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Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority)

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read "How To Become A Hacker", it influenced me a lot. I would say it was the most influential article I've ever read in my life. I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian. Latter I found this article of Eric Raymond: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/libgates.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/libgates.html Years later, I found articles of Paul Graham. It was amazing to read him. And he also turned out to be on free-market side: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html I like his quote: > This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. Now, what I've see is disappointing, I don't like this and it shouldn't be like this at least on Hacker News. We have more than enough people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion.

dgllghr 9y ago
This article does not say that capitalism is a danger to society, it says that Runaway Capitalism is a danger to society. I think there is a lot of evidence out there of the damage that too much free market causes, just as there is a lot of evidence for that damage that too much centralization in an economy causes. I don't disagree with you in some of these points, but I do disagree (as someone who thinks that the author of this article makes some good points) about being a "die hard socialist". Wanting universal healthcare, funded education, infrastructure spending, and corporate oversight does not make me a socialist. Or if we've moved so far to the right that it does make me a socialist, so be it. I'm not moving.
- pdonis 9y ago
  *> the damage that too much free market causes This is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the term "capitalism". While many people who call themselves capitalists would like everyone else to think it means a free market, the capitalists themselves don't mean that. They mean simply that they acquire control of more capital, by hook or by crook. If they can most easily acquire control of more capital in a free market, they will support a free market. But historically, most capitalists have acquired more capital by buying monopoly privileges from the government, usually because they have failed in the free market and so turn to plan B: outlaw your competition. What seems to be new about companies like Google and Facebook is that instead of buying monopoly privileges from the government, they are acquiring them, and hence control of more capital, by exploiting bugs in the human cognitive system to get people to take actions that satisfy short term needs but have potentially disastrous long term consequences. In one sense this is still a free market, since people voluntarily choose to use Google and Facebook. But in another sense it erodes a free market, by eroding trust. Unfortunately, I don't see the buzzfeed article engaging with this aspect at all.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Looking at how the free market works, in many cases I would seriously reconsider what we mean by "voluntary" here. Just because a transaction wasn't made at gunpoint, doesn't mean it wasn't coerced, or that one party wasn't duped into it through scam/advertising.
    - pdonis 9y ago
      > Just because a transaction wasn't made at gunpoint, doesn't mean it wasn't coerced, or that one party wasn't duped into it through scam/advertising. Of course coercion doesn't have to be at gunpoint. That doesn't mean "coercion" is not a reasonably well-defined term. Similarly, giving someone false information to induce them to buy something you're selling isn't a free market, it's fraud. That said, I agree that the definition of "voluntary" has to be made with care. I said basically the same thing in the second paragraph of the post you responded to.
  - dgllghr 9y ago
ythn 9y ago
A lot of "hackers" also have a min/max mindset where they have to optimize everything, including society. And min/maxing society means solving problems like wealth imbalance, causes of death, etc. And from a purely analytical standpoint, it seems that increasing government authority is the only viable solution to a lot of those things. FWIW I am a right leaning libertarian type, but I think I understand why a lot of hackers/intellectuals lean left. Feel free to correct me.
jchw 9y ago
I wouldn't consider the best "hackers" to be the best programmers. To me, a hacker is almost a specific type of programmer, and not everyone embodies the manifesto.
yedava 9y ago
Wealth inequality leads to a form of centralization of power. One could even say that libertarian inspired deregulation of the past few decades has accelerated this centralization of power. So it shouldn't be surprising if people are looking for other political systems to decentralize power.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  I only know a few die-hard libertarians personally, but the few I've talked seemed to be primarily motivated by the opportunity to ruthlessly and amorally exploit their fellow citizens. Maybe they're fringe, but they were the "living in a walled compound protected by their private militia" type libertarians.
aphextron 9y ago
> Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. No. Capitalism is good. However, runaway winner-take-all capitalism will destroy our planet and lead us back to feudalism. The great success of the United States has been its' ability to restrain unfettered capitalism with social responsibility, while not hampering the progress of the former. That contract has begun to break down, and it is causing the horrors we now see.
dclowd9901 9y ago
> I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution. We also have _plenty_. We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet. We need capitalism to innovate and respond with agility to market forces (when THERE'S ACTUALLY A FREE AND TRANSPARENT MARKET), but we need socialism to check their power, as a corporation is wont to become singular, which, as you've stated, a singular, centralized power is no good either.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution. And the only way to scale that shared contribution without leading to all the problems with centralization that you refer to is to do it based on interactions between individuals--i.e., individualism. So you _have_ to build a society on individualism: nothing else works. > We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet. Who is this "we"? There is no single "we" that has all the resources. Nor should there be; that would be centralized power.
tstactplsignore 9y ago
Your worldview is common, but doesn't really understand where left-wing, pro-democratic socialists are coming from. Like you, we are driven by a deep mistrust of power. We hate absolute authority, like decentralization, and are especially interested in out of the box thinking. Right now, the box we find ourselves in is a capitalist society where capitalist ideology is completely pervasive. The most powerful and dangerous authorities are corporations and excessively rich individuals. The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest. What we reject is the idea that capitalism has any of the right answers here. To the left, capitalism is the primary agent of centralization of wealth and power and authority. I don't expect you to agree, but I hope you better understand where we are coming from.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > Like you, we are driven by a deep mistrust of power. We hate absolute authority, like decentralization, and are especially interested in out of the box thinking. > The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest. All of these "solutions" have been tried. They all failed at your stated goal; instead they ended up leading to enough centralized power to kill tens of millions of people. The only way to decentralize is to empower individual people. As soon as you form a group, any group, based on any interaction except mutual affection or trade, you are centralizing, whether you realize it or not. That's the hard lesson the 20th century taught us; unfortunately many people have not learned it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- civilian 9y ago
