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Growth is great if everyone involved in the system has a fair opportunity to partake in that growth and if it creates real value (not just growth in stock price

Growth is great if everyone involved in the system has a fair opportunity to partake in that growth and if it creates real value (not just growth in stock price). However, opportunities for wealth redistribution are increasingly rare these days so the only way to level the playing field seems to be through the collapse of the financial system. Personally, I stand to benefit financially from chaos. If the stock market collapses tomorrow and a large number of public corporations go bankrupt then that means more business opportunities small (self-sustaining/profitable) startups to take their place and therefore more opportunities for me as a shareholder of such a startup.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Personally, I stand to benefit financially from chaos. It's hard to really know, the thing about revolutions is you just end up with a new set of leaders, human nature doesn't change much along the way.
humanrebar 9y ago
> ...the only way to level the playing field seems to be through the collapse of the financial system. It's worth noting that when the financial system goes through a down cycle, the government bails out the politically and economically powerful, propping up existing economic inequalities. This is not a capitalist policy. I think capitalism mostly has a branding problem.
- jondubois 9y ago
  I think that the bailing out of corporations during the 2008 crisis was in a large part the result of corporate lobbying; which is a natural byproduct of capitalism. Capitalist moralists love to point out that 'bailing out' is anti-capitalist but at the same time they seem to ignore to the fact that that government manipulation by corporations is an integral part of capitalism in the first place. So you end up with two sets of capitalists; moral capitalists and immoral capitalists unwittingly collaborating with one another. It was very convenient for a lot of passive 'moral' shareholders that the government just happened to step in to bail out their favourite stocks.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > ...government manipulation by corporations is an integral part of capitalism in the first place. I don't think regulatory capture is an ideological phenomenon. To put it another way, how would one design a system where central authorities are not susceptible to this kind of lobbying? I don't think I've heard a credible plan along these lines. The usual tactic is to centrally control decisions but make sure "good" leaders hold that power. As recent political outcomes have illustrated (yet again), it's more or less inevitable that someone untrustworthy or even odious will be in charge of these decisions at some point.
  - gremlinsinc 9y ago
    capitalism might actually ... work ... if it was untethered from government..and didn't manipulate governments. I.e. get rid of lobbying, and make it universally illegal to influence politicians even on the level of a Geneva war-crime. Not that - that will ever happen.. Politics lately seems to just be legal Mafia.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Lobbying is free speech. School teachers writing their school board about school supplies are lobbying. And that action is constitutionally protected as freedom of petition, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. But I agree about the cronyism. But I think the solution is to simplify everything and make it more transparent. So regulatory capture, for instance, has fewer places to thrive.
      - gremlinsinc 9y ago
        One single person writing a letter--is acceptable.. But money is power, one single person writing a letter backed by 2 million in funding... that's extortion..and should NOT be free speech. Each person should have EQUAL weight on their 'freedom of speech' abilities... Lobbyism as it works now is flawed. Corporations are not human entities and should have no protections under the constitution of free speech either... The CEO sure--but they should just be able to send the letter, without any money backing and be barred from giving more than what a normal person could afford to a politician -- i.e. something like $500/year per politician..or something.
hardlianotion 9y ago
"Personally, I stand to benefit financially from chaos" In the sense that I understand the word, it is not the shareholder of a startup that will benefit from chaos, but a member of an armed gang.
crispinb 9y ago
> Growth is great if everyone involved in the system has a fair opportunity to partake in that growth Not really. We're so far beyond the carrying capacity of our planet already that our natural systems are collapsing at a dizzying pace. More growth = faster collapse. For a mix of personal and professional reasons I'm in touch with many experts in specific ecologies throughout mainly SE Asia, Australia, and W.Europe. Nearly every one is in one of a spectrum of states between panic and depression, because the systems they are studying are collapsing fast enough to be very obviously discernible within their own career span (these are people in their 30s to 50s). This is pretty well known to us in Australia, which has had astonishingly fast population growth, so that now many retirees can see the collapse for themselves. All the Queensland inshore reefs that they used to visit on school holidays, for example, have now disappeared. Those studying the offshore reefs tell us that they will also be dead in a few decades. This is repeated for all our land ecosystems, from the tropical savannahs to the Southern highlands. Many people cloistered in the parasitic virtual worlds of business and cities think of this as something that won't affect them. It's something seperate, 'the environment', that they only see on holidays and in documentaries. Yet the world's climate on which agriculture depends is also collapsing fast. Topsoil is being blown and washed away. Fresh water is disappearing. We're three or four bad seasons (which are ever harder to predict) away from disaster. Ongoing growth is incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

