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I think its quite something that we all waste our time over divisions like left/right, capitalism/socialism, woke/not-woke when in practice; this is the only di

I think its quite something that we all waste our time over divisions like left/right, capitalism/socialism, woke/not-woke when in practice; this is the only division that matters. Those who are trying to follow the rules and make the nation better, and those that are only active for their self-interest.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago
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- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  hard disagree, many OG and influentual socialists came from rich backgrounds. There's also lots of poor people out there who are simply waiting their opportunity to be corrupt. Anecdotally I've experienced many people from working class backgrounds who are extremely proud of their tax evasion. The key dividing line is those who follow the rules and believe in the system and those that don't and are just looking out for their own interests. This further explains corruption within socialist systems where everyone is effectively "equal" but some people are still looking out for themselves over everyone else.
  - don_esteban 1y ago
    The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. No need to go far, just look at the result of lobbying in the USA. Btw, while there are many famines caused by despots (Stalin's, Mao's, Red Khmer's), there is also Bengal's famine of 1943. One must also point out that China in the last 40 years have done perhaps more regarding the poverty mitigation than anybody else in the human history (capitalism, especially the wild one, has actually quite patchy record...)
    - whatshisface 1y ago
      The Chinese people did all of the work, their government simply allowed them, returning some of their own money in the form of state investment. Who pays for "state" investment?
      - don_esteban 1y ago
        The Chinese government did a lot of smart policies, empowering their people to unleash their entrepreneurial drive, helping them with targeted investment where that was deemed to get good long term/strategic payoff. This was not passive 'let them do what they want', it was (and still is) an actively guided process - there is enough information about that in the net. It also failed in many ways, but overall influence is highly positive, the results speak for themselves. Failing to see that is a sign of ideological blindness.
    - Quarrelsome 1y ago
      > The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. perhaps "rules" was a poor choice of word. What I meant was more a belief in society in general, a belief in the nation, in fairness. I guess in one-word: selfishness. I believe the _real_ political divide is between those who are selfish and those who are not.
      - don_esteban 1y ago
        much better, thank you still, ideological zealots really unselfishly believe in their case, whether that is fundamental christianity/islam/communism/capitalism (ok, maybe capitalism not, almost by definition, capitalism is about greed) and are willing to inflict unbelievable horrors in the name of their ideology one should also not forget that there exist deep cultural differences and what is considered 'fair' and 'belief in society' is quite different e.g. between the western judo-christianism and eastern societies
    - Aunche 1y ago
      Lobbying isn't used to exacerbate the social divide. It's used to achieve incremental policy wins and prevent incremental policy losses for the clients of the lobbyists. This is what the general public needs to do as well if they want the government to better represent their interests, but they have little interest in that. People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide, and the overwhelmingly negative sentiment to lobbying is evidence of this. Colonialism is a form of centralized planning, which catastrophically fails for the same reasons that it does in communist regimes. China is evidence of capitalism's incredibly successful record of poverty mitigation. They've retained some communist style central planning, but the "bad" part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of wealth, as mentioned upthread, which China allows just like any capitalist country.
      - don_esteban 1y ago
        Lobbying to create laws that benefit rich people/big corporations and make the life of ordinary people tougher directly exacerbate the socio-economic divide. Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality. The reality being that the system is designed by rich, for rich, to maintain and improve their position. "People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide" What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless? "Colonialism is a form of centralized planning" - no, colonialism (and neocolonialism) is a form of institutionalized looting, historically highly successful (see the graph of the GDP (as a percentage of the whole world GDP) of Great Britain vs India for a nice example) No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power, by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state. I suspect one of the reasons China was able to maintain its upward trajectory was their ability to separate the political power from the wealth (see the case of Jack Ma what happens if the wealth starts to impinge on political power in China). From the point of view of West, they did some highly questionable decisions that costed them trillions (squashing the blockchain miners, bursting property bubble, going hard after excessive gaming and internet time by kids) and would not be conceivable in the west, but overall might be net positive for the society at all.
        Aunche 1y ago
- miohtama 1y ago
  > Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history. The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism – in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between five and nine million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture. > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hunger-and-poverty https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    It's impossible to say with any certainty that was down to an economic system change and not the myriad of other issues plaguing the Soviet states. And maybe on balance hunger went down, but in particular for a whole lot of those Soviet states, the transitions from the failing "communist" state and the market-based alternatives was incredibly harsh and involved a whole lot of starving as the prices of food and other critical goods soared out of reach of Soviet citizens, not even going into the psychological effects. Also also, insofar as "communism" "failed" (the USSR was incredibly authoritarian and corrupt, many communists and socialists take big issues with them or China for that matter being called communist but I digress), it "failed" alongside a host of economic sanctions brought upon it by it's Capitalist neighbors, utterly terrified at it's very existence. I mean Christ calling someone communist is still an insult in the United States, and an attack on a politician here too, decades after the Red Scare supposedly ended.
    - nradov 1y ago
      What sanctions? The USA and Canada literally sold huge quantities of grain to the USSR even during the height of the Cold War. Without those food sales even more Soviet citizens would have gone hungry.
