4 ms·

Capitalism is definitely ill-suited to a crisis like this. We have an enormous production chain for anything we could possibly need and we could just use that.

• adventured 7y ago
  The way it would work is, Berkshire Hathaway with their $130 billion in cash would purchase Delta outright for pennies on the dollar. Berkshire can endure whatever reasonable length of time is required to get Delta back to spitting off $6 billion per year in operating income. Someone else with immense capital and assets would buy American Airlines (maybe Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison would lean into that; Ellison likes airlines). Someone else would buy United, perhaps a major financial firm, private equity. Capitalism is not ill suited for this crisis. This is not the first time we've seen this. We had Capitalism in 1860-1870 and 1918 as well. What people didn't like about this process in the past, is the way it often consolidates economic returns further, it generates huge winners and losers (in a way that seems to most to be particularly predatory or unfair, as an emotional take), and society often feels taken advantage of by people with vast well-stocked fortunes. Don't confuse whether it would work with whether people like it or not. It works in fact and we've seen it multiple times in the past, we know exactly what happens: there are big winners (those that were prepared to take advantage) and big losers. Many people took vast economic advantage of the Civil War, not least of all by buying their way out of serving (hiring legal substitutes). Rockefeller for example did well in commodities at this time, prior to the Standard Oil days.
  • claudeganon 7y ago
    > society often feels taken advantage of by people with vast well-stocked fortunes. Given that the rich will survive this with a dent to their fortunes, while everyone else is risking losing their house, jobs, health, and even lives, this isn’t a feeling, but the reality. If the outcome of this pandemic is Capitalism devolving into greater wealth concentration and inequality, and the consequence of that concentration is ever increasing precarity and material harm for everyone else, it is terribly ill suited for this and all other crises.
    • saas_sam 7y ago
      Yours is a grossly ignorant comment. This crisis was started and worsened by the Chinese Communist Party who used their one-party, autocratic power to jail doctors and journalists who were trying to help early on. Every supply-and-demand crisis in history that was managed by a non-capitalist regime such as in the USSR and Venezuela was worsened by many orders of magnitude. I'm talking about people starving in the streets while warehouses full of pork, milk, and grain rotted due to an inability to centrally manage supply chains. I'm talking about once-productive farms shutting down once the "evil greedy farmers" were run out of the country and the farms turned over to "the People" -- go read about what happened to these farms and the people who depended on them. I know it's fashionable to rail against The Man and watch your Reddit Gold™ roll in, but I really wish you'd press pause on that until becoming a smidge better educated on the subject.
      • danharaj 7y ago
        It is always remarkable when capitalist cheerleaders fly into a fit of incoherent rage over reasonable criticism of their favored system. You don't get enough out of capitalism to lick the boot that hard, buddy.
        • saas_sam 7y ago
          Hmm, one side of this argument appears to come prepared with facts and examples while the other side only has name-calling and insults. While I would never dream to try and change your mind, friend, I very much appreciate that you outed yourself for me so other readers are led to the correct conclusion.
          • danharaj 7y ago
            I'm not arguing with you, I didn't say "You're wrong because you're malding", I just said "you're malding".
          • chillwaves 7y ago
            > I know it's fashionable to rail against The Man and watch your Reddit Gold™ roll in, but I really wish you'd press pause on that until becoming a smidge better educated on the subject. Clearly throwing insults exposes a weak hand.
  • danharaj 7y ago
    Under capitalism, the spare capacity that hospitals could have had to deal with this crisis, in beds, ventilators, equipment, supply chains, personnel are all defined as waste. That's what hospitals have been cutting for decades under the rubric of efficiency and profitability. Profitability under normal conditions quickly becomes systemic failure under exceptional circumstances. You have to be drunk on ideology to not see the impending cascading failures which will occur because the profit motive necessitates the coupling of systems and reduction of their ability to absorb unpredicted shocks. Like every system, of course capitalism will fail under certain circumstances, usually circumstances that it itself creates.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      >Under capitalism, the spare capacity that hospitals could have had to deal with this crisis, in beds, ventilators, equipment, supply chains, personnel are all defined as waste. That's not true, spare capacity is spare capacity. Hospitals have a profit motive to keep spare capacity around because they want to be able to make money during surge conditions. Or, that's how it would work if capitalism was in charge. (I leave open the possibility for a lot of deviation from ideal theory in this case because the US medical system is actually a combination of the worst attributes of regulation and capitalism, committing to neither and shambling along with the most self-serving parts of each).
      • extralegos 7y ago
        While it’s true that American hospitals do tend to have a lot of spare equipment and real estate, you’re exactly right that the reason is profit motive, _not_ providing healthcare. Real estate investments speak for themselves, while equipment upgrades are cooperative with regulation procedures that favor scarcity, often for the sake of profit. Also, the American health industry does not have the labor force to facilitate a pandemic. The American Medical Association has kept it this way for a reason. The whole industry depends on scarcity. Nurses are one exception where low pay is favored. They are the peon workers of the industry but, because nurses are paid so little, there is a very limited amount of them as well.
    • 7y ago
  • extralegos 7y ago
    You are literally describing the catastrophe phase of Karl Marx’s critique of capital accumulation. >Many people took vast economic advantage of the Civil War. And the period immediately following restoration is known as The Guilded Age. It’s not exactly considered a high point for capitalism.
• outlace 7y ago
  Without capitalism several orders of magnitude more people would die. Source: every communist regime ever
  • colejohnson66 7y ago
    It’s also not black and white. There’s things in between a true free market capitalist society and a state run communist society.
  • kjakm 7y ago
    China seems to be doing well relative to, say, Italy.
    • oarabbus_ 7y ago
      China also sealed people in their apartments and left them to die to stymie the virus. 15 or so years ago China allowed ~500,000 people to die in order to build a hydroelectric dam (Three Gorges) for several other million. If you consider that kind of machiavellianism a good thing, I suggest you move to China.
    • dmoy 7y ago
      China's economy isn't very communist anymore. Also the things that are helping (at least anecdotally, according to family on lockdown now) have more to do with the ability to effectively implement quarantine than their economic system (which, again, isn't really a communist economy). There's still definitely a communist party regime, for sure.
      • magduf 7y ago
        "Communist" in name only. The party is really just an authoritarian party.
    • pseudolus 7y ago
      China "communist"? Nominally, but no one here or there actually believes it. It's evolved into some sort of authoritarian regime with elements of state and private sector capitalism.
• rijoja 7y ago
  in a free society every mind can participate in solving the crisis on a voluntary basis, whereas with the model you are suggesting a far smaller group of minds would make these decisions for everyone and try to force everyone else with threats of violence and force. In a free society every free individual can think up a solution in a totilitan society on the other hand a smaller set of people will make the decision. I like to think for myself and would prefer to let the question of a solution be handled by as many people as possible and based on reasoning and politely asking instead of appointing a group of technocrats to be worshipped as priests.
  • danharaj 7y ago
    You can have all the ideas that you want but the levers of power and the ability to actually implement response efforts at the level of thousands to millions of people, nationally and internationally, is only in the hands of a "far smaller group of minds". Neoliberalism has sold you the bill of goods that you are free because your opinion can differ from the ruling class. But the ruling class is nonetheless going to look after its own and leave you to the dogs. They have nothing but contempt for you. They don't give a shit what your opinion is or how this series of crises will disrupt your life, and the lives of those less fortunate and more precarious than yours.
  • dreen 7y ago
    I wasn't suggesting anything apart from making better use of resources we have. Yourself and others seem to think that the only alternative to our current model of Capitalism must be a Totalitarian Regime or simply Soviet-style Communism. That's just a weird way to think.