  Socialist governments killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century. They acquired power far more completely than any company has. Big companies come and go. They may have power, but it's temporary, and there's nothing violent when they start losing their footing. I'd rather have Amazon delivery my groceries than live in Venezuela.
lotyrin 9y ago
Liberterianism !== Anarcho-Capitalism. And Socialism !== Centralized Authoritarian Communism. There's not just the one polar spectrum of political ideology that's demonstrated by modern politicians and its far extremes. You can hold both Libertarian and Socialist value axioms at the same time, they aren't mutually exclusive.
CodeMage 9y ago
> Now, what I've see is disappointing, I don't like this and it shouldn't be like this at least on Hacker News. We have more than enough people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion. I agree, HN discussions should be more than just saying "I don't like this and it shouldn't be like that", don't you think? > I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian. That's a huge jump you made there, from someone "who doesn't blindly follow authority" to a "right-libertarian". Your whole "argument" hinges on your perception and interpretation of what "hacker" means.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) They've grown up. They've come to understand that the biggest problems humanity faces all come down to them not being able to coordinate shit. They've learned that governments, bad as they are, are the natural and one of the few working mechanisms to coordinate at scale. And in particular, they've realized the folly of libertarians who ignore the fact that free markets have stupidly obvious and dangerous failure modes that come from insufficient or invalid coordination. They've also been observant. They've noticed how private industry took over and utterly corrupted computing. They've noticed that it's private companies who create apparatus of the totalitarian dystopia they feared. They've seen how the market abused people, and they themselves have been disappointed by the market, which left them behind and continued to create shitty computing toys for the masses instead of useful tools to build the future with. They comprehended topology, discovering that decentralization can be more robust, but is usually also less efficient - and sometimes a situation calls for more efficiency. But hey, there's plenty of decentralization-loving, government-hating anarchist "hackers" out there. They're busy trying to cook us all on this planet by worsening climate change with cryptocurrencies.
kenforthewin 9y ago
If you don't believe that unchecked capitalism can be a danger to civilization, you've completely disconnected from reality. Also worth noting: your Paul Graham-inspired libertarianism is funny to all of us who are still connected.
dnthvpasswdarnd 9y ago
Socialism is not necessarily authoritarian. The other side of socialism is anarchism, or libertarian socialism, which has a long tradition on the internet. In fact IETF is an anarchist organization originally, with a motto along the lines of "no kings, no presidents, no voting, consensus and running code". The whole Free Software movement, to which ESR more or less belongs (though he created more liberal "open-souce" branch), is also socialist. Neither free software nor open source is individualist, it is impossible for a lone "hacker" create anything significant without using a vast amount of Free Software. W3C has mostly followed IETF style governance (consensus), and switching to more formal voting procedure has only led to adoption of DRM as a web standard. Fun fact, there is an RFC stating that the Internet is a cooperative anarchy: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt For an introduction into IETF-style anarchy see: https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/ https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/ On W3C: https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/reg... Murray Rothbard even said in his books that the word "libertarian" was used by "libertarian socialist" first. It is only recently that capitalist and extremely individualist views became popular among hackers. Hackers were always anarchist, but only recently anarchy started to mean extreme liberalism, essential point of which is absolute private property, including copyright. For more on anarchist view on "libertarian" views, read Anarchist FAQ. Ironically, you can install it with "apt-get install anarchism" on any Debian-based distro.
Fraterkes 9y ago
Politically I would think anarchism fits better with the hacker mindser as you describe it. And anarchism has a long leftist tradition. Also, to bridge the gap between ideologies a little; in my mind leftism dosnt dislike creative freedom or progress, they just think that large corporations are more at risk of stiffling it than regulations.
logfromblammo 9y ago
> How we end up in situation when huge portion of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? It must be all those years of reducing marginal costs of production to tiny fractions of their previous values and then seeing absolutely no benefit from it going to our friends and family. Not that I'm a socialist. I used to be right-libertarian. Now I'm more of an anarchist, but pragmatic about it. I simply don't believe that the problems caused by concentrated power can be adequately solved by believing in concentrated power. I also don't believe that anything I say or do can have any noticeable impact on global politics. That frees me to do the best I can do in my local arena, without the rest of the world somehow being my problem to solve. As I see it, the onus is on the wealthy to distribute the fruits of the economy that they have taken, far in excess of what they can use themselves. If they don't, the rest of us will eventually murder them. Maybe not you or me, but someone. We can suggest fixes like UBI, debate their merits, and provide detailed, foolproof plans that might avert that bloody and grisly demise, but the cycle repeats until someone that has the power elects to diffuse it permanently. Otherwise, the challenger just claims the one ring and becomes the new tyrant. From my perspective, either some key elements of socialism happen, or I may have to join a torches-and-pitchforks mob, storm the castle, and maybe kill someone. Maybe the survivors get what they want immediately, or maybe they have to wait for the pigs to start walking around on two legs, and then try again. I don't really want to kill rich people, but I'm sure there are a few of them out there that could be vastly improved by a good murderin', and I could probably live with the guilt of it, so long as they're enough of an asshat. I can rationalize a whole lot against someone who thinks people earning $7.50/hr shouldn't have access to affordable health care. Or even houses or food.
dcre 9y ago
>people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion Strange characterization of an author pointing out a form of authoritarianism.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. Well? So what? And you very obviously speak from a libertarian point of view- but that doesn't mean that your comment must automatically be dismissed as worthless by those who have different political affiliations. What's important is what someone is saying, not who is saying it, or how similar it is to something someone else has said. I'm pretty sure we should not have to point this out, anymore.