  - storus 1y ago
    > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. This sounds like a complete BS. There were no starving people in the Soviet Union and its satellites after a brief post-war period. They had no luxuries all year round like exotic fruits, but the basics were covered. They had also vastly more educated population than the US. Just their governance and understanding of economics didn't consider the innate selfishness of humans and the need to dominate and outdo others so supply-demand laws didn't work well. China fixed that part later by allowing private corporate ownership and throwing its population into a Darwinian environment while keeping minimal social standards for the unlucky ones. North Korea, Cambodia and Laos would be the only "communist" countries where famines were still present.
- cptskippy 1y ago
  The problem with broad generalizations like that is you will make enemies of allies and allies of enemies, only you won't realize it and fail to understand why people aren't 100% behind your agenda. This is itself a form of corruption.
  - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
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        cptskippy 1y ago
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- snowwrestler 1y ago
  In a socialist system you still need a government, which is a group of people who are empowered to enforce the rules of socialism. As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well. If they are very good socialists they will redistribute it all. If they are not-very-good socialists they will redistribute some of it and reserve some to support a nice lifestyle for themselves and their families. They won’t personally “own” mansions, airplanes, factories, etc. like capitalists do, but they still control them legally so the practical effect is very similar.
  - don_esteban 1y ago
    "As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well." Umm, it does not work like that, look at the Scandinavian-type socialism. The collective wealth is in the functioning education & health system, social support net, working public transport and such. Not a type of wealth that the government can usurp for themselves, to the detriment/exclusion of the remainder of the society. Too much ideological argumentation here...
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  - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
    No, you don’t need a centralized government in all social systems. Centralized government is the big distinction here. Libertarian socialism of a decentralized government.
- jandrese 1y ago
  It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Communism doesn't solve that problem. The less centralized your power is the more efficient your economy works. Pushing decisions down to the edge means the people deciding how to allocate resources are the closest to the information about what is needed where. The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation, if someone is ultimately in charge of both sides they will be inclined to try to choose just one and "avoid waste", which ultimately is just avoiding optimization. This is also why companies become less competitive as they grow and are always under threat from startups and a big reason why antitrust is about more than just "protecting consumers". That's also why big companies are always lobbying government for protection of their business models.
  - TFYS 1y ago
    > It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Those are the same thing. > The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. That was true a few decades ago. Now with everyone having a smartphone in their pockets at all times and the amount of computing power we have it should be doable. Still not easy for sure, but not impossible. > Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation Think about how much non-productive work has to be done just to enable competition. Instead of one organization per industry we need multiple, all with their own overhead costs. Every company has to do their branding, HR, marketing, etc. The whole advertising industry pretty much exists only because companies try to get an edge with propaganda instead of improving their product. Wasted work. Competition also forces companies to do unethical things. Say one company starts cutting down rainforests to get an edge over the competition. Now they're cheaper than other businesses, and every business that wants to survive has to start cutting down rainforest. One country gets rid of worker rights -> businesses move there and other countries must follow suit. Same with taxes.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
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- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  sure, but the implication is that outside of the political tribalism that has America gripped; there's people on your side of this tribal divide who would screw you and people on the opposite tribal side who would work well with you. The tribalism of two party politics blurs those lines and replaces them with arbitrary forms of tribal allegiance. i.e. under a freer political system with a vibrant set of political parties that actually matched peoples political interests you might find former democrats and republicans voting together for the same party. Its my belief that the political divide in US mostly comes down to what TV channel your parents had on.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I think you completely missed The point of the comment you replied to. It's not stupidity, it's avarice. And you being willing to overlook it is exactly the problem parent is describing
uncircle 1y ago
Yes, because all rules have been created for your own good, so you must follow without ever questioning them. The world is more nuanced than your silly black-and-white duality, unless it's a Twitter argument and it's all about dividing the world in convenient us-vs-them boxes.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding my point. Either you believe in the society you live in, or you don't. The story specifically speaks of people high up within that society that do not believe in it and are using their position to undermine that society in order to benefit themselves.. That, for me, is the #1 problematic archetype of person. Its not just about the rules and if you follow them or not, its about the belief in turn-taking, in other people having the same rights as you, a belief that in society; everyone is important, everyone is mostly equal and that the society should be fair. Perhaps my phrasing could be improved? For the most part I am simply trying to define the difference between people being selfish and not.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    > Either you believe in the society you live in, or you don't. This makes GP even more correct. One can believe (and like) part of the society one lives in but not like other parts, or plainly think they are wrong and should be changed at all costs.
    - Quarrelsome 1y ago
      GP? > One can believe (and like) part of the society one lives in but not like other parts, or plainly think they are wrong and should be changed at all costs. Sure but I mean in terms of the abstract. The idea that those most successful may have to pay more in taxation, the idea that justice should be blind and that everyone deserves a trial. I guess the tipping point is when your belief in the part of society that are wrong are so extreme that you think its ok to undermine society (e.g. steal public money, push infront of queues, etc) in order to combat that "wrong".
