4 ms·

Capitalism vs socialism isn’t about the existence of that capital, just who owns and how decisions are made. In all the cases of the mismanaged businesses, they

Capitalism vs socialism isn’t about the existence of that capital, just who owns and how decisions are made. In all the cases of the mismanaged businesses, they were being mismanaged under capitalism and a new manager came in, was competent and was heeded. I guess the premise here is that “capitalism better because competent managers rarer than incompetent managers” and “incentives of money alone are better than incentives that include dysfunctional personal relationships”. Since “socialism” seems ill-defined (or has several different definitions), seems difficult to say whether it would provide better outcomes. Authoritarian “people’s republic of X”-style didn’t provide good outcomes. Seems like that was due to authoritarian politics getting in the way of actual business. I haven’t seen the show, but why would workers who own a stake in the viability of the company voting on management have not worked? If track records of management outcomes were available like sports statistics, there’d be something better than rhetoric to guide voting.

asdff 5y ago
Irrespective of flavor of socialism, just logically capitalism does not make any lick of sense unless you are among the capital class already who benefits from scraping the barrel of revenue to collect an amount as profit. The fact that there exists a profit margin and businesses cannot operate at cost is why manufacturing in China is used in the west vs western manufacturing, since businesses operating at cost can offer product at cost vs cost*profit_margin so these businesses are always more competitive than western counterparts who have to pay for someone else's profit margin down the entire supply chain.
- dantheman 5y ago
  I'll take the vast improvement of living standards under capitalism over those found in socialist countries. Are you arguing that the rapid decline in poverty in China due to capitalism is a bad thing?
  - galdauts 5y ago
    I'd like to add that there are different flavours of both capitalism and socialism. The kind of disaster capitalism practiced in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries in the 90s certainly didn't lead to an improvement of living standards for quite a long time, if even. China also presents a case of state capitalism where companies are strictly controlled by the government as evidenced by the recent set of regulations published a few weeks ago and many companies are owned by the children of party members.
  - asdff 5y ago
    I'd argue that what we see in terms of living standards in ostensibly socialist countries is much more due to corruption of office, which happens here too, vs the way that profit is shared among a business. Three of my city councilmembers have been indicted by the FBI for corruption in the last three years. Luckily in the U.S. the levers of power are pulled by more people dispersed across a larger bureaucracy, so corruption of office can only affect so many things, vs somewhere like PRNK or KSA where there is absolute rule. There are plenty of businesses that run on a more socialist model even within capitalist countries. They are owner operated and share profit amongst the cooperative, are often successful and have motivated employees who work longer tenures than your average employee at a company where they don't see any share of the profit for their hard work.
- phonypc 5y ago
  Sorry, what? You think Chinese manufacturing businesses aren't making a profit?
  - quantified 5y ago
    And there is no contradiction between socialism and making a profit. Any enterprise owned under any organization, directed by any structure, could make a profit. What you do with those profits becomes interesting, if they exist.
  - asdff 5y ago
    They make a profit at the end of the supply chain, but all their materials are sourced at cost since the state is running the company. US companies have to pay profit all down the supply chain, which is why there is such an advantage to being able to vertically integrate your supply chain in the US. In China, is essentially all vertically integrated already.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  > scraping the barrel of revenue I believe the idea behind capitalism is exchanging value for value (private property and the ability to exchange it). Someone sitting back and skimming a tax off the top of others property, without providing value, doesn’t seem to be compatible with the philosophy.
  - asdff 5y ago
    What is a whale shareholder playing tennis off of their dividends and doing no 'work' toward their investment beyond looking at their quarterly statement if not someone skimming off the collective pot of profit generated by labor for their own personal hedonism? We have a lot of dragons in society who are celebrated for their difficult job of sitting comfortably on their pile of gold. Not sure why.
malwarebytess 5y ago
> Authoritarian “people’s republic of X”-style didn’t provide good outcomes. Except, you know, China.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  China did well after adopting a capitalist economic model. Not so well after adopting a communist economic model. Over 50 million dying just from starvation is basically the worst you can possibly be. Insane top down command like killing all the sparrows or collectivizing farms, or pulling nails out of furniture so that little villages can make steel describes the insanity of that approach. It had a shelf life of about 40 years. They still maintain the party dictatorship. Really what matters for dominance is a disciplined party apparatus that seizes power in some kind of coup or revolution and then rules the country with an iron fist. The party may use a justification of envy -- appealing to people's anger that others have more than they do -- or it may use religion, or moral arguments, or national pride arguments. But those are all instrumental to the underlying aim of power. Once you are in power, you can impose capitalism or communism or some mix. If communism doesn't work, you can discard it and look for something better. It's interesting that many on the left just dropped working class issues like a used shirt and refocused on race with extreme ease. For me personally, that's how I distinguish between a group that wants power as opposed to a group that is advocating for some policy profile. If they can switch out the policy profile and replace it with something different, then they were never that interested in policy to begin with.