dgllghr 9y ago

This article does not say that capitalism is a danger to society, it says that Runaway Capitalism is a danger to society. I think there is a lot of evidence out there of the damage that too much free market causes, just as there is a lot of evidence for that damage that too much centralization in an economy causes. I don't disagree with you in some of these points, but I do disagree (as someone who thinks that the author of this article makes some good points) about being a "die hard socialist". Wanting universal healthcare, funded education, infrastructure spending, and corporate oversight does not make me a socialist. Or if we've moved so far to the right that it does make me a socialist, so be it. I'm not moving.

pdonis 9y ago
*> the damage that too much free market causes This is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the term "capitalism". While many people who call themselves capitalists would like everyone else to think it means a free market, the capitalists themselves don't mean that. They mean simply that they acquire control of more capital, by hook or by crook. If they can most easily acquire control of more capital in a free market, they will support a free market. But historically, most capitalists have acquired more capital by buying monopoly privileges from the government, usually because they have failed in the free market and so turn to plan B: outlaw your competition. What seems to be new about companies like Google and Facebook is that instead of buying monopoly privileges from the government, they are acquiring them, and hence control of more capital, by exploiting bugs in the human cognitive system to get people to take actions that satisfy short term needs but have potentially disastrous long term consequences. In one sense this is still a free market, since people voluntarily choose to use Google and Facebook. But in another sense it erodes a free market, by eroding trust. Unfortunately, I don't see the buzzfeed article engaging with this aspect at all.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Looking at how the free market works, in many cases I would seriously reconsider what we mean by "voluntary" here. Just because a transaction wasn't made at gunpoint, doesn't mean it wasn't coerced, or that one party wasn't duped into it through scam/advertising.
  - pdonis 9y ago
    > Just because a transaction wasn't made at gunpoint, doesn't mean it wasn't coerced, or that one party wasn't duped into it through scam/advertising. Of course coercion doesn't have to be at gunpoint. That doesn't mean "coercion" is not a reasonably well-defined term. Similarly, giving someone false information to induce them to buy something you're selling isn't a free market, it's fraud. That said, I agree that the definition of "voluntary" has to be made with care. I said basically the same thing in the second paragraph of the post you responded to.
- dgllghr 9y ago

ythn 9y ago

A lot of "hackers" also have a min/max mindset where they have to optimize everything, including society. And min/maxing society means solving problems like wealth imbalance, causes of death, etc. And from a purely analytical standpoint, it seems that increasing government authority is the only viable solution to a lot of those things. FWIW I am a right leaning libertarian type, but I think I understand why a lot of hackers/intellectuals lean left. Feel free to correct me.

