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Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

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Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#111

Post by nickik »

MereInterest wrote: post #27
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

>b. that's an argument against big government, not an argument against capitalism A government that is not large enough to upset an even playing field will also not be large enough to level an uneven playing field.

False. A government power derives from its monopoly of violence not from the size of its budget.

There is litte correlation between the size of a govenrment and its ability to regulate.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#112

Post by krapp »

carom wrote: post #19
major505 wrote: post #2

Well, I will not subscribe to the new yourkers for just an article, but my anwser wold be hell no. Intervencion of govern in the free market.... maybe.

I've gotten downvoted for mentioning paywalls as well. I think this is a very valid call out though. While there are workarounds, I don't want to spend more than 2 seconds opening an article (most the time it isn't worth going to google cache, some archive, or doing the fb redirect). I dislike that it is effectively a dead link for many people and that it is being shared on the front page of a major aggregator. It is…

>While there are workarounds, I don't want to spend more than 2 seconds opening an article (most the time it isn't worth going to google cache, some archive, or doing the fb redirect).

And yet you wasted more time that that writing this comment, so we could waste more time that that reading it.

If your time is so valuable that you can't be bothered to put in even the few seconds of minimal effort needed to engage with the topic at hand, perhaps your time is better spent elsewhere.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#113

Post by slg »

vollmond wrote: post #24

"Is freedom a threat to democracy?" is another way to word the headline.

I think one could make an argument that unfettered freedom of speech combined with capitalism is a threat to democracy. Money allows one to purchase speech. Speech allows you to influence people. You can control the people if you can control the money. Money is not distributed equally in a capitalist society which results in the power to influence not being distributed equally. We have all seen this in action.

Therefore if you want a properly functioning democracy you will need campaign finance laws which are inherently restrictions on speech. And even campaign finance reform might not be enough now that we are in an era of constant propaganda that is able to lay the ground work of influencing people outside of election cycles.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#114

Post by ksk »

hapnin wrote: post #75

"Is [Abstraction A] a threat to [Abstraction B]?" No. Human beings who put money and control of land and resources over and above the welfare of other human beings are a threat to us all and always have been. I wish sociopathic hypergreedy control freaks were viewed the same way we perceive pedophiles instead of being rewarded.

Capitalism self-selects for those hypergreedy people. Thankfully, a lot of humans are social animals interested in welfare of other humans, and society at large. A Welfare component is required to offset people harmed by the excess of capitalism.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#115

Post by petraeus »

The only way to fix democracy is to make voting mandatory, but the elites in power have no motive to change the system. In fact they have all the reason to keep the status-quo. The current version of democracy is a treat to democracy itself.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#116

Post by JetSetWilly »

mpweiher wrote: post #54
JetSetWilly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit similar to claiming that communism is great, because all the times when it was tried and there were problems weren't real communism. If capitalism tends to inevitably lead to corruption of government and the undermining of democracy etc in the long run, then that's an interesting critique, which can't just be swatted away with "yes but the result isn't capitalism".

> If capitalism tends to inevitably lead to corruption of government Everything tends to lead to corruption of government, in fact most forms of government are the corruption we see as the problem here. The key point of liberal democracy is to put mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening.

Well maybe, but there's a question of degree. Free Market / Capitalism proponents, will argue until they are blue in the face about how much more clever and intelligent and better actors in a free and competitive market will behave compared to alternative systems, so why wouldn't these actors also apply that competitive edge to the business of "corrupting the government for personal gain" and end up doing the corruption better than an alternative system would?

Perhaps you could have a liberal democracy that copes fine in one era with various built-in systems to combat corruption, but if you make the market more competitive/free-er/better then it can no longer cope in subsequent eras? Who knows, but it certainly seems to match my perceptions of certain countries following market liberalisation.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#117

Post by haZard_OS »

mindcrime wrote: post #74
vertexFarm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that to be at all fair we should treat the side-effects of capitalism as capitalism, just as we treat the side-effects of communism as communism. When we see that communist regimes have famines and vast imprisonments and corrupt party leaders stealing from the people, we correctly identify that as one of the realities of communism which stems from the impossibility of making communism work within the confines…

When it's the inevitable effects of capitalism, we deny it I haven't seen any proof that there are any "inevitable" effects of capitalism. Certainly we can't take the existence of these effects that you are referring to as a given.

Would you say that you haven't seen any proof that there are "inevitable" effects of (attempts at) communism?

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#118

Post by _jal »

rayiner wrote: post #84
mindcrime wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a common view, but I don't think the evidence supports it. What "corruption" and "regulatory capture" did Amazon or Google leverage in coming to dominate multiple verticals? Instead, I think technology is the culprit. Technology pushes out the boundary where economies of scale give way to diseconomies of scale. Mom & pops can't compete with Amazon not because Amazon has a few senators in its pocket. They can't…

Capture and corruption doesn't help small startups become big[1]. They help big companies stay big.

I think you're right that Google and Amazon (and others) leveraged something new - the catalog-sales and cat-video dynamo we call the internet - to get where they are.

And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are.

[1] You might say 'Uber' in response; I'd say the company was corrupt and failed to find sufficient exploitable government levers to succeed in those efforts, because someone else got to those levers first.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#119

Post by vertexFarm »

eximius wrote: post #9

No, but greed is.

Can you even have capitalism without greed? Greed is just a pejorative term for self-interest, which is a core assumption in the treatise of capitalism. It can't exist without it.

It just needs to be limited. You can't have lassis-faire capitalism forever because the people who are most successful will change the initial conditions and it will no longer be lassis-faire. So you need some kind of control outside the free market. The free market alone is not corruption-proof in any way.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#120

Post by jcims »

nickik wrote: post #77
gameswithgo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are not talking about an absence of govenremnt. A small government is perfectly able to regulated what is needed to regulate. It is an absolutle isllusion to believe that only a big government can correctly regulated cooperations. In fact, I would argue there is little corrulation either way, both big and small govenrment sometimes have effective laws. The ability to regulated derives from a monopoly on violence,…

I think the confusion is conflating size, or maybe more precisely 'scope', with power.
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