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You're wrong for objective reasons. People try to immigrate to the capitalist democracies at very high rates. The same is not true of communist states, which hi

You're wrong for objective reasons. People try to immigrate to the capitalist democracies at very high rates. The same is not true of communist states, which historically had to build actual walls to keep people in. You can try to blow off actual, concrete performance in metrics everyone agrees on like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality, but you will still be wrong by the mass collective judgement of many billions of people over a period of a century or more. Claiming otherwise is like claiming 2 + 2 = 0. There are no such things as walls around capitalist democracies to stop citizens from fleeing.

nicoburns 4y ago
What you're missing is that the alternative to capitalism isn't necessarily communism. It can be wrong to argue for capitalism and wrong to argue for communism. I would for example argue that, while still imperfect, European-style "social democracies" that combine a market economy with a strong social state are a lot better a system than either Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism. They certainly tend to do much better than both on the metrics you mention like like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality. And when considering "oughts" we need not limit ourselves to extant systems either. We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based. I'd argue that such a system would be different enough that it would no longer count as capitalism.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  This works well when there are no alternatives. If the best country in the world to do business stops bring the US due to these changes, then capital will gradually move elsewhere and the massive amounts of wealth needed to enable us to even contemplate UBI may no longer exist.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
- native_samples 4y ago
  European countries are capitalist democracies though (modulo the EU institutions themselves, which aren't, but let's put that to one side). The differences between Europe and the USA are tiny compared to the differences between capitalism and communism. They aren't profoundly different third ways or anything like that. I live in Europe and the place I live has mandatory health insurance, rule of law, relatively free speech, a strong finance sector, good ease of doing business and high inwards migration. From the perspective of an average person life here isn't much different to life in the USA. W.R.T. Europe doing better on those statistics, can you cite that? It's not really true I think. The USA and western European countries are comparable in terms of percentage of migrants: https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2020-interactive/ https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2020-interactive/ USA is ~15%, similar to the UK, Spain, France, Germany. Of course they would all be much higher if controls were relaxed. Many people would like to migrate to the USA but cannot, even from western Europe. Notably pale on the map: eastern Europe, China, Russia, Latin America etc. Migration stats are as I said - communist countries have very low numbers of immigrants and capitalist countries, which certainly includes western Europe, have much higher rates. For life expectancy it's the same story. USA and Europe are very similar. The USA is a bit lower, probably due to higher rates of obesity, but there's not much in it. China, Russia and especially North Korea are both quite a bit lower. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy "We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based" Theoretical non-capitalist, non-communist systems are usually communist on close inspection. UBI is communism in its purist form, renaming it doesn't change that. If you want to know how well paying people regardless of work goes, take a look at the current rates of inflation, backlogs in government services and economic chaos that lockdowns and furloughs led to. That's peanuts compared to what a meaningfully sized UBI would entail.

nicoburns 4y ago

What you're missing is that the alternative to capitalism isn't necessarily communism. It can be wrong to argue for capitalism and wrong to argue for communism. I would for example argue that, while still imperfect, European-style "social democracies" that combine a market economy with a strong social state are a lot better a system than either Soviet-style communism or US-style capitalism. They certainly tend to do much better than both on the metrics you mention like like "do people actually want to live in a place", life expectancies or things like food/medicine quality. And when considering "oughts" we need not limit ourselves to extant systems either. We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based. I'd argue that such a system would be different enough that it would no longer count as capitalism.

robertlagrant 4y ago
This works well when there are no alternatives. If the best country in the world to do business stops bring the US due to these changes, then capital will gradually move elsewhere and the massive amounts of wealth needed to enable us to even contemplate UBI may no longer exist.
- nicoburns 4y ago
native_samples 4y ago
European countries are capitalist democracies though (modulo the EU institutions themselves, which aren't, but let's put that to one side). The differences between Europe and the USA are tiny compared to the differences between capitalism and communism. They aren't profoundly different third ways or anything like that. I live in Europe and the place I live has mandatory health insurance, rule of law, relatively free speech, a strong finance sector, good ease of doing business and high inwards migration. From the perspective of an average person life here isn't much different to life in the USA. W.R.T. Europe doing better on those statistics, can you cite that? It's not really true I think. The USA and western European countries are comparable in terms of percentage of migrants: https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2020-interactive/ https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/wmr-2020-interactive/ USA is ~15%, similar to the UK, Spain, France, Germany. Of course they would all be much higher if controls were relaxed. Many people would like to migrate to the USA but cannot, even from western Europe. Notably pale on the map: eastern Europe, China, Russia, Latin America etc. Migration stats are as I said - communist countries have very low numbers of immigrants and capitalist countries, which certainly includes western Europe, have much higher rates. For life expectancy it's the same story. USA and Europe are very similar. The USA is a bit lower, probably due to higher rates of obesity, but there's not much in it. China, Russia and especially North Korea are both quite a bit lower. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy "We could for example consider an economic system that included a basic income, which would allow it to be much more redistributive while still being market based" Theoretical non-capitalist, non-communist systems are usually communist on close inspection. UBI is communism in its purist form, renaming it doesn't change that. If you want to know how well paying people regardless of work goes, take a look at the current rates of inflation, backlogs in government services and economic chaos that lockdowns and furloughs led to. That's peanuts compared to what a meaningfully sized UBI would entail.