jchw 9y ago

I wouldn't consider the best "hackers" to be the best programmers. To me, a hacker is almost a specific type of programmer, and not everyone embodies the manifesto.

yedava 9y ago

Wealth inequality leads to a form of centralization of power. One could even say that libertarian inspired deregulation of the past few decades has accelerated this centralization of power. So it shouldn't be surprising if people are looking for other political systems to decentralize power.

nkrisc 9y ago
I only know a few die-hard libertarians personally, but the few I've talked seemed to be primarily motivated by the opportunity to ruthlessly and amorally exploit their fellow citizens. Maybe they're fringe, but they were the "living in a walled compound protected by their private militia" type libertarians.

aphextron 9y ago

> Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. No. Capitalism is good. However, runaway winner-take-all capitalism will destroy our planet and lead us back to feudalism. The great success of the United States has been its' ability to restrain unfettered capitalism with social responsibility, while not hampering the progress of the former. That contract has begun to break down, and it is causing the horrors we now see.

dclowd9901 9y ago

> I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution. We also have _plenty_. We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet. We need capitalism to innovate and respond with agility to market forces (when THERE'S ACTUALLY A FREE AND TRANSPARENT MARKET), but we need socialism to check their power, as a corporation is wont to become singular, which, as you've stated, a singular, centralized power is no good either.

pdonis 9y ago
> You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution. And the only way to scale that shared contribution without leading to all the problems with centralization that you refer to is to do it based on interactions between individuals--i.e., individualism. So you _have_ to build a society on individualism: nothing else works. > We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet. Who is this "we"? There is no single "we" that has all the resources. Nor should there be; that would be centralized power.

tstactplsignore 9y ago

Your worldview is common, but doesn't really understand where left-wing, pro-democratic socialists are coming from. Like you, we are driven by a deep mistrust of power. We hate absolute authority, like decentralization, and are especially interested in out of the box thinking. Right now, the box we find ourselves in is a capitalist society where capitalist ideology is completely pervasive. The most powerful and dangerous authorities are corporations and excessively rich individuals. The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest. What we reject is the idea that capitalism has any of the right answers here. To the left, capitalism is the primary agent of centralization of wealth and power and authority. I don't expect you to agree, but I hope you better understand where we are coming from.

pdonis 9y ago
> Like you, we are driven by a deep mistrust of power. We hate absolute authority, like decentralization, and are especially interested in out of the box thinking. > The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest. All of these "solutions" have been tried. They all failed at your stated goal; instead they ended up leading to enough centralized power to kill tens of millions of people. The only way to decentralize is to empower individual people. As soon as you form a group, any group, based on any interaction except mutual affection or trade, you are centralizing, whether you realize it or not. That's the hard lesson the 20th century taught us; unfortunately many people have not learned it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
civilian 9y ago
Socialist governments killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century. They acquired power far more completely than any company has. Big companies come and go. They may have power, but it's temporary, and there's nothing violent when they start losing their footing. I'd rather have Amazon delivery my groceries than live in Venezuela.

lotyrin 9y ago

Liberterianism !== Anarcho-Capitalism. And Socialism !== Centralized Authoritarian Communism. There's not just the one polar spectrum of political ideology that's demonstrated by modern politicians and its far extremes. You can hold both Libertarian and Socialist value axioms at the same time, they aren't mutually exclusive.