seneca 1y ago
That's probably a healthy way to see things. Ideally all people that are actively working to create or improve should be on the same "side" against those that are destructive. The second order conflict then becomes what the rules are, and how we guide that side. That is, I think, where most of the factionalism historically plays out. It does feel like we're regressing to fighting that first order conflict more often now though. In reality, it may be more complicated than that though. Most people don't see themselves as destructive, they just have a very different view of what the right rules are and what ought to be done to progress things. That can appear destructive from the outside.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  I think tax cuts are possibly a decent enough proxy for this subject? While there's certainly a case to be made for tax cuts in very specific use-cases (e.g. where they're strangling demand/innovation/living costs/government-corruption/etc); a general belief in tax cuts is a constraint that makes it very hard to believe in society. If you believe in tax cuts as a principle (i.e. 0% is a goal), then generally its hard to support government spending, which means its hard to support solving problems within your society, because doing so makes it harder to cut taxes. So with that in mind, I personally think people who believe in the Von Mises model of taxation (i.e. "all taxation is theft") are ideologically incompatible with any sort of society that tries to solve its own problems.
  - seneca 1y ago
    I think this is a great example of a second-order disagreement. How about people who genuinely believe in a minimal state? They often believe in charitable giving and local community organization, in my experience. Maximal civil society vs maximal government. A good example of this type is people who believe in the ideas laid out in Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even the more hard line Von Mises types are close to this. There are disgruntled people who are just asocial in that camp, like any other, but they are over emphasized by opponents just like every political group. It would be very hard to argue that Nozick wasn't someone concerned with advancing society. The difference for that type is just a strong disagreement about how to do so. Painting them as first-order opponents is a mistake, I think.
tacitusarc 1y ago
There’s an interesting book “What is Wong with the World”, which points out that despite everyone agreeing that things are broken and people should unite to fix them, there are many competing visions for what “fixed” looks like, and this is been the source of much of the contention. It was written in the early 1900s.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  While I agree there is contention about "what's wrong", there's a bit of a difference between "I should put government money into my pocket" and "I think local district zoning laws need reform".
- dmix 1y ago
  I believe OP is saying the most fundamental thing is people working in government acting moral and in the interest of the country, and not using the power position for self enrichment or engaging in petty corruption for social gain. If you have that then it doesn't matter if your system is capitalist or socialist or a bunch of competing variations where no one agrees. The outcome will always be severely hampered by their constant interference in business, plundering of tax money, and repression of dissent. Most people probably universally agree on the topic of corruption, unlike economics or social policy. But it requires a well designed political system and a strong culture, which is difficult to do retroactively.
logicchains 1y ago
Exactly. The problems with both governments and corporations come from when individuals working for them are able to act "above the law", and get away with things that if done by a solitary, poor person would land that person in jail. In a truly just society nobody would be above the law.
panic 1y ago
This sounds nice until you think more closely about the framing implicit in “follow the rules and make the nation better”. Who makes the rules and defines what is good for a nation?
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  sorry, "rule following" is possibly a sub-optimal language choice. I more mean the sort of selfishness that leads to corruption. Those who see their turn in government less about directing the nation and more as their turn to line their pockets and abuse their power.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  True, and yet... I think there is broad consensus that too much poverty is a problem, and (perhaps somewhat less broad) that therefore too much wealth inequality is a problem. I think there's fairly broad consensus that college costs are a problem, that healthcare costs and access are a problem. I think there's a fair consensus that fixing these things would make the nation better. Then you get to "how do we fix them?" and all consensus disappears. As for the rules, it seems pretty clear to me that "the rules" are the Constitution and the existing law, plus the rules on how to pass or repeal laws. But this framing also misses one category: Those who think that they should break the rules to make the nation better. I think that they are misguided at best and lying (either to others or to themselves) at worst. Why misguided? Because preserving the rule of law is a really big deal. Even if they have the best of intentions, once they knock the law down flat and pave a road over it, they won't be the only one to drive on it. Tyrants try to build that road; if it's already there, the tyrant's job becomes much easier and much harder to stop. So I oppose such tactics. It doesn't matter whether they are well-meaning or not. Even if the person doing them will never be a tyrant, the next person who wants to be a tyrant will find the door wide open.
  - keybored 1y ago
    Majority opinion can look like consensus. And yet things like wealth inequality make for an uneven distribution of opinion where the minority end up having the most votes in effect.
0x1ceb00da 1y ago
In poor countries everyone lives in a scarcity mindset, even the ultra rich. It's a lot like the supernatural stimulus that makes humans crave junk food and sugar. Some indian communities are prone to obesity because storing as much fat as possible was the only way to survive in the famines that happened under the british rule. Only people whose bodies could do that survived.
dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
>we all waste our time over divisions like left/right, capitalism/socialism, woke/not-woke when in practice This is by design( divide and rule...). And it works as intended.
keybored 1y ago
This is naive to the point of not being addressable.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  I think you'll find thats only because you're incompatibly cringe. Once you sort that out, you'll find it scans ok.
  - keybored 1y ago
    I find it hard to downgrade my wisdom that much, even with hard liquor.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Maybe try upgrading it instead?
    - Quarrelsome 1y ago
      Cmon yo, if you got wisdom then drop it. So far all we got is judgement. Those ain't the same thing.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago

