We've made the world too complicated

A hint for my detractors..

> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village.

The rival tribe is MAGA, ironically destroying the commons partly because somone told them another tribe was taking their jobs. The ransacking is uncontested and uncontestable because the civilizing forces they oppose only serve to bind others against fighting back.

> Or a predatory animal.

That would be capitalism, killing far more people daily than wolves or bandits ever did.

> Or bacterial infections.

Full circle with this threat, since having lost healthcare at the same time as losing a job means that modernity isn't saving you from a risk like this anyway.

Is fear of losing jobs still a step up? This is more savage than actual savagery and deeply unnatural. Poll 5 strangers, and remove the threat of permanent isolation. You can snap your fingers, and be accepted into the community of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Or be a monk in medieval times. Transported with your family/community to pioneer days, whatever. At least 1 will tell you they don't want to live like this, that almost anything is better, and they'll be very happy to risk early death, extra illness, and extra lawlessness, come what may, because they face these things anyway. Whether you'd choose it personally or think it's wise isn't really the question.. it's hardly an inconsistent position and it's a very common way to feel about modern life.

Kids aren't allowed to play at the playground unsupervised or walk around anywhere by themselves. Cars are all now 4,000 pounds, have terrible sight lines and are lifeless. I don't like this world.

> One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent.

The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago.

I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.

Which god?

Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought.

Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good.

Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good or bad. It just is. Everybody takes advantage of gravity all the time to do things like walking. Some people build clever systems that explicitly rely on gravity. The current state of gravity is not making the world better or worse than the state of gravity did a million years ago.

People are doing amazing things that seem to defy gravity. But they don't defy gravity. They still rely on principles of physics that include gravity. People who understand gravity can depend on it to make things like Burj Khalifa possible.

Any interaction between people involves economics. Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both). Capitalism focuses on the effects of acting in self interest. But people have to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. That decision is independent of capitalism. I think it is best not to confuse that decision with capitalism.

That might help better explain why I think capitalism is super awesome when informed by enlightened ideas of self interest. Your gripe doesn't seem to me to be against capitalism. Your argument seems to be that people have mistaken ideas about their own self interest.