CodeMage 9y ago

> Now, what I've see is disappointing, I don't like this and it shouldn't be like this at least on Hacker News. We have more than enough people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion. I agree, HN discussions should be more than just saying "I don't like this and it shouldn't be like that", don't you think? > I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian. That's a huge jump you made there, from someone "who doesn't blindly follow authority" to a "right-libertarian". Your whole "argument" hinges on your perception and interpretation of what "hacker" means.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) They've grown up. They've come to understand that the biggest problems humanity faces all come down to them not being able to coordinate shit. They've learned that governments, bad as they are, are the natural and one of the few working mechanisms to coordinate at scale. And in particular, they've realized the folly of libertarians who ignore the fact that free markets have stupidly obvious and dangerous failure modes that come from insufficient or invalid coordination. They've also been observant. They've noticed how private industry took over and utterly corrupted computing. They've noticed that it's private companies who create apparatus of the totalitarian dystopia they feared. They've seen how the market abused people, and they themselves have been disappointed by the market, which left them behind and continued to create shitty computing toys for the masses instead of useful tools to build the future with. They comprehended topology, discovering that decentralization can be more robust, but is usually also less efficient - and sometimes a situation calls for more efficiency. But hey, there's plenty of decentralization-loving, government-hating anarchist "hackers" out there. They're busy trying to cook us all on this planet by worsening climate change with cryptocurrencies.

kenforthewin 9y ago

If you don't believe that unchecked capitalism can be a danger to civilization, you've completely disconnected from reality. Also worth noting: your Paul Graham-inspired libertarianism is funny to all of us who are still connected.

dnthvpasswdarnd 9y ago

Socialism is not necessarily authoritarian. The other side of socialism is anarchism, or libertarian socialism, which has a long tradition on the internet. In fact IETF is an anarchist organization originally, with a motto along the lines of "no kings, no presidents, no voting, consensus and running code". The whole Free Software movement, to which ESR more or less belongs (though he created more liberal "open-souce" branch), is also socialist. Neither free software nor open source is individualist, it is impossible for a lone "hacker" create anything significant without using a vast amount of Free Software. W3C has mostly followed IETF style governance (consensus), and switching to more formal voting procedure has only led to adoption of DRM as a web standard. Fun fact, there is an RFC stating that the Internet is a cooperative anarchy: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1726.txt For an introduction into IETF-style anarchy see: https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/ https://www.wired.com/1995/10/ietf/ On W3C: https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/archived_content/people/reagle/reg... Murray Rothbard even said in his books that the word "libertarian" was used by "libertarian socialist" first. It is only recently that capitalist and extremely individualist views became popular among hackers. Hackers were always anarchist, but only recently anarchy started to mean extreme liberalism, essential point of which is absolute private property, including copyright. For more on anarchist view on "libertarian" views, read Anarchist FAQ. Ironically, you can install it with "apt-get install anarchism" on any Debian-based distro.

Fraterkes 9y ago

Politically I would think anarchism fits better with the hacker mindser as you describe it. And anarchism has a long leftist tradition. Also, to bridge the gap between ideologies a little; in my mind leftism dosnt dislike creative freedom or progress, they just think that large corporations are more at risk of stiffling it than regulations.

logfromblammo 9y ago

> How we end up in situation when huge portion of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? It must be all those years of reducing marginal costs of production to tiny fractions of their previous values and then seeing absolutely no benefit from it going to our friends and family. Not that I'm a socialist. I used to be right-libertarian. Now I'm more of an anarchist, but pragmatic about it. I simply don't believe that the problems caused by concentrated power can be adequately solved by believing in concentrated power. I also don't believe that anything I say or do can have any noticeable impact on global politics. That frees me to do the best I can do in my local arena, without the rest of the world somehow being my problem to solve. As I see it, the onus is on the wealthy to distribute the fruits of the economy that they have taken, far in excess of what they can use themselves. If they don't, the rest of us will eventually murder them. Maybe not you or me, but someone. We can suggest fixes like UBI, debate their merits, and provide detailed, foolproof plans that might avert that bloody and grisly demise, but the cycle repeats until someone that has the power elects to diffuse it permanently. Otherwise, the challenger just claims the one ring and becomes the new tyrant. From my perspective, either some key elements of socialism happen, or I may have to join a torches-and-pitchforks mob, storm the castle, and maybe kill someone. Maybe the survivors get what they want immediately, or maybe they have to wait for the pigs to start walking around on two legs, and then try again. I don't really want to kill rich people, but I'm sure there are a few of them out there that could be vastly improved by a good murderin', and I could probably live with the guilt of it, so long as they're enough of an asshat. I can rationalize a whole lot against someone who thinks people earning $7.50/hr shouldn't have access to affordable health care. Or even houses or food.

dcre 9y ago

>people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion Strange characterization of an author pointing out a form of authoritarianism.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. Well? So what? And you very obviously speak from a libertarian point of view- but that doesn't mean that your comment must automatically be dismissed as worthless by those who have different political affiliations. What's important is what someone is saying, not who is saying it, or how similar it is to something someone else has said. I'm pretty sure we should not have to point this out, anymore.