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Quarrelsome 1y ago
hard disagree, many OG and influentual socialists came from rich backgrounds. There's also lots of poor people out there who are simply waiting their opportunity to be corrupt. Anecdotally I've experienced many people from working class backgrounds who are extremely proud of their tax evasion. The key dividing line is those who follow the rules and believe in the system and those that don't and are just looking out for their own interests. This further explains corruption within socialist systems where everyone is effectively "equal" but some people are still looking out for themselves over everyone else.
- don_esteban 1y ago
  The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. No need to go far, just look at the result of lobbying in the USA. Btw, while there are many famines caused by despots (Stalin's, Mao's, Red Khmer's), there is also Bengal's famine of 1943. One must also point out that China in the last 40 years have done perhaps more regarding the poverty mitigation than anybody else in the human history (capitalism, especially the wild one, has actually quite patchy record...)
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    The Chinese people did all of the work, their government simply allowed them, returning some of their own money in the form of state investment. Who pays for "state" investment?
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      The Chinese government did a lot of smart policies, empowering their people to unleash their entrepreneurial drive, helping them with targeted investment where that was deemed to get good long term/strategic payoff. This was not passive 'let them do what they want', it was (and still is) an actively guided process - there is enough information about that in the net. It also failed in many ways, but overall influence is highly positive, the results speak for themselves. Failing to see that is a sign of ideological blindness.
  - Quarrelsome 1y ago
    > The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. perhaps "rules" was a poor choice of word. What I meant was more a belief in society in general, a belief in the nation, in fairness. I guess in one-word: selfishness. I believe the _real_ political divide is between those who are selfish and those who are not.
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      much better, thank you still, ideological zealots really unselfishly believe in their case, whether that is fundamental christianity/islam/communism/capitalism (ok, maybe capitalism not, almost by definition, capitalism is about greed) and are willing to inflict unbelievable horrors in the name of their ideology one should also not forget that there exist deep cultural differences and what is considered 'fair' and 'belief in society' is quite different e.g. between the western judo-christianism and eastern societies
  - Aunche 1y ago
    Lobbying isn't used to exacerbate the social divide. It's used to achieve incremental policy wins and prevent incremental policy losses for the clients of the lobbyists. This is what the general public needs to do as well if they want the government to better represent their interests, but they have little interest in that. People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide, and the overwhelmingly negative sentiment to lobbying is evidence of this. Colonialism is a form of centralized planning, which catastrophically fails for the same reasons that it does in communist regimes. China is evidence of capitalism's incredibly successful record of poverty mitigation. They've retained some communist style central planning, but the "bad" part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of wealth, as mentioned upthread, which China allows just like any capitalist country.
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      Lobbying to create laws that benefit rich people/big corporations and make the life of ordinary people tougher directly exacerbate the socio-economic divide. Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality. The reality being that the system is designed by rich, for rich, to maintain and improve their position. "People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide" What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless? "Colonialism is a form of centralized planning" - no, colonialism (and neocolonialism) is a form of institutionalized looting, historically highly successful (see the graph of the GDP (as a percentage of the whole world GDP) of Great Britain vs India for a nice example) No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power, by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state. I suspect one of the reasons China was able to maintain its upward trajectory was their ability to separate the political power from the wealth (see the case of Jack Ma what happens if the wealth starts to impinge on political power in China). From the point of view of West, they did some highly questionable decisions that costed them trillions (squashing the blockchain miners, bursting property bubble, going hard after excessive gaming and internet time by kids) and would not be conceivable in the west, but overall might be net positive for the society at all.
      - Aunche 1y ago
miohtama 1y ago
> Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history. The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism – in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between five and nine million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture. > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hunger-and-poverty https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  It's impossible to say with any certainty that was down to an economic system change and not the myriad of other issues plaguing the Soviet states. And maybe on balance hunger went down, but in particular for a whole lot of those Soviet states, the transitions from the failing "communist" state and the market-based alternatives was incredibly harsh and involved a whole lot of starving as the prices of food and other critical goods soared out of reach of Soviet citizens, not even going into the psychological effects. Also also, insofar as "communism" "failed" (the USSR was incredibly authoritarian and corrupt, many communists and socialists take big issues with them or China for that matter being called communist but I digress), it "failed" alongside a host of economic sanctions brought upon it by it's Capitalist neighbors, utterly terrified at it's very existence. I mean Christ calling someone communist is still an insult in the United States, and an attack on a politician here too, decades after the Red Scare supposedly ended.
  - nradov 1y ago
    What sanctions? The USA and Canada literally sold huge quantities of grain to the USSR even during the height of the Cold War. Without those food sales even more Soviet citizens would have gone hungry.
- storus 1y ago
  > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. This sounds like a complete BS. There were no starving people in the Soviet Union and its satellites after a brief post-war period. They had no luxuries all year round like exotic fruits, but the basics were covered. They had also vastly more educated population than the US. Just their governance and understanding of economics didn't consider the innate selfishness of humans and the need to dominate and outdo others so supply-demand laws didn't work well. China fixed that part later by allowing private corporate ownership and throwing its population into a Darwinian environment while keeping minimal social standards for the unlucky ones. North Korea, Cambodia and Laos would be the only "communist" countries where famines were still present.
cptskippy 1y ago
The problem with broad generalizations like that is you will make enemies of allies and allies of enemies, only you won't realize it and fail to understand why people aren't 100% behind your agenda. This is itself a form of corruption.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
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snowwrestler 1y ago
In a socialist system you still need a government, which is a group of people who are empowered to enforce the rules of socialism. As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well. If they are very good socialists they will redistribute it all. If they are not-very-good socialists they will redistribute some of it and reserve some to support a nice lifestyle for themselves and their families. They won’t personally “own” mansions, airplanes, factories, etc. like capitalists do, but they still control them legally so the practical effect is very similar.
- don_esteban 1y ago
  "As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well." Umm, it does not work like that, look at the Scandinavian-type socialism. The collective wealth is in the functioning education & health system, social support net, working public transport and such. Not a type of wealth that the government can usurp for themselves, to the detriment/exclusion of the remainder of the society. Too much ideological argumentation here...
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- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  No, you don’t need a centralized government in all social systems. Centralized government is the big distinction here. Libertarian socialism of a decentralized government.
jandrese 1y ago
It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Communism doesn't solve that problem. The less centralized your power is the more efficient your economy works. Pushing decisions down to the edge means the people deciding how to allocate resources are the closest to the information about what is needed where. The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation, if someone is ultimately in charge of both sides they will be inclined to try to choose just one and "avoid waste", which ultimately is just avoiding optimization. This is also why companies become less competitive as they grow and are always under threat from startups and a big reason why antitrust is about more than just "protecting consumers". That's also why big companies are always lobbying government for protection of their business models.
- TFYS 1y ago
  > It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Those are the same thing. > The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. That was true a few decades ago. Now with everyone having a smartphone in their pockets at all times and the amount of computing power we have it should be doable. Still not easy for sure, but not impossible. > Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation Think about how much non-productive work has to be done just to enable competition. Instead of one organization per industry we need multiple, all with their own overhead costs. Every company has to do their branding, HR, marketing, etc. The whole advertising industry pretty much exists only because companies try to get an edge with propaganda instead of improving their product. Wasted work. Competition also forces companies to do unethical things. Say one company starts cutting down rainforests to get an edge over the competition. Now they're cheaper than other businesses, and every business that wants to survive has to start cutting down rainforest. One country gets rid of worker rights -> businesses move there and other countries must follow suit. Same with taxes.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

