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Isn’t that how capitalism works in general? Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Defenders of capitalism unite!!! lol. Free market right?
by bix6 3mo ago
Isn’t that how capitalism works in general?
Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Defenders of capitalism unite!!! lol. Free market right?
- smallmancontrov 3mo agoYou're forgetting that whenever the incentives lead to bad places it isn't True Capitalism (tm).
- inigyou 3mo agoTrue capitalism has never been tried. This right now is crony capitalism.
- bmicraft 3mo agoAh yes, because capitalism in it's purest form would never have companies form monopolies and lobby governments for favorable legislation.
- pessimizer 3mo agoUnder True Capitalism™, cartels could do their price fixing on reality shows.
- overtone1000 3mo agoEnd stage True Capitalism™ is when you have to subscribe to a streaming service to watch as the streaming service cartel fixes their prices.
- shevy-java 3mo agoWhere does capitalism mandate corruption? Yes, it is not realistic to assume there is no corruption, but capitalism in and by itself does not mandate corruption. Obviously this all falls apart when capitalism can buy legislation. We are seeing how the USA is currently eroded by a few oligarchs.
- tavavex 3mo agoThey're not saying it 'mandates' it as law, but that the systematic incentives inevitably lead to corruption. The ability to buy government is irrelevant - this is just the easiest method right now of converting money into power. If there was no government to buy, private business would execute that conversion themselves by ruling over people and enforcing their wishes directly.
- pasc1878 3mo agoAnything that involves humans will have corruption. Society needs somethings to try to stop corruption wehther government rules or non government actions. Under pure capitalism what stops this?
- scottyah 3mo ago"capitalism" was meant to harness the greed in men- they're self-assembling groups on mostly level playing fields, and the people vote during every purchase. The more votes they get, the more opportunities to expand. Only when the people fail to choose wisely is a governmental body supposed to come in and help "regulate". The other option is the government decides from on-high how things should work, and you'd better hope that what got them to power was good. Then these people need to be wizards at allocating labor, research, and benefits.
- inigyou 3mo agoAnd the amount of votes someone gets is proportional to the votes they previously received, so the best vote-getters end up having all of the votes to cast between each other, and everyone else ends up with zero votes.
- 8note 3mo agocapitalism definitely mandates corruption non-corrupt competitors will be beaten every time by corrupt ones
- adrianN 3mo agoIs there even a government under true capitalism or is it more like the lunar anarchy described in „the moon is a harsh mistress“?
- wredcoll 3mo agoWhat even is "true capitalism"?
- danudey 3mo agoUsually "true capitalism" means one of two things: 1. Capitalism where there is no government or regulatory interference, and the "invisible hand of the free market" produces some kind of utopian society based purely on every business abiding by rules enforced by no one, where somehow corporations don't take advantage of workers they way they do now despite there being no laws against it. 2. The same thing but sarcastically because it's obvious that that system would be demonstrably worse than the restricted version of capitalism that we have now.
- leonidasrup 3mo agoThe "invisible hand of the free market" works only, if you have many market participants competing one against another. When a participant wins the competition you get monopoly, when multiple participants collude you get oligopoly, or cartel. Market can not solve this. Historical examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC
- inigyou 3mo agoIf competition was economically efficient, it would happen. Monopolies prove that monopolies are efficient.
- 3997531578 3mo ago[dead]
- aplummer 3mo agoDoes seem a bit like; we’ve never tried roasting people at 1200C, only at 1000C
- mikelitoris 3mo agoSounds like no true scotsman. Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory
- qeternity 3mo agoEmpirically this isn't true. However you feel about "true" capitalism vs socialism, countries underpinned by capitalism have prospered, even the socialist flavors (China, Scandinavia)...while the countries that have attempted pure socialism have all failed.
- thewebguyd 3mo agoThe problem with that logic is you're treating economic systems as if they all exist in a vacuum, and you're setting up a circular argument of if its successful its actually because capitalism, if it fails it must have been socialism. It completely ignores the decades of external hostility toward any nation that attempted to build a socialist economy. Almost every attempt has been met with near immediate intervention from captialist super powers, particularly the USA. Nixon activeley worked to cause the military coup in Chile, Cuba has faced the longest trade embargo in modern history (and yet still managed to outperform its peers in the region in healthcare and literacy). Its unscientific to attribute these struggles purely to internal failure when they are subject to deliberate economic warfare. Secondly, your definitions are being stretched to fit your thesis. Scandinavia is not "socialist flavored" it IS a social democracy, with free markets. Claiming China's success is from captialism is ignoring that its economy relies entirely on state owned land, state owned and controlled banks, and state owned companies, and mandatory five year plans coming from the state. If we classify any successful state-led initiative as "capitalist" and any blockaded, intervened upon state as "purely socialist" then the argument is an unfalsifiable truism.
