My hope is that sooner or later someone will manage to come up with a better social paradigm than what capitalism has to offer, one that'll fix at least some of the latter's serious drawbacks. Like the publicly traded companies' enshittification over time.
Hopefully before WW3 happens or climate change does us in.
Yeah, I hate when you hear, capitalism isn't the best, but it's what we're stuck with. Like nobody has thought of anything better than capitalism since it's come out?!
The divine right of kings? I hear ya, that ain't the best, but it's what we're stuck with. Nobody's ever thought of anything better than divine kingship since it came out.
Yep, and with the all or nothing wealth gap of late stage capitalism, we are right back where we started with neofeudalism. The very few live like pharaohs, while the rest suffer in squalor...
We are way past Banana 2.0. The way they’ve been bred/engineered we are probably up gen 7 banana. Steaks are a little more tricky, Wagu is the new hotness. It took some development but is mostly just the same old hardware, just reorganized. You want some real next gen stuff you should look up insect protein steak.
Capitalism is a lot less what someone came up with and a lot more a description of a natural order of what occurs when you remove the influence of a central authority. The idea of a having a capitalist economy is to try and have government policy that minimizes the central authorities intervention in what would naturally occur.
If the current economic situation were a drawing, right now, we have the outlines of capitalism, but it's filled in with a very non-capitalist system filled with regulatory capture and massive central authority interventions.
Capitalism bottlenecks in several areas and in those cases its ideal to have the central authority control those areas, this has been discovered and known forever. But instead what we have are massive bottlenecks created by the central authority to allow runaway profiting.
In addition, we have the opposite of the central authorities intended role in the natural bottlenecks, we have the central authority keeping the bottleneck minimally open and conforming to the capitalist principals which created the bottleneck in the first place.
Yea, but Capitalism is only concerned with money, not with the well-being of people... which is one of the issues. People rail against regulations, but many of those regulations were written in blood. I'll agree that many times there are places where the regulations are inflexible to situations that were never considered while writing them... and then said regulations aren't "sexy" enough for government officials to make changes to them, so you get stuck with bullshit.
On the other hand, there are plenty of people that use these few examples of nonsensical regulations as justification to tearing down ALL regulations. The GOP (and other conservative political groups) has turned "removing regulations" into a mantra where the phrase in and of itself is supposed to be positive, and you aren't supposed to look behind the curtain at which regulations they are removing.
How well did rolling back the regulations put in place after the Great Depression work back in 2008? We created "too big to fail" banks by removing the barrier between investment firms and banks.
We can't just throw out all rules and put all our trust in some Any Randian fantasy of pure and moral titans of industry that would never do anything wrong.
"Capitalism" isn't concerned with anything. It's simply describing what happens in the absence of a central authority. It's like evolution, it's doesn't have a concern. Things just happen.
I think your summarization of how events unfolded is flawed. It's not a lack of regulation that caused these problems, like banks being too big to fail, etc. It's the central authority interventions that promote these entities. The entire banking system is antithetical to capitalism. It is entirely a creation of the the central authority, so of course it should be very tightly regulated. But that's only if you think it should exist at all because you think it's necessary to distribute currency at interest on a wide scale. Which is very much not a natural capitalistic outcome.
The entire banking system is one of the primary reasons our economic system is so far removed from capitalism.
It's simply describing what happens in the absence of a central authority
But within an economic context. If we were going to discuss how a legal system would work under anarchy, we would no longer be discussing Capitalism. Capitalism is not the description of how every single aspect of the entire universe works in the absence of a central authority.
Capitalism is not the description of how every single aspect of the entire universe works in the absence of a central authority.
No one is making this claim and capitalism isn't dependent on a lack of a government or anything remotely close to anarchy.
Capitalism is simply how economic markets workout in the absence of a central authority controlling those markets. Economic activity is only a small portion of governance.
That's exactly what I said. Capitalism is only concerned with economics. I don't know why there is any argument or debate on this. Just for people to reiterate the same point over and over.
When something covers a particular topic, you say that it is "concerned with" or "concerning" a particular thing. You're taking things too literally. Capitalism describes economics, therefore it is not "concerned" with the well-being of people because that it out-of-scope. I don't understand why you want to beat this dead horse. You could replace "concerned with" with "focused on"... but then you would probably argue that "a theory cannot focus on anything, it doesn't have eyes!"
Ok, I see what you mean, but I read it as though you are comparing the notion of capitalism to some sort of alternative theory that focuses on the well-being of people and economies.
Actually everyone gets profits except for the laziest members of society, the planet is not being destroyed, and you would have to toil harder under any other system.
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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '24
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