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Quarrelsome 1y ago
sure, but the implication is that outside of the political tribalism that has America gripped; there's people on your side of this tribal divide who would screw you and people on the opposite tribal side who would work well with you. The tribalism of two party politics blurs those lines and replaces them with arbitrary forms of tribal allegiance. i.e. under a freer political system with a vibrant set of political parties that actually matched peoples political interests you might find former democrats and republicans voting together for the same party. Its my belief that the political divide in US mostly comes down to what TV channel your parents had on.
freedomben 1y ago
I think you completely missed The point of the comment you replied to. It's not stupidity, it's avarice. And you being willing to overlook it is exactly the problem parent is describing

uncircle 1y ago

Yes, because all rules have been created for your own good, so you must follow without ever questioning them. The world is more nuanced than your silly black-and-white duality, unless it's a Twitter argument and it's all about dividing the world in convenient us-vs-them boxes.

Quarrelsome 1y ago
I think you're misunderstanding my point. Either you believe in the society you live in, or you don't. The story specifically speaks of people high up within that society that do not believe in it and are using their position to undermine that society in order to benefit themselves.. That, for me, is the #1 problematic archetype of person. Its not just about the rules and if you follow them or not, its about the belief in turn-taking, in other people having the same rights as you, a belief that in society; everyone is important, everyone is mostly equal and that the society should be fair. Perhaps my phrasing could be improved? For the most part I am simply trying to define the difference between people being selfish and not.
- darkwater 1y ago
  > Either you believe in the society you live in, or you don't. This makes GP even more correct. One can believe (and like) part of the society one lives in but not like other parts, or plainly think they are wrong and should be changed at all costs.
  - Quarrelsome 1y ago
    GP? > One can believe (and like) part of the society one lives in but not like other parts, or plainly think they are wrong and should be changed at all costs. Sure but I mean in terms of the abstract. The idea that those most successful may have to pay more in taxation, the idea that justice should be blind and that everyone deserves a trial. I guess the tipping point is when your belief in the part of society that are wrong are so extreme that you think its ok to undermine society (e.g. steal public money, push infront of queues, etc) in order to combat that "wrong".

seneca 1y ago

That's probably a healthy way to see things. Ideally all people that are actively working to create or improve should be on the same "side" against those that are destructive. The second order conflict then becomes what the rules are, and how we guide that side. That is, I think, where most of the factionalism historically plays out. It does feel like we're regressing to fighting that first order conflict more often now though. In reality, it may be more complicated than that though. Most people don't see themselves as destructive, they just have a very different view of what the right rules are and what ought to be done to progress things. That can appear destructive from the outside.

