3 ms·
Articles like these are well-intentioned, but it's part of a quite ignorant and manipulative trend. It makes one believe Capitalism means Coca-Cola, Microsoft
by dataker 11y ago
Articles like these are well-intentioned, but it's part of a quite ignorant and manipulative trend.
It makes one believe Capitalism means Coca-Cola, Microsoft and other corporations taking over the world, corrupting local governments and destroying local businesses.
At its best, this is a form of 'Crony Capitalism', but far from what Capitalism genuinely is.
- api 11y agoI'm not aware of any political system that turns out, in practice, the way its theoreticians envision it "genuinely" being. Our mental simulations of what should happen in a human society ordered by some principle usually turn out to be abysmally wrong, since complex systems are full of negative feedback loops and other intuition-destroying things. I really think that nearly all political theory (up to and including Marxism and Libertarianism/Objectivism) belong to the pre-complexity-theory era. Complexity science and all its related fields (evolutionary dynamics, etc.) are just devastating to those theories. One big meta-lesson of these fields is that our intuition is calibrated for dealing with small scale local systems and simply falls apart in these arenas. You have about as much intuition for what happens in an economy of 300+ million people as you have for what happens at the event horizon of a black hole. We seem to have yet to produce a post-complexity political philosophy. Most political thinkers seem to still be in denial and clinging desperately to their 19th century (and earlier) notions of human behavior and social dynamics.
- mercurial 11y agoCrony capitalism? How many "genuinely capitalistic" corporations show moral qualms when it comes to exploiting (or even engineering) weak regulatory frameworks in under-developed areas and engaging in the time-honored tradition of buying local officials?
- dataker 11y agoI'm not sure there'd have many corporations and, if so, buying local officials would be useless, as they'd have limited power in the first place.
- mercurial 11y agoI'm talking in general. "Really capitalistic" companies don't have issues with corruption, as long as it is not paired with protectionism.
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoGenuine capitalism is like genuine communism: an excuse for various real-world implementations filled with abuse and corruption.