at "the Soviet Union was doing a communism". Hard to see a dictatorship as the workers owning the means of production.
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system? If it wasn't capitalists, wouldn't it be something else? Drought? Covid?
It's not baseless speculation, and it's not a little bit of pressure. I'm saying it was a lot of pressure. And I'm saying we don't know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.
I'm not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever
Regardless, it appears that we're just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.
I’m currently watching capitalism in America bow to authoritarianism. I fail to see what you’re trying to say
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system?
Looks at present day US and UK
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
On one hand, i don't trust the cia on anything. I dont even trust them to know what those words mean.
On the other; this us hilarious.
< nerd-moment rant >
CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.
And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.
( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )
Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they'd otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.
Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to... Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.
Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.
The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge -- she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.
Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts -- FISA -- for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama's kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.
And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren't as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)
In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy... CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn't handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it's no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.
< /nmr >
cia is incompetent is new
Lol no. They woukd drug each other with lsd while on assignment through the whole later half of the cold war. Which, based, very cool, but not the best for winning cold wars.
most brutal
Do we include their proxies and 'school of the americas' grads as theirs? Because some of them also liked the helicopter trick. And worse things.
secured americans against
Sure thing sen. Mcarthy.
Really though. They said that's what they were doing. But they're kind of professional liars.
often messy about it
Fire is often thought of as warm
wanted to be a spy as a kid
Sure, before you learn what it really is. Try being a labor organizer; all the danger and intrigue, less language requirement and pay, plus it's easy on the conscience.
They were always streaked with incompetent shit heads. There's huge swathes of culture they just cant get people into, because they can't hire anyone from those cultures, and to work there your ability to understand shit has to wear serious horse blinders.
I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it's a pretty big institution. It's also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.
I agree that it's gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I'll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that's different than incompetent
If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they're immoral.
CIA's strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.
As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn't imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.
This was an internal memo not meant for the public eye, so it probably contains accurate information.
Was the .com crash bad for average people? I was not yet financially responsible for myself then.
I was average people and watched a lot of layoffs happen over it.
It didn't feel that way, not like 2006 felt. I think the crash got quickly overshadowed by 9/11. I also believe that the bubble itself was actually managed better, instead of becoming instant tax cuts and handouts like bubbles under Republicans, so the fallout didn't feel so bad.
The worst thing that happened during it was the Enron scandal, a bunch of startup website companies failed, and the ones that didn’t are evil mega corps now.
We're not in the crash yet. We've been very close a few times, but they keep reviving the dying horse while they beat it.
It helps when you have a fiat currency that the world is tied to. Won't last forever.
I agree with this. It's gotten bad, like, great depression bad, at times, but it never lasted. There has so far been bounce backs in a relatively reasonable timeframe.
When it crashes, you'll know.
What's the better system?
At the very least heavy regulation to prevent unfair practices. Humans will pretty much always optimize the fun out of everything.
Take competitive video games for example, where once something becomes the meta, it's used and abused until it gets nerfed. But people still play hundreds of games with whatever the most optimal meta is, even if it takes the fun and variety out of the game and makes it boring.
Pretty much every economic system ends up the same way, people figure out the most optimal ways to exploit whatever the system is, take the fun and fairness out of it, and ruin it for anyone who doesn't want to play by the meta. In an ideal system, there's strong regulatory systems in place (for example the FTC and the CFPB) that work to balance things and make sure the system works for everyone. But the people who like to optimize the fun out of things have decided they'd like the regulators out of the way so they can go crazy with their exploitation.
This but unironically
Capitalism fails every 4-7 years.
Because these only happen in capitalism. Yeah, sure. Wanna buy a bridge?
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