Quarrelsome 1y ago
I think tax cuts are possibly a decent enough proxy for this subject? While there's certainly a case to be made for tax cuts in very specific use-cases (e.g. where they're strangling demand/innovation/living costs/government-corruption/etc); a general belief in tax cuts is a constraint that makes it very hard to believe in society. If you believe in tax cuts as a principle (i.e. 0% is a goal), then generally its hard to support government spending, which means its hard to support solving problems within your society, because doing so makes it harder to cut taxes. So with that in mind, I personally think people who believe in the Von Mises model of taxation (i.e. "all taxation is theft") are ideologically incompatible with any sort of society that tries to solve its own problems.
- seneca 1y ago
  I think this is a great example of a second-order disagreement. How about people who genuinely believe in a minimal state? They often believe in charitable giving and local community organization, in my experience. Maximal civil society vs maximal government. A good example of this type is people who believe in the ideas laid out in Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even the more hard line Von Mises types are close to this. There are disgruntled people who are just asocial in that camp, like any other, but they are over emphasized by opponents just like every political group. It would be very hard to argue that Nozick wasn't someone concerned with advancing society. The difference for that type is just a strong disagreement about how to do so. Painting them as first-order opponents is a mistake, I think.

tacitusarc 1y ago

There’s an interesting book “What is Wong with the World”, which points out that despite everyone agreeing that things are broken and people should unite to fix them, there are many competing visions for what “fixed” looks like, and this is been the source of much of the contention. It was written in the early 1900s.

Quarrelsome 1y ago
While I agree there is contention about "what's wrong", there's a bit of a difference between "I should put government money into my pocket" and "I think local district zoning laws need reform".
dmix 1y ago
I believe OP is saying the most fundamental thing is people working in government acting moral and in the interest of the country, and not using the power position for self enrichment or engaging in petty corruption for social gain. If you have that then it doesn't matter if your system is capitalist or socialist or a bunch of competing variations where no one agrees. The outcome will always be severely hampered by their constant interference in business, plundering of tax money, and repression of dissent. Most people probably universally agree on the topic of corruption, unlike economics or social policy. But it requires a well designed political system and a strong culture, which is difficult to do retroactively.

logicchains 1y ago

Exactly. The problems with both governments and corporations come from when individuals working for them are able to act "above the law", and get away with things that if done by a solitary, poor person would land that person in jail. In a truly just society nobody would be above the law.

panic 1y ago

This sounds nice until you think more closely about the framing implicit in “follow the rules and make the nation better”. Who makes the rules and defines what is good for a nation?

Quarrelsome 1y ago
sorry, "rule following" is possibly a sub-optimal language choice. I more mean the sort of selfishness that leads to corruption. Those who see their turn in government less about directing the nation and more as their turn to line their pockets and abuse their power.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
True, and yet... I think there is broad consensus that too much poverty is a problem, and (perhaps somewhat less broad) that therefore too much wealth inequality is a problem. I think there's fairly broad consensus that college costs are a problem, that healthcare costs and access are a problem. I think there's a fair consensus that fixing these things would make the nation better. Then you get to "how do we fix them?" and all consensus disappears. As for the rules, it seems pretty clear to me that "the rules" are the Constitution and the existing law, plus the rules on how to pass or repeal laws. But this framing also misses one category: Those who think that they should break the rules to make the nation better. I think that they are misguided at best and lying (either to others or to themselves) at worst. Why misguided? Because preserving the rule of law is a really big deal. Even if they have the best of intentions, once they knock the law down flat and pave a road over it, they won't be the only one to drive on it. Tyrants try to build that road; if it's already there, the tyrant's job becomes much easier and much harder to stop. So I oppose such tactics. It doesn't matter whether they are well-meaning or not. Even if the person doing them will never be a tyrant, the next person who wants to be a tyrant will find the door wide open.
- keybored 1y ago
  Majority opinion can look like consensus. And yet things like wealth inequality make for an uneven distribution of opinion where the minority end up having the most votes in effect.

0x1ceb00da 1y ago

In poor countries everyone lives in a scarcity mindset, even the ultra rich. It's a lot like the supernatural stimulus that makes humans crave junk food and sugar. Some indian communities are prone to obesity because storing as much fat as possible was the only way to survive in the famines that happened under the british rule. Only people whose bodies could do that survived.

dennis_jeeves2 1y ago

>we all waste our time over divisions like left/right, capitalism/socialism, woke/not-woke when in practice This is by design( divide and rule...). And it works as intended.

keybored 1y ago

This is naive to the point of not being addressable.

Quarrelsome 1y ago
I think you'll find thats only because you're incompatibly cringe. Once you sort that out, you'll find it scans ok.
- keybored 1y ago
  I find it hard to downgrade my wisdom that much, even with hard liquor.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Maybe try upgrading it instead?
  - Quarrelsome 1y ago
    Cmon yo, if you got wisdom then drop it. So far all we got is judgement. Those ain't the same thing.