  - kaibee 5y ago
    Tbh, I have no idea who 'on the left' you could be talking about (except Sinema I guess)? The labor side of the Democratic party has been enemic for the last 50 years.
  - door103 5y ago
    > China did well after adopting a capitalist economic model. Not so well after adopting a communist economic model. Let's be clear here -- regardless what you think of the Chinese government, they are far from a "capitalist economic model". Many major industries are nationalized, the state plays an enormous role in the economy. 60% of their economy by market cap is state-owned. It isn't Soviet-style or Mao-era socialism, but it is still a very different system than western capitalism. It's similar to the NEP era in the USSR (1921-1928)
bobcostas55 5y ago
>Capitalism vs socialism isn’t about the existence of that capital, just who owns and how decisions are made. You can't just assume the existence of capital. It's not an exogenous variable.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Capital is anything that creates wealth. Therefore if the society has wealth then it must have capital. Thus capital is one of the pillars on which civilization stands. People can argue who has control over capital, and what kinds of property rights are allowed, but the existence of capital is presupposed by all economic theories. I recommend Sydney Homer's A History of Interest Rates in which he traces interest rates from neolithic period up to the 20th Century. If you want to know what interest rates were charged in the time of ancient Egypt, or early African societies, or Native American tribes, or whatever happened to those French rentes, then this is the book for you. Here are some excerpts: - - - - - - Paleolithic man went out to find his food. Neolithic man produced his own food through agriculture and animal culture. His capital took the form of seeds, improved tools, and especially herds of animals. Capital accumulation led to a great increase in population and the opening up of vast new areas in Asia and Europe. Such capital permitted the further accumulation of possessions, the support of chieftains, and the building of cities. Cattle breeding has supplied us with many financial terms used in later money economies. For example, there is our own word capital and our term pecuniary, from pecus, meaning a “flock” in Latin. Sumerians used the word mas for calves and for interest. The Egyptian term ms, meaning interest, is derived from the verb msj, which means “to give birth.” Early Greeks, in fact, valued their precious metals in terms of cattle. [...] In Namaland, in Southwest Africa, cattle and beads were the original currencies. Debts were incurred in cattle (no rates quoted), and the difficulty of repayment often led to cattle raids into neighboring states. [...] In the French Sudan cattle were used until recently as currency for large transactions. Cattle loans were granted free of interest, but if a cow which was lent had a calf, the calf and the cow was claimed by the creditor. Similarly, in Uganda and French Equatorial Africa cattle and sheep were the bases of credit. In the former the creditor expected every third new birth as interest. In Northern Siberia, at least until recently, domesticated reindeer served as money. Loans were granted in reindeer. Among the Kirghiz of Siberia, horses and sheep served as money and were loaned out. The usual interest for such loans was 100%. - - - - - - Homer, Sidney; Sylla, Richard. A History of Interest Rates (Wiley Finance) (p. 53-58). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
7sidedmarble 5y ago
Remember not a single of the Communist experiments of the 20th century started as already democratic, Western style societies. Russia and China were not developed countries prior to communism. They didn't have what we would consider the rule of unarbitrary law. Marx and Engels saw socialism as the next step a society would move into after capitalism. They predicted this had to rest on the foundation of a society which had already experienced it's 'bourgeois revolution', meaning power had to leave the aristocracy and be in the hands of the capital owning class. They saw democracy as a necessary step for a society to progress to socialism. There is no great examples of this in the 20th century. If you read even a little Marx, how could you ever expect the kind of society he describes without first having democracy? Socialism is based on one concept: democracy in the work place. If democracy does not exist in the first place, the endeavor will always be doomed.
- quantified 5y ago
  Probably greed and sociopathy doom those collectivist experiments. Economic and political systems need to work with humans as we are, not as we idealize them.
  - 7sidedmarble 5y ago
    What if we are already living in a time where rich Western countries could experience post-scarcity if we just allocated resources and priorities differently? If we're not there yet, what do we do when we are? To me socialism is just an inevitability. We will eventually reach post-scarcity. I think if we can examine the current system and find so many ethical problems... It's worth asking ourselves what we could do to get to that ideal star trek society faster.
  - bccdee 5y ago
    Probably the fact that these societies arose from violent revolutions doomed them. Revolutions tend to lead to authoritarian governments, because if you can take over the whole country with your army, you don't really need democracy to legitimize you. I could easily cite Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, EL Salvador, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and countless other 20th century totalitarian regimes as instances where "capitalist experiments were doomed by greed and sociopathy." Very easily, given that these regimes were backed by American capitalist business interests. But realistically? When you're strong enough and ruthless enough to take over an entire country, you're probably more interested in power than in ideology, one way or another.

