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There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing

• sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  And businesses as a whole produce positive externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to allow them to exist.
  • crawfordcomeaux 1y ago
    Only when accounting is done without calculating ecological cost, including human quality of life.
    • Nasrudith 1y ago
      Human quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.
  • asdf6969 1y ago
    > we continue to allow them to exist Who is “we”? I can’t do anything about it. No more than peasants “allow” the king to exist..
    • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      Sure you can. You can vote to get rid of corporations, and you'll get outvoted. Ergo: we. You don't understand how kings work if you think it's equivalent to your situation in a western democracy.
      • asdf6969 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
          Formatting issue? "Voting obviously doesn't work." - Troll
        • Jensson 1y ago
          Voting obviously works, you can vote away capitalism, some countries did that. The only reason it "doesn't work" is that the countries that did vote away capitalism didn't fare very well, so other countries people are very reluctant to try that again. But they absolutely could if they wanted.
          • asdf6969 1y ago
            Some countries “voted” to elect Putin and napoleon too…
• heyjamesknight 1y ago
  Capitalism has pulled more people out of poverty worldwide by an order of magnitude than any other competing system or ideology. What capitalism does is apparent in its worldwide success.
  • heyjamesknight 1y ago
    Amazed that Hacker News has become such a bastion of socialism. The above comment is objective fact.
• AlexandrB 1y ago
  > The purpose of a system is what it does This is a dumb saying. And if you start to apply it to everything capitalism still seems pretty ok. For example: "The purpose of Communism is killing 20+ million people"[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Sovi...
  • moefh 1y ago
    I agree that when taken literally, it's a dumb thing to say: literally (i.e., the dictionary definition), the purpose of a system is the reason why it was built, not what it does. But it's a slogan, and slogans don't always make sense taken literally. The point of the slogan is to remind people of the (obvious, I hope) fact that, as I wrote: > you can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it If you check my Wikipedia link it shows that the original quote says more or less the same thing: "[this slogan] makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances". In other words, it doesn't matter what's the historical context of why corporations were created, what matters is what they do now. You can argue, like it was argued, that corporations as a whole currently are a net benefit. My point is that bringing up the historical context of their original purpose adds nothing to the discussion. As to your other point, I completely agree that it would be useless to try to defend the Staling regime by pointing out what communism was intended to be. That's more or less the point I was trying to make.
• Nasrudith 1y ago
  That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.
  • moefh 1y ago
    I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all. Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say). In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.