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Yeah but this is the entire point of Neoliberal economics: enabling rent seeking behaviour to allow Capital to accrue wealth by virtue of being the biggest pile
by peterashford 2mo ago
Yeah but this is the entire point of Neoliberal economics: enabling rent seeking behaviour to allow Capital to accrue wealth by virtue of being the biggest pile of wealth. It's ultimately not sustainable: the reductio ad absurdum of this state of affairs is one Capitalist owning everything. Clearly the pitchforks will come out before that, its just a question of how long it takes before it all explodes
- dgellow 2mo agoSorry to tell you, but no pitchforks will come to save you
- LateCheckOut 2mo agoMaybe collapsing ecosystems will
- Mistletoe 2mo agoWhy did they come out in the French Revolution and countless other times and they won’t now?
- fragmede 2mo agoCapital built stronger, taller, AI-enhanced walls to keep the peasants out.
- strictnein 2mo agoBecause our lives are 100x better (maybe more?) than the lives of the average subject in France in the 18th century.
- dgellow 2mo agoThat, and also an extremely sophisticated media ecosystem, surveillance apparatus, police forces, etc. But there is also close to no collective responsibility in the US culture
- peterashford 2mo agoTraditionally, this has been the solution to mass inequality
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- strictnein 2mo ago> entire point of Neoliberal economics: enabling rent seeking behaviour to allow Capital to accrue wealth Rent seeking is enabled by government involvement in markets. The idea that it was the point of "Neoliberal economics" is simply wrong.
- psd1 2mo ago> Rent seeking is enabled by government involvement in markets Twaddle. Bad government can increase it, but government is also the only force with the capacity to oppose it. In other news, medicine can kill you. Adam Smith noted rent-seeking in the 18th century. We have had plenty of laissez-faire government during that time. It did not eliminate rent-seeking. It did not eliminate rent-seeking because rent-seeking is not created by the application of this or that economic policy; it's because animals seek easy meat. Over time, that trumps any system based on codified rule of law. It is, by Gödel, impossible to write law that decides the legality of all behaviour. Sufficiently smart sociopaths will get around any codified system. Ideology founders on biology. That does not mean we should give them free reign. The solution to am arms race is not to place your head on the block - not when your enemy is a sociopath. Free market fundamentalism, like all dogma, is espoused by exactly two sets of people: grifters, and cretins. Ideology - be it free market fundamentalism or communism or any other holy book that claims to solve 7 billion humans doing human things - is nothing more than the expression of a hunger for simple solutions to complex problems. There is no fault in _liking_ simple solutions, but _needing_ them is an intellectual disability.
- strictnein 2mo ago> "...is espoused by exactly two sets of people: grifters, and cretins" This is when you can tell someone has a really strong argument. Anyone who disagrees with you is, by definition, scum. A true Scotsman would never support free markets fundamentalism.
- peterashford 2mo agoWell, Adam Smith was a true Scotsman, and he hated rent seeking and I'm pretty sure he'd hate neoliberalism as well. You're taking a strawman of the parent post. Their point was about people espousing dogma. You turned that into 'anyone who disagrees with me'. Not cool