asdff 5y ago

Irrespective of flavor of socialism, just logically capitalism does not make any lick of sense unless you are among the capital class already who benefits from scraping the barrel of revenue to collect an amount as profit. The fact that there exists a profit margin and businesses cannot operate at cost is why manufacturing in China is used in the west vs western manufacturing, since businesses operating at cost can offer product at cost vs cost*profit_margin so these businesses are always more competitive than western counterparts who have to pay for someone else's profit margin down the entire supply chain.

dantheman 5y ago
I'll take the vast improvement of living standards under capitalism over those found in socialist countries. Are you arguing that the rapid decline in poverty in China due to capitalism is a bad thing?
- galdauts 5y ago
  I'd like to add that there are different flavours of both capitalism and socialism. The kind of disaster capitalism practiced in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries in the 90s certainly didn't lead to an improvement of living standards for quite a long time, if even. China also presents a case of state capitalism where companies are strictly controlled by the government as evidenced by the recent set of regulations published a few weeks ago and many companies are owned by the children of party members.
- asdff 5y ago
  I'd argue that what we see in terms of living standards in ostensibly socialist countries is much more due to corruption of office, which happens here too, vs the way that profit is shared among a business. Three of my city councilmembers have been indicted by the FBI for corruption in the last three years. Luckily in the U.S. the levers of power are pulled by more people dispersed across a larger bureaucracy, so corruption of office can only affect so many things, vs somewhere like PRNK or KSA where there is absolute rule. There are plenty of businesses that run on a more socialist model even within capitalist countries. They are owner operated and share profit amongst the cooperative, are often successful and have motivated employees who work longer tenures than your average employee at a company where they don't see any share of the profit for their hard work.
phonypc 5y ago
Sorry, what? You think Chinese manufacturing businesses aren't making a profit?
- quantified 5y ago
  And there is no contradiction between socialism and making a profit. Any enterprise owned under any organization, directed by any structure, could make a profit. What you do with those profits becomes interesting, if they exist.
- asdff 5y ago
  They make a profit at the end of the supply chain, but all their materials are sourced at cost since the state is running the company. US companies have to pay profit all down the supply chain, which is why there is such an advantage to being able to vertically integrate your supply chain in the US. In China, is essentially all vertically integrated already.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
> scraping the barrel of revenue I believe the idea behind capitalism is exchanging value for value (private property and the ability to exchange it). Someone sitting back and skimming a tax off the top of others property, without providing value, doesn’t seem to be compatible with the philosophy.
- asdff 5y ago
  What is a whale shareholder playing tennis off of their dividends and doing no 'work' toward their investment beyond looking at their quarterly statement if not someone skimming off the collective pot of profit generated by labor for their own personal hedonism? We have a lot of dragons in society who are celebrated for their difficult job of sitting comfortably on their pile of gold. Not sure why.

malwarebytess 5y ago

> Authoritarian “people’s republic of X”-style didn’t provide good outcomes. Except, you know, China.

rsj_hn 5y ago
China did well after adopting a capitalist economic model. Not so well after adopting a communist economic model. Over 50 million dying just from starvation is basically the worst you can possibly be. Insane top down command like killing all the sparrows or collectivizing farms, or pulling nails out of furniture so that little villages can make steel describes the insanity of that approach. It had a shelf life of about 40 years. They still maintain the party dictatorship. Really what matters for dominance is a disciplined party apparatus that seizes power in some kind of coup or revolution and then rules the country with an iron fist. The party may use a justification of envy -- appealing to people's anger that others have more than they do -- or it may use religion, or moral arguments, or national pride arguments. But those are all instrumental to the underlying aim of power. Once you are in power, you can impose capitalism or communism or some mix. If communism doesn't work, you can discard it and look for something better. It's interesting that many on the left just dropped working class issues like a used shirt and refocused on race with extreme ease. For me personally, that's how I distinguish between a group that wants power as opposed to a group that is advocating for some policy profile. If they can switch out the policy profile and replace it with something different, then they were never that interested in policy to begin with.
- kaibee 5y ago
  Tbh, I have no idea who 'on the left' you could be talking about (except Sinema I guess)? The labor side of the Democratic party has been enemic for the last 50 years.
- door103 5y ago
  > China did well after adopting a capitalist economic model. Not so well after adopting a communist economic model. Let's be clear here -- regardless what you think of the Chinese government, they are far from a "capitalist economic model". Many major industries are nationalized, the state plays an enormous role in the economy. 60% of their economy by market cap is state-owned. It isn't Soviet-style or Mao-era socialism, but it is still a very different system than western capitalism. It's similar to the NEP era in the USSR (1921-1928)