Personally, I stand to benefit financially from chaos. It's hard to really know, the thing about revolutions is you just end up with a new set of leaders, human nature doesn't change much along the way.

humanrebar 9y ago

> ...the only way to level the playing field seems to be through the collapse of the financial system. It's worth noting that when the financial system goes through a down cycle, the government bails out the politically and economically powerful, propping up existing economic inequalities. This is not a capitalist policy. I think capitalism mostly has a branding problem.

jondubois 9y ago
I think that the bailing out of corporations during the 2008 crisis was in a large part the result of corporate lobbying; which is a natural byproduct of capitalism. Capitalist moralists love to point out that 'bailing out' is anti-capitalist but at the same time they seem to ignore to the fact that that government manipulation by corporations is an integral part of capitalism in the first place. So you end up with two sets of capitalists; moral capitalists and immoral capitalists unwittingly collaborating with one another. It was very convenient for a lot of passive 'moral' shareholders that the government just happened to step in to bail out their favourite stocks.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > ...government manipulation by corporations is an integral part of capitalism in the first place. I don't think regulatory capture is an ideological phenomenon. To put it another way, how would one design a system where central authorities are not susceptible to this kind of lobbying? I don't think I've heard a credible plan along these lines. The usual tactic is to centrally control decisions but make sure "good" leaders hold that power. As recent political outcomes have illustrated (yet again), it's more or less inevitable that someone untrustworthy or even odious will be in charge of these decisions at some point.
- gremlinsinc 9y ago
  capitalism might actually ... work ... if it was untethered from government..and didn't manipulate governments. I.e. get rid of lobbying, and make it universally illegal to influence politicians even on the level of a Geneva war-crime. Not that - that will ever happen.. Politics lately seems to just be legal Mafia.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Lobbying is free speech. School teachers writing their school board about school supplies are lobbying. And that action is constitutionally protected as freedom of petition, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. But I agree about the cronyism. But I think the solution is to simplify everything and make it more transparent. So regulatory capture, for instance, has fewer places to thrive.
    - gremlinsinc 9y ago
      One single person writing a letter--is acceptable.. But money is power, one single person writing a letter backed by 2 million in funding... that's extortion..and should NOT be free speech. Each person should have EQUAL weight on their 'freedom of speech' abilities... Lobbyism as it works now is flawed. Corporations are not human entities and should have no protections under the constitution of free speech either... The CEO sure--but they should just be able to send the letter, without any money backing and be barred from giving more than what a normal person could afford to a politician -- i.e. something like $500/year per politician..or something.

hardlianotion 9y ago

"Personally, I stand to benefit financially from chaos" In the sense that I understand the word, it is not the shareholder of a startup that will benefit from chaos, but a member of an armed gang.

crispinb 9y ago

> Growth is great if everyone involved in the system has a fair opportunity to partake in that growth Not really. We're so far beyond the carrying capacity of our planet already that our natural systems are collapsing at a dizzying pace. More growth = faster collapse. For a mix of personal and professional reasons I'm in touch with many experts in specific ecologies throughout mainly SE Asia, Australia, and W.Europe. Nearly every one is in one of a spectrum of states between panic and depression, because the systems they are studying are collapsing fast enough to be very obviously discernible within their own career span (these are people in their 30s to 50s). This is pretty well known to us in Australia, which has had astonishingly fast population growth, so that now many retirees can see the collapse for themselves. All the Queensland inshore reefs that they used to visit on school holidays, for example, have now disappeared. Those studying the offshore reefs tell us that they will also be dead in a few decades. This is repeated for all our land ecosystems, from the tropical savannahs to the Southern highlands. Many people cloistered in the parasitic virtual worlds of business and cities think of this as something that won't affect them. It's something seperate, 'the environment', that they only see on holidays and in documentaries. Yet the world's climate on which agriculture depends is also collapsing fast. Topsoil is being blown and washed away. Fresh water is disappearing. We're three or four bad seasons (which are ever harder to predict) away from disaster. Ongoing growth is incompatible with the continuing existence of a living planet.