Freedom of “choice”.
Comment on The System does not work.
Ravenheart@lemmy.zip 2 months agoI agree. But also, they’re all capitalists. Even the so-called Democratic socialists are capitalists.
RockBottom@feddit.org 2 months ago
pilferjinx@piefed.social 2 months ago
I normally view them as community-first capitalists. Still better than any kind of totalitarian (no dissent) government.
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yes, and capitalism can work if it’s well regulated. And that means the people have to control the government, not the corporations or billionaires. Thats what’s very wrong in the USA now.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The entire fundamental goal of capitalism is to commodify any potential source of profit. That means something like a “well regulated government” which is a guaranteed negative profit engine will always be amongst the first things to be commodified.
The only way that “works” is if the government treats corporations and billionaires with a equal or greater level of contempt than they treat the government. At which point it is, by any reasonable definition, no longer capitalism.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I think this is just a larger cycle of history that has nothing specifically to do with capitalism.
In every society, there are levers of power. In ever society, access to the levels of power grants you more power. Eventually, every society is ruled by a few people who can trivially put their own interests ahead of the interests of everyone else. Eventually, doing so for long enough makes everyone (but the powerful worse off) and the society collapses, at which point the guillotines come out and society resets (best case scenario) or it enters a stable state of serfdom.
This has all happened before. This will all happen again.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yes.
No. Capitalism is because we have learned some lessons from that long history of power struggles but we are currently stuck in a rut and have a good 50-100 years of knowing better but refusing to do anything about it, which itself is another larger cycle of history that we know better but refuse to do anything about.
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well, the idea is to use people’s greed to drive growth and progress. If the government can shape profit forces to drive life quality improvements of the population, then it can work. This basically boils down to taxing bad shit, or making certain practices illegal. People will always try to game the system and find holes, and the government needs to constantly watch for this and plug the. Then competition within those rules can lead to positive outcomes.
The government doesn’t need to treat corporations or billionaires with contempt, it just needs to ignore their wants and prioritize on the people.
SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I understand the idea, I’m saying the idea is inherently contradictory and stupid.
A corporation only exists as a legal fiction. A corporation can not exist if a state “ignores their wants” because the state is the one granting the desire for the corporation to exist in the first place! Billionaires function similarly via the concept of private property but that one is a bit more roundabout.
They exist because the state intrinsically cares deeply because “billionaires” have every incentive to ensure the state does so. The state “ignoring their wants” does not come close to matching the incentives of the “billionaires” and as such the Nash equilibrium will ALWAYS favor the “billionaires” without equal, or greater, incentives for the state.
You set up a system based inherently on ‘winner takes all’ style conflict and are surprised when the most ruthless and least moral people end up winning?
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
FTFY.
I think we’re well past the idea that capitalism is the “end of history”. The profit motive is always gonna lead us back here.
CannonFodder@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think if donations to political parties were limited to a couple of hundred dollars per person and no corps or other funding allowed - or better yet, paid for only by a public fund based on the number of votes last cycle, then the system would have a chance. We’d need much more anti-corruption systems for politicians too. And this stuff would have to be constitutionally protected. The goal would be to make it so the politicians can only game for votes from the people. And Corp/capital owners could only game the system writhin the rules set by the government which is actually beholden to the people. People could innovate and take reasonable risks/work hard and be rewarded for that. Of course decent education is part of the equation too.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If you keep capitalism no amount of political donation/lobbying regulation will ever fix the problem. The problem being that having money affords you influence, even without donating directly to political parties, or by lobbying and legally bribing politicians with cushy jobs after they leave politics.
If we allow wealth to be amassed and concentrated in the hands of a few (who extracted that excess value from the workers who actually produced it), we hand control of the economy, and thus society to an unelected oligarchy.
If you control the wealth of a nation, including capital, you control the workers who are economically forced to work for you, as they lack enough money to compete with you.
When you control the capital, you decide what projects are invested in, you can influence elected bodies to bend over backwards for you with tax reductions (see, Amazon and basically getting cities to bid for them to locate parts of their business there).
And oh so much more that I am too inarticulate to make concise here.
You can’t regulate your way to capitalism working, since the profit motive will always work to undo them (see the fact that Anti-Trust is barely being enforced anymore in the US, and the rest of the world generally)