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Coming from a family that has suffered severely under Marxism, anti-capitalist sentiment that promotes Marxism as an answer like this makes me very sad. Capita

by simonh 5y ago

Coming from a family that has suffered severely under Marxism, anti-capitalist sentiment that promotes Marxism as an answer like this makes me very sad. Capitalism is based on fundamentally democratic principles. Markets are basically continuous ongoing referendums on what people want, need or care about. It's based on freedoms to own property and buy or sell products and labour as sovereign individuals, and freedom of association to form companies. Marxism replaces markets with bureaucratic fiat. Resources are expropriated by the bureaucracy and allocated according to political priorities, it's a fundamentally coercive and authoritarian system from top to bottom. Take away the need for people to satisfy a market of their peers in order to earn a living, and who gets to decide what they work on and what it's value is? Marxists have an answer for that - it's the bureaucracy again. All power becomes centralised. This is not a theory, this is what actually happened everywhere this has been tried. Don't get me wrong, I'm no free market fundamentalist. I'm a Brit but probably closest to being a European style social democrat politically. Socialism has had many failures, but so has capitalism. The real world is a messy complicated place and no one answer ever fits every economic question we have to deal with. But Marxism is sheer political and economic poison.

throwaway316943 5y ago
Bingo. Currency and free markets are the best implementation of distributed democracy we’ve seen yet. Everyone can vote on everything as many times as they want constrained only by their participation in the system. I still believe we need a level playing ground though, anti trust and a strong legal system to prevent abuse. We should be careful about safety nets though, preventing failure and saving people from disaster are different things with different consequences.
- simonh 5y ago
  Right, and just like democracy needs rules to make sure elections are fair, you do need rules to ensure the markets are fair. We do need safety nets too, can we really have bailouts for banks but somehow ordinary working people who fall sick are out on the street on their own? But it's a net not a pedestal. I do worry about basic income the article fantasises about developers getting a guaranteed state income that allows them to write whatever software they like. That really is a fantasy, most open source projects are single-contributor repositories that get a couple of downloads ever. I know, I created a few ;)

by simonh 5y ago

throwaway316943 5y ago

Bingo. Currency and free markets are the best implementation of distributed democracy we’ve seen yet. Everyone can vote on everything as many times as they want constrained only by their participation in the system. I still believe we need a level playing ground though, anti trust and a strong legal system to prevent abuse. We should be careful about safety nets though, preventing failure and saving people from disaster are different things with different consequences.

simonh 5y ago
Right, and just like democracy needs rules to make sure elections are fair, you do need rules to ensure the markets are fair. We do need safety nets too, can we really have bailouts for banks but somehow ordinary working people who fall sick are out on the street on their own? But it's a net not a pedestal. I do worry about basic income the article fantasises about developers getting a guaranteed state income that allows them to write whatever software they like. That really is a fantasy, most open source projects are single-contributor repositories that get a couple of downloads ever. I know, I created a few ;)