bobcostas55 5y ago

>Capitalism vs socialism isn’t about the existence of that capital, just who owns and how decisions are made. You can't just assume the existence of capital. It's not an exogenous variable.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Capital is anything that creates wealth. Therefore if the society has wealth then it must have capital. Thus capital is one of the pillars on which civilization stands. People can argue who has control over capital, and what kinds of property rights are allowed, but the existence of capital is presupposed by all economic theories. I recommend Sydney Homer's A History of Interest Rates in which he traces interest rates from neolithic period up to the 20th Century. If you want to know what interest rates were charged in the time of ancient Egypt, or early African societies, or Native American tribes, or whatever happened to those French rentes, then this is the book for you. Here are some excerpts: - - - - - - Paleolithic man went out to find his food. Neolithic man produced his own food through agriculture and animal culture. His capital took the form of seeds, improved tools, and especially herds of animals. Capital accumulation led to a great increase in population and the opening up of vast new areas in Asia and Europe. Such capital permitted the further accumulation of possessions, the support of chieftains, and the building of cities. Cattle breeding has supplied us with many financial terms used in later money economies. For example, there is our own word capital and our term pecuniary, from pecus, meaning a “flock” in Latin. Sumerians used the word mas for calves and for interest. The Egyptian term ms, meaning interest, is derived from the verb msj, which means “to give birth.” Early Greeks, in fact, valued their precious metals in terms of cattle. [...] In Namaland, in Southwest Africa, cattle and beads were the original currencies. Debts were incurred in cattle (no rates quoted), and the difficulty of repayment often led to cattle raids into neighboring states. [...] In the French Sudan cattle were used until recently as currency for large transactions. Cattle loans were granted free of interest, but if a cow which was lent had a calf, the calf and the cow was claimed by the creditor. Similarly, in Uganda and French Equatorial Africa cattle and sheep were the bases of credit. In the former the creditor expected every third new birth as interest. In Northern Siberia, at least until recently, domesticated reindeer served as money. Loans were granted in reindeer. Among the Kirghiz of Siberia, horses and sheep served as money and were loaned out. The usual interest for such loans was 100%. - - - - - - Homer, Sidney; Sylla, Richard. A History of Interest Rates (Wiley Finance) (p. 53-58). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

7sidedmarble 5y ago

Remember not a single of the Communist experiments of the 20th century started as already democratic, Western style societies. Russia and China were not developed countries prior to communism. They didn't have what we would consider the rule of unarbitrary law. Marx and Engels saw socialism as the next step a society would move into after capitalism. They predicted this had to rest on the foundation of a society which had already experienced it's 'bourgeois revolution', meaning power had to leave the aristocracy and be in the hands of the capital owning class. They saw democracy as a necessary step for a society to progress to socialism. There is no great examples of this in the 20th century. If you read even a little Marx, how could you ever expect the kind of society he describes without first having democracy? Socialism is based on one concept: democracy in the work place. If democracy does not exist in the first place, the endeavor will always be doomed.

quantified 5y ago
Probably greed and sociopathy doom those collectivist experiments. Economic and political systems need to work with humans as we are, not as we idealize them.
- 7sidedmarble 5y ago
  What if we are already living in a time where rich Western countries could experience post-scarcity if we just allocated resources and priorities differently? If we're not there yet, what do we do when we are? To me socialism is just an inevitability. We will eventually reach post-scarcity. I think if we can examine the current system and find so many ethical problems... It's worth asking ourselves what we could do to get to that ideal star trek society faster.
- bccdee 5y ago
  Probably the fact that these societies arose from violent revolutions doomed them. Revolutions tend to lead to authoritarian governments, because if you can take over the whole country with your army, you don't really need democracy to legitimize you. I could easily cite Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, EL Salvador, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and countless other 20th century totalitarian regimes as instances where "capitalist experiments were doomed by greed and sociopathy." Very easily, given that these regimes were backed by American capitalist business interests. But realistically? When you're strong enough and ruthless enough to take over an entire country, you're probably more interested in power than in ideology, one way or another.