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libertarian edition of "we've never achieved true communism"
by jstewartmobile 8y ago
libertarian edition of "we've never achieved true communism"
- TimTheTinker 8y agoTrue communism is impossible without perfect (i.e. morally incorruptible) people. People who hate on "capitalism" are often (I think) troubled by the behavior of rich/powerful people. I am too. But the solution isn't to remove property rights.
- jstewartmobile 8y agoBoth are over-abstracted materialist belief systems of how society should function. The new religions.
- fallingfrog 8y agoI would have to disagree with that, because it's too broad. I would say it is true that you can't have a society with no feedbacks- in other words, consequences. Carrots and sticks. In capitalism, the most important feedback is profit. But profit as the main feedback path has obvious problems- it ignores human suffering and environmental damage and so forth. That's why pure capitalism can only exist as an abstraction. You have to put it within a very carefully designed legal system. Communism is the same way. A society where every product of industry is free, and nobody has to work, is obviously silly. However a communist society with appropriate consequences in place is completely plausible.
- throwaway37585 8y ago> a communist society with appropriate consequences in place is completely plausible Example?
- throwaway37585 8y agoCan you explain your comment?
- jstewartmobile 8y agoI don't have a dog in this fight, but when I bring up some pathology of "capitalism" (like planned obsolescence for example) with one of my libertarian friends, they come back with "oh, but we're not working under -true- capitalism", and I'm like "gee, that sounds so familiar"
- TimTheTinker 8y agoMy reaction to stuff like that is "regulate it". Big businesses have to be regulated to prevent abuse... nothing wrong with that. Raise up the lowly (by giving them as much freedom as possible and leveling the field between them and the powerful), bring down the lofty (by regulating them to the extent that their power takes freedom away from the lowly)... that's the ideal economic policy as I see it :)
- jstewartmobile 8y agoSounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism#Overview Tried to post earlier, but got rate-limited for pissing off dang a while back.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoWow, never heard of this before. This is pretty close to where I stand. Guess I was wrong about the definition of “capitalism”.
- throwaway37585 8y agoIsn't the difference that, empirically, the more socialist a country becomes, the more its living standards deteriorate, while the more liberal a country becomes, the more its living standards improve?
- dragonwriter 8y agoNeither “socialist” nor “liberal” are qualities that exist on a simple total ordering such that that claim is even coherent, much less accurate, and standard of living measurements tend to be optimized for particular economic structures and not comparable across significantly different economic systems without problems.