Why is it that whenever intrinsic, usual operations of capitalism are described (which happen 99% of the time) such as…
1) whenever VCs invest in shares of a project
2) they tend to subsidize money-losing unit economics to “reduce friction” resulting in attempts to lock-in people and monetize their attention later
3) when the VCs later dump it on the public, the company has to now answer to wall street shareholders and its executives are heavily pressured to have quarterly earnings calls
4) they must find ways to extract rents forever because whoever bought at the top (the majority) wants to see their shares go higher, even at the expense of the public interest
5) whereas cryptocurrency could be about collective ownership, if there is no separate shareholder class then the network participants ARE collectively owning the means of production (basically, textbook socialism)
Whenever something like this is stated, anarcho-capitalists and right wing libertarians say:
Oh, there is NOTHING wrong with capitalism. That’s not REAL capitalism. That is corporatism / cronyism. (Some go further and quote Mises/Say/Praxeology: “only individuals can act, organizations can’t act.”)
Then about collective ownership of the means of production / distribution / the network they say… “That’s not REAL SOCIALISM. Socialism is when you use central government and planning and has led to so much misery and famine…”
So, a mainstream application of capitalism isn’t “real” capitalism because laissez faire capitalism doesn’t require the State. But credit unions, housing cooperatives, democratically run universities and now cryptocurrency DAOs are not “real” socialism because socialism requires the State?
There is a huge double-standard here, and I would encourage ancaps to answer the following questions:
Why not use mainstream dictionaries and
encyclopedias for definitions?
Why not admit libertarian socialism exists
Why not compare the results of democracy
vs top down ownership in organizations
on both the participants and the public good
Also, we can move beyond Libertarian Capitalism vs Libertarian Socialism discussions, to simply ask how to best structure decision making in a project.
You can have cryptocurrency run top-down where people work on stuff to survive, and the parent company must make profits. Or you can remove the profit motive and have wikipedia, open source, science, etc. But then you’d need to subsidize people’s maslow’s needs with a UBI.
See for example how your very news and media is affected by the profit motive… compare something like WikiNews vs CNN and Fox. Where are the movements to do something about it? Here is one example I am working on myself: https://rational.app