What If ‘Capitalism’ Isn't the Problem? [audio]

Post by Waterfall » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

dqv wrote: post #46

mathattack wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is such planning possible? Decentralized models work because centralized planning doesn’t. I concur with the aims. Solving pandemics, climate change and nuclear proliferation require a different toolset than what succeeded for reducing global poverty.

Centralized planning didn't work. And my assumption has always been that it was the result of a slow-to-respond system. Today we have a way to react to economic signals almost instantaneously. I think it's worth trying again in a smaller way i.e. centralized planning of the meat industry (someone smarter than me can figure out what industry is actually best to do a trial run of modern centralized planning).

Post by nickthemagicman » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 8:19 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #17

DrJones1098 wrote: post #10

Two alternative viewpoints I have that are radically opposed: What if government regulations warp capitalism and give protectionism and favoritism to certain companies while excluding the rest and not allowing for the free market to work? What if unregulated capitalism has cannibalized itself and destroyed the free market by way of big fish eating up all of the small ones and now we're left with a bunch of huge corpo…

Well, the synthesis is that capitalism is not just an economic system, and that in reality economics cannot be divorced from social and political spheres. Government regulations warping capitalism are in large part a consequence of capitalism. Think about it, is it ever possible to orchestrate a society where money buys you media, re-election campaigns, charity and favours, without those having the most money wieldin…

Post by simonpure » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #12

It's not a productive word really because it almost poisons every discussion based on whether someone's broadly sympathetic to 'capitalism' or not. Even when people actually agree this can cause meaningless confusion. What I think is very valuable within our system is markets as a tool . There's no functioning replacement yet for allocating resources through something like a market at large scale. Even socialism symp…

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 1:58 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #70

panarky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I realize that land is a distinct factor of production in the land-labor-capital-entrepreneurship model, in common usage I'd say land is the ultimate capital. Capitalists exploit ownership to generate profit for themselves. Sometimes that's ownership of something they produced, like a machine or a building or a work of the mind. More often, it's something produced by labor that they exploit for profit. And some…

Capital must be producible. Land cannot be any form of capital because it cannot be produced.

Post by thrwway34 » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

iterativ wrote: post #31

fallingfrog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we are experiencing now is reversion to the norm. The post-ww2 period was a special moment when a lot of things lined up to produce a capitalism that was relatively egalitarian, but that was the result of the USA being the only intact industrial economy left, and owning the world reserve currency, and so on. It was never going to last, and it will never happen again. We’re already bringing back sweatshops and ex…

In 1949 (just after WW2), Einstein wrote: "The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil." Einstein was not a sociologist, but it's an indication that about "egalitarian capitalism" is not exactly true.