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Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

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Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#91

Post by vertexFarm »

ancorevard wrote: post #67

"Is the freedom to choose what to Sell and what to Purchase a threat to the freedom to choose political leadership?" No. In fact, you cannot have the one without the other.

And what if you are free to purchase that political leadership and use it to curtail the freedom of others? And use it to skew the system and hoard wealth so nobody can ever buy it back? Hm?

I swear, an-caps just don't consider the actual consequences of their ideology. Just once I wish y'all would think something through all the way to the end and consider the possibility of non-ideal situations.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#92

Post by yosito »

s2g wrote: post #81
yosito wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a threat to the freedom of the privileged, but it protects the freedom of the vulnerable.

OH god no. Democracy is a system which can easily trample on the freedoms of the vulnerable. It's why you need to engineer your actual system of government to give representation to the vulnerable that is hard to ignore.

Democracy is a system designed to give representation to the vulnerable. I suppose you're saying that it's possible to have a poorly designed democracy such as one that gives representation to the majority at the expense of the minority, which I agree with.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#93

Post by s2g »

ghouse wrote: post #12

Unregulated capitalism, perhaps. However, I don't think the US has capitalism (well-regulated or otherwise) today. Today we have a system where gains are privatized, losses are socialized, and market-participants can coerce their elected officials to tilt the market in their favor. This is not capitalism.

Sounds like capitalism to me. Corporations have just managed to leverage it for long enough to create what we have now.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#95

Post by jerf »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #29
mindcrime wrote: post #4

Simple answer: No. More nuanced answer: not exactly. Not Capitalism per-se anyway. But clearly you can see an unhealthy degree of commingling of big government and big business, in a way that is damaging to society at large. But to my mind: a. that's corruption, not capitalism b. that's an argument against big government, not an argument against capitalism

Some have argued, however, that this commingling is caused by the forces of capitalism. Once you have large profits, it makes sense to direct some of them towards altering the laws in your favor. Simultaneously, capitalism seems to encourage the kind of concentration of wealth that will always ensure some capitalists have large profits relative to the norm of society. So in many ways this commingling ends up being in…

I agree that there is a lot of inevitability in this result. This is often a debate in the implicit context of "we should make the government even stronger, probably socialism or communism", but in those cases instead of two entities who at least sometimes struggle for power, we're just giving up and giving all the power to one entity.

So, if the problem is that corporations and governments tend to get too close to each other, what exactly is the nominally-better solution that we're supposed to be comparing against?

What if this is already just about the best we could hope for? It does sometimes seem to me that people have this implicit idea of a world in which, basically, nobody has any power, or everybody has the exact same amount to an arbitrary number of decimal places, but even by the standards of Utopianism, that's Utopian. What, exactly, is the goal of this conversation?

It'll differ for different people, of course, but it's still a valid exercise. There is a lot of "1. Identify problem. 2. Propose solution. 3. Fail to observe that proposed solution couldn't possibly have solved original problem, even if it worked as designed."

(For another example, see the last few mass shootings, and the subsequent proposed "solutions"; without reference to whether or not they would be good idea and whether or not more gun control is good or bad, it was frequently the case that even if the proposed solutions were in place and perfectly, unrealistically functional prior to the incident that the solution still wouldn't have prevented the event, e.g., "more background checks" that the shooter still would have passed, etc.)

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#96

Post by bantunes »

mindcrime wrote: post #40
gameswithgo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the absence of big government, big corporate will become defacto government even more easily.

Not necessarily. Big corporations actually depend on the State for their very existence, and leverage corruption, regulatory capture, etc., to grow larger and more powerful than they would naturally.

One can consider that status quo as their infancy period. Once they're big enough, they'll be able to exist and thrive without corporate welfare. "Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries." according to http://www.corporations.org/system/top100.html

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#97

Post by hayd »

tshaddox wrote: post #42
aggie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a. that's corruption, not capitalism This is the same logic used by people who argue "That's corruption, not socialism." If everywhere there is capitalism, there is corruption, you can't simply wave it away. Edit: I originally asked "How is this argument different from 'that's corruption, not socialism'", which some seemed to interpret as a defense of socialism. I'm just pointing out the flawed logic in both argume…

> How is this any different from people who argue "That's corruption, not socialism"? It’s not at all different. In fact, state socialism and state capitalism are extremely similar systems.

The lack of forced labor camps or worse, the existence of a free press which can expose corruption, mean these systems are not extremely similar...

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#98

Post by dharma1 »

dsr_ wrote: post #39

According to many economists, yes. Capitalism does not appear to have a stable mode with a low Gini coefficient. Power that derives from wealth becomes concentrated, which is clearly anti-democratic. Democracy is only viable as a decision-making process in societies where everyone is more or less equal. When people gain power at the expense of others, the result is that the system may remain nominally democratic, but…

I think programmatic organisational structures with economics and voting built in are pretty interesting. We're building tooling for something like that with https://aragon.one

It's still pretty early days but right now you can create your democracy based DAO in a couple of minutes with no programming. You can issue tokens, vote and and tie in any action of a dapp to another action (like transfer of tokens to the result of a vote).

I think it's an interesting vision of a future where you can very easily create programmatic cross-border organisations that can have economic value creation attached to them, and operate based on how the token holders vote.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#99

Post by nickik »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #59
mindcrime wrote: post #4

Simple answer: No. More nuanced answer: not exactly. Not Capitalism per-se anyway. But clearly you can see an unhealthy degree of commingling of big government and big business, in a way that is damaging to society at large. But to my mind: a. that's corruption, not capitalism b. that's an argument against big government, not an argument against capitalism

To your nuanced answer, has there been a time when Capitalism didn't seek to dominate all of it's regulatory bodies? Unions, governments, activists, even other Capitalists as they represent competition. There's a reason leftists call Imperialism the highest form of Capitalism.

Of course they do. Adam Smith already understood this.

However, just because any group in society wants to change the rules of society to their benefit, does not make the existance of those groups a bad thing per se.

Sometimes people act as if that was unique for capitalist. In fact Unions, Activists, Government burocracies and so on have the exact same insentives, they want to change rules to benefit them.

The reason leftists call Imperialism the highest statge of capitalism is because these leftists had a very limited understanding of both history and the reasons behind imperialism. Their theory never made much sense and much modern history has desproved these simplified Leninist notions.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#100

Post by isaiahg »

mindcrime wrote: post #4

Simple answer: No. More nuanced answer: not exactly. Not Capitalism per-se anyway. But clearly you can see an unhealthy degree of commingling of big government and big business, in a way that is damaging to society at large. But to my mind: a. that's corruption, not capitalism b. that's an argument against big government, not an argument against capitalism

I'm having trouble seeing how you made that jump from corruption to big government.
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