- exhumet 3mo agoagreed. its almost like... we need a healthy mix of economic systems to prosper
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tavavex 3mo agoWe're living under true capitalism right now. Look at the incentives. I don't see how we could have progressed to anything besides this, this is the natural outcome of the system in place. American libertarians often imagine some kind of wonderland capitalism where everyone agrees to play by the rules that aren't enforced by anyone. To my knowledge this has never existed as a long-term equilibrium and it can't exist. I've yet to meet anyone who can tell me how their imaginary ideas go up against claims like 1. Encouraging infinite growth with no controls or limits will always lead to monopolism and is a one-way ratchet 2. Power vacuums are always filled (no public government leads to private companies stepping in and taking the dictatorial role, this time without any of the democracy) 3. Power always corrupts
- DoesntMatter22 3mo agoThe United States is far more socialist than capitalist and it’s not close. In the early 1900s the federal tax rate was 0. Now we spend 125% of what we bring in in taxes. That is definitely not capitalism. That’s not a free market, that is the government spending far beyond what’s even feasible
- Analemma_ 3mo agoWhat does the relative level of government spending versus taxation have to do with whether businesses will self-regulate? You're just spewing non sequiturs here.
- DoesntMatter22 3mo agoThey said we live under true capitalism right now we I’m clearly showing we do not. Not to mentions the US is far from “self regulating” there are millions of words of regulation in the US.
- fragmede 3mo agoNo you didn't, all you did was complain about taxes and say that there exist regulations by counting the number words in them. Not all words are equal, not does it mean that they're effectively enforced. Looking at various monopolies like Ticketmaster or the UnitedHealth group and how they've been allowed to flourish it doesn't seem like America has anywhere near enough regulations to be considered true capitalism. If the market economy isn't a free market because a monopolist is exerting outsize control on the market, it's not a free market. That doesn't make it socialism though, that makes it crony-capitalism instead.
- BigTTYGothGF 3mo agoCrony capitalism is just regular capitalism.
- stymaar 3mo ago> True capitalism has never been tried “True communism has never been tried”
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ratelimitsteve 3mo agoCrony capitalism is true capitalism. The idea that capitalists will simply choose not to organize to benefit their own positions out of some sense of altruism is insanely naive, and puts you in the same camp as USSR apologists claiming that their issue was the lack of true communism. A system that fails when people subvert it to their own benefit is a system that fails.
- scottyah 3mo agoThe power of who lives, dies, and what's allowed are made by the individual consumers (or groups of consumers), so it's the same problem we have with democracy.
- Yizahi 3mo agoIt had been though. Just search for Galt's Gulch, Chile 2012 :)
- moomin 3mo agoTrue Capitalism looks a lot more like socialism than many would like to admit.
- The_Blade 3mo agoreap the profits, socialize the losses
- SaltyBackendGuy 3mo agoThat's crony capitalism again
- scottyah 3mo agoSocialism is crony capitalism?
- dragontamer 3mo ago> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations
- scottyah 3mo agoCorporations are the definition of socialism- everyone pools their efforts and they decide how to allocate the rewards (after taxes).
- nDRDY 3mo agoCan this be called "Capitalism" when SpaceX is now a public company?
- randallsquared 3mo agoThe word "public" doesn't mean that in this case. It's still a private company.
- qeternity 3mo agoPublic in this context just means publicly listed on a stock exchange. It does not mean it is state-owned.
- fdsajfkldsfklds 3mo agoState ownership is just a proxy for public ownership.
- angiolillo 3mo agoDoesn't that depend on the form of government the state has? (For example, state ownership under an absolute monarchy doesn't seem like a proxy for public ownership.)
- shevy-java 3mo ago[dead]
- phil21 3mo agoNo. This is how crony-capitalism works. You could make a decent argument that capitalism will very likely end-game devolve into crony-capitalism as it's typical failure mode, but I don't think it's written in stone. It's funny to me. Everyone rails about Atlas Shrugged being some libertarian fantasy story. I always read it as an allegory warning about crony capitalism and how it ruins society along with a story about trains and magical perpetual motion machines.
- timacles 3mo agoSocialism capitalism, history shows basically all human systems devolve into corruption regardless of how sound the underlying concepts are. Which I’m surprised people don’t point out more. What does it matter which system is the best when at the end of the day the powerful people are going to make back room deals to subvert it and that always leads to a feedback loop
- phil21 3mo agoYep. This is how I view the world these days too. All systems will inevitable devolve into corruption and centralized power. The best system I suppose is the one that starts with the most distributed means of power possible, and then that gives the most quality of life years out of anything before it's time for a horrific reset again.
- lenkite 3mo agoThe best way to sort this out is to have truly random election winners and heads of organizations and bids for govt contracts. And yes, you must have enough numbers in the input for random selection. If a Pvt corporation fails to deliver a bid or lies in customer features, then CEO is caned (Singapore style) and taken out of the next pool for random selection. If a politician fails to deliver an election promise in his term, then politician is caned and taken out of the next pool for random selection. Randomly selected judges decide the severity of crime and magnitude of punishment.
- christophilus 3mo agoIt’s how the world works in general. Bribes and corruption are not unique to capitalism.
- frankzinger 3mo agoBut not in the Shining City on the Hill
- aeternum 3mo agoThe beauty of capitalism is you have a choice. There are already ETFs that exclude SpaceX/Elon's company's for those who so desire. See QQNE and SPNE.
- georgemcbay 3mo agoIn practice the choices tend to be limited for a lot of the people for whom this rule change was meant to ensnare their money because it exists within 401k plans with limited portfolio options.
- aeternum 3mo agoRight but that's because you've now layered in government control. 401k plans are more heavily regulated, often negotiated by the employer rather than the employee. The real question is why are employers able to limit employee 401k investment choices and employee health insurance. This is not freedom.
- 3997531578 3mo ago[dead]