Is capitalism a threat to democracy? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#171

Post by spiralx » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #159

spiralx wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In capitalism, people are given the ability to create value to their fullest extent. In capitalism people have the ability to create value to the extent they have the capital to do so, a requirement which excludes most people from achieving what they could.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, but that's a knowledge problem. Many people have no idea how to procure capital, nor what capital procurement even entails. There are few viable routes to becoming an entrepreneur, and most people would agree that the most viable route is learning from other entrepreneurs. For me, learning how to operate a business required a lot of reading, failure, and bad decisions. For someone wh…

> So while I agree with you that most people are excluded from maximizing their potential, I think the root cause is not a lack of capital, but a lack of knowledge about how to interact with capital.

And do you not think that this is a function of how much capital one has access to in the first place? Leaving aside the research showing how poverty affects development, those born to families with wealth will have both more knowledge of how to interact with capital and more access to capital in general.

You seem to be both acknowledging that there is a stacked deck and claiming that there is a level playing field where everyone can achieve their true potential.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#172

Post by noir-york » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #165

noir-york wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, which is why modern democracies, or at least Western ones, don't describe themselves as democracies (except only as shorthand), but republican liberal* democracies. * liberal here meaning political liberal (JS Mill liberalism), and not what is understood by "liberal" in US politics.

The UK is a western democracy and does not describe itselg as a republican anything, though opponents to certain elements of the current constitution describe themselves that way. There is an overlap between democratic republics (or, to use the less common phrasing, “republican democracies”) and limited representative democracies, but they aren't the same.

The UK is what is called an aristocratic republic* as it retains the Roman Republic's setup: - Sovereign / House of Lords (Senate) / Lower house.

The US Founding Fathers copied England, and Rome's model but replaced the sovereign with a President.

Representative democracies are necessarily republics - although some, like my country, skip the upper house. Rome introduced consuls / republican model because the population was too large, unlike the Greek polis, to be politically manageable. Rome of course was not a democracy.

*or monarchic. I am away from my books so cannot confirm exactly the term. Sorry.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#173

Post by juliangoldsmith » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

yosito wrote: post #57

linuxftw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But democracy is a threat to freedom.

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

What happens when those privileged are able to control the primary source of information for the population? It seems likely they would be able to convince the vulnerable to give up their freedom by convincing them it was in their interest.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#174

Post by _rpd » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

yosito wrote: post #57

linuxftw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But democracy is a threat to freedom.

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

The tyranny of the majority is just as terrible as other types of tyranny.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#175

Post by yosito » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #173

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.

What happens when those privileged are able to control the primary source of information for the population? It seems likely they would be able to convince the vulnerable to give up their freedom by convincing them it was in their interest.

That's definitely a threat to democracy, but the name of that threat is not "democracy" or "captialism", it's "propaganda".

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#176

Post by yosito » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

_rpd wrote: post #174

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.

The tyranny of the majority is just as terrible as other types of tyranny.

Not all democracies are "majority rule".

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#177

Post by _jal » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #167

_jal wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are. IMO that's not a convincing argument. Your response to two specific counter-examples is "one day you'll see that those examples actually prove my point instead of yours"

That's nice. If you'd like to convince me I'm wrong, you'll have to explain why these companies, which are subject to the same pressures as others and hire from the same pool of execs, will behave differently than the rest of the herd of large public firms.

If you want to argue they'll lobby, manipulate and bribe less than average among peer-firms, well, that argument could be made.

But if you want to argue that there's something special about them that means they won't play all the same games, perhaps start with explaining how Amazon's begging-for-handouts HQ tour is different than the sports stadium scam.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#178

Post by gimmeDatCheddar » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

spiralx wrote: post #145

gimmeDatCheddar wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) When competition is allowed to enter the market, we eventually have an equilibrium where the right number of competitors is producing a good or a service at the best price and highest quality possible. That is capitalism. When concentrations of wealth are leveraged into political power, you have cronyism in the government. That's not a fault of capitalism itself. 2) The wealthy cutting their taxes does not necessa…

> When competition is allowed to enter the market, we eventually have an equilibrium where the right number of competitors is producing a good or a service at the best price and highest quality possible. That is capitalism. No, that's a highly theoretical model that doesn't exist in the real world. > When concentrations of wealth are leveraged into political power, you have cronyism in the government. That's not a fa…

It does exist in the real world, although it can sometimes become obfuscated by government regulation and intervention. Example: Entering the pharmaceutical space to produce cost-effective generic medicines in order to steal market share from the big pharmaceuticals is hard because of government red-tape.

Using capital as leverage for political influence is not a central tenet of capitalism. You can be a capitalist and remain entirely outside the political realm. Some capitalists are known to use their capital for expensive philanthropic ventures or to support candidates who want to raise taxes.

Why did you ignore my comment about tax revenue and spending, by the way? That was the meat of the post.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#179

Post by panarky » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #16

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

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

A fish doesn't know it's in water because it never experienced anything else.

Can we imagine anything other than the system we live in?

I suppose we can imagine small adjustments like higher or lower taxation, more or less regulation, increasing or decreasing subsidies for different groups.

But that's like slightly changing the temperature or salinity of the water we're swimming in. It doesn't help us imagine what walking through air would be like.

Re: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

#180

Post by nickik » Fri, May 11, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

Don't throw out 'all economist' argument when its not true. It is simply false the all economist believe in the marxist notion of automatic capital centralisation.

There is also little evidence that economiclly freeer country are more unequal or that have a lower share of wealth amoung the poor.

> It's not clear that this method has ever worked on a scale larger than a kibbutz or cooperative, but it's also clear that most families are run as communes, though this is rarely discussed.

This is actually not rarly discussed. Capitalist thinkers like F.A. Hayek and Adam Smith did actually think about these problems quite carefully. Sadly people like him are simply ignored by much of the leftist marxist crowd becuase they are just evil capitalist handmaidens.

If you read Adam Smith two books 'Wealth of Nation' and 'Theory of Moral Sentiment' it is quite clear how he fought about this. Hayek made this into a more coherent theory.

As you abserve amoung familiy and friends (evne in tribes) we do not engadge in property rights and trade. The problem is that humans devloped in these communities and to attemed to scale the same way of thinking and organisation to a macro society is impossible because of information and insentive problems.

Hayek makes distinction between micro cosmos and macro cosmos where in the small you would not want to run it like a market, but it would be equally damaging to attemped to apply the micro cosmos rules to macro cosmos.

In fact psycology has made it perfectly clear that humans simply do not have the intellectual capacity to relate to millions of human that they don't know in anywhere close to the same way the do to the humans they know.