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> why you think so? Because human nature is inherently selfish. The great majority of people generally tend to do stuff that benefits them and their close ones

• komali2 3y ago
  > This is getting too much to explain for me. I recommend reading up on free markets. I didn't mean to tire you, I have read a great many things on this subject over the decades, it's how I got to be how I am now (I wasn't always a dirty anticapitalist). At this point I'm less interested in debating the pillars of ideologies and more interested in individuals and why they believe what they do, and conversation around that. Thanks for the video recommendation, I'll check it out. Please don't feel the need to continue, I'm just going to go through your post and make some notes mostly for myself, it helps me organize my thoughts and consider my own ideas. > Because human nature is inherently selfish I heard this all the time but my every life experience speaks against this. Have you ever been in a natural disaster? If our nature is selfishness, why then are we our most selfless when everything but our nature is stripped away? Others have noticed this, I recommend "A Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit. > The great majority of people generally tend to do stuff that benefits them and their close ones. Capitalism recognizes that and realizes that the great majority of value created by self-interested people is captured by the society in form of innovation, creation of products and services, jobs and taxes. Is that truly what capitalism does? Is there a possibility that a capitalist society instead repeatedly tells people to fear their selfish neighbor, and "get yours" before they do? In particular, does it really disperse selfish behavior to the benefit of all? I'm particularly skeptical of this point because while I agree that capitalism rewards selfish behavior, the very existence of billionaires seems to indicate that the "great majority of value" is not "captured by society" at all. If it were, I feel we would have fed our hungry children before we had launched a tesla car into space. At the very minimum, capitalism is a poor allocator of this great majority of value. > Societies that reject this truth (communism) tend to starve since nobody does anything anymore and everybody tries to steal from the State. Some semi-socialists states didn't starve, and one of them (Cuba) has better healthcare outcomes than the most powerful capitalist state on earth (the USA), though there are many other issues with its society of course. Furthermore, I can point you to many inherently anarchistic, share-and-share alike communities that aren't starving. In my experience this is because people love doing things for many reasons, and profit is often the very last reason. It's not just me saying this, I was taught this time and time again from my sales leaders: there's a reason a sales contest prize is a car and not a cash prize. Money is just not a good motivator for most people. > This is false at a society level. In the USA for example slavery was abolished when the industrialized North won the war thanks to its better industrial and economic performance. Well it certainly had better industrial performance, but even afterwards near-equivalent slavery was maintained in the South for quite some time. Where they couldn't pay no wages, they paid almost none. Then there was the industrial era upgrade in the form of Company Towns. Why did those go away? Because they also weren't profitable? > Turns out a society of self-interested free individuals is much more profitable and successful than reluctant slaves in chains. I argue that the chains haven't really been cast off. Though slavery was made illegal, black americans still worked fields at penny wages, and their cheap labor class was maintained through racist law. Even today the Americans maintain a slave labor pool in their prisons. So the richest country on earth still seems to think it's quite profitable. > Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build) > Some rules are essential for a rule-of-law society (like contract law, judiciary, police, externality taxation, etc), others are well intended but imply costs and time which adds up (see how housing is unaffordable due due to regulations making it impossible to build) This is interesting to me because one of the largest issues I've found with modern capitalist society is that these laws ostensibly maintain "rule of law" but in practice seem to maintain class boundaries. A great example is in most capitalist nations, wage theft in the form of stolen time, missed paychecks, etc, outstrips retail theft losses by orders of magnitude. And yet the society spends a great deal of money and time on police and judiciary efforts to prosecute one and not the other. I don't see how these "essential" laws are doing anything useful. > Absolutely. Read up on how markets work and how they they are only mechanism we know for solving the pricing (valuation) and resource allocation problem. Hmm, I have read quite a bit on the subject, but I'm always open to more suggestions. Regarding resource allocation, I mean, I can allocate resources from farm to table for my home without ever considering "value" or "price." Perhaps I've exchanged the calorie for the dollar, though! > The wallet always hits above. No starving person is ethical. During my life under communism I saw the worst human abuse imaginable all from people who in theory had no profit motive. Human nature is human nature. I'd like to learn more about this if you're willing to share. Where were you living, and what sort of things did you see? > Are you kidding? Why do you think all those food companies exist if not for profit? But... the poor can't pay for food lol. > In capitalism there is a glut of choice to the end that obesity is a big problem. I believe a lot of the obesity issues in America in particular are also due to food deserts and malnutrition. However, doesn't this just further demonstrate that profit is poorly determining what is good for people? It seems there's more money to be made by showing people commercials for food that's mostly just corn (one of the cheapest vegetables to grow) in various forms, getting them addicted from a young age, and continuing to feed them corn throughout their lives as they grow obese from malnutrition. > In communism we kept looking hungry at empty shelves. If you mean the USSR I do still hold to the theory that this was less an issue with the idea of resource allocation without profit at the heart and more an issue with a centrally planned economy. I don't support the idea of communist centrally planned economies, the failure modes are too obvious. > Orwell saw right through them Orwell is a great man, and I think it's good you bring him up, because he's an example of a marxist who was disgusted with general communist approval of a monster like Stalin. His quote: "One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten." I know it's common to doubt his leftist tendencies, but I feel it's undeniable: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." I wasn't trying to be cute with my state capitalist comment, and I don't want to dredge up painful memories, I was merely stating what I believe to be the generally agreed upon understanding of the USSR economy. Communism may not be a popular idea but it is relatively well defined by its theorists: no state, no currency, no class, and workers owning the means of production. It sounds that you witnessed first hand that of course none of this was true in the USSR. I would in fact be quite happy to call the "no state, no currency, no class, and workers owning the means of production" ideology something other than communism at this point, too much dialectic debate has been fought around both that word and "socialism."