I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours. Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Every shock to our current system will take time to adjust.
Probably not, but Norway is generally an anomaly. It's got massive natural resource wealth, a small homogeneous population, and is surrounded by allies and falls under the US security umbrella
> I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours.
This doesn't mean that different economic systems have equivalent or comparable problems. Just like you can have a worse economic system than today's global capitalism, you could, in principle, have better systems.
Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics.
Countries can have a highly regulated form of capitalism where trade and ownership is strictly controlled… and they’re often called socialist or communist, or a laissez faire system.
However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.
Capitalism isn’t a fundamental law like the speed of light or thermodynamics.
We can use other systems that suit our goals better. Even if it’s a better form of capitalism than what we’re dealing with now.
This post-monetarist form of capitalism is killing people and this planet and enriching but a few. That’s not the kind of society most people want. A matter of time before there are enough have-nots and upheaval becomes a real problem for the capital owners.
Capitalism is too broad a term to be useful in these conversations.
At it’s core capitalism just means that private individuals can own property, instead of the state owning everything. Which is absolutely critical for a free society. It’s paramount that individuals not be dependant on a ruling class for survival.
Ownership is a term that is loaded and the argument between socialism and capitalism is actually not really helpful.
For instance, if we removed the concept of capital and implemented socialism, there would still be a concept of "responsibility for". So if there were community bicycles, individuals would still have responsibility if they threw the bicycles in a lake. The community officially "owned" the bicycles, and the individual acted against the community's best interests.
Capitalism as written about by Adam Smith seeks to solve the same problem by putting the "ownership" in the hands of the individual, so that the individual is given incentive to care and maintain the bike.
These are both potentially-effective systems that seek to solve the problem of "who's responsible for this bicycle". There are trade-offs for each.
When we simplify complex market-based problems into choices between either capitalism or socialism, we have created nice ways to describe the problem, but neither of them serves as an effective solution to the problem.
For the solution, we have to dig deeper and that means not being beholden to ideologies that can prevent us from seeing good solutions.
The problem with ownership is that it isn't that easy.
With land people don't own the land itself they only have exclusive usage rights for a specific period of time. Once that time is over they are no longer responsible. Thus even with private ownership you still can have the tragedy of the commons problem, it is just divided over time instead of space.
The most common example is soil depletion from industrialized agriculture.
If you wanted to solve this problem you would need a regulatory body that inspects the quality of the soil and fines people who degrade it. Governance becomes essential
to balance the micro and macro economy.
The concept of property has been warped to include the value of shares of a corporation, whose value is generated by the labor of its employees. This is the primary way the richest people steal wealth from labor.
Only if you believe in the Labor Theory of Value, which most don't. If I own a ship that's going on some expedition (as how shares originally started), I raise capital and reduce risk by issuing shares that people can buy. I have to, well, share my wealth but I have more money now to do the expedition. Corporations are just bigger versions of the same idea, they're still run by people, any of whom can decide not to work there anymore, for better or worse.
What you and other students of Karl Marx always ignore is the fact that if company owners was not allowed to earn profit then there would be no companies founded, meaning that the workers would not have jobs.
They can do that, nothing stops people from setting up co-ops today, I've been in one as well in fact. But at the same time, if I'm making something lucrative, I'd want to profit from it. That other people I hire are willing to work for the wage I give them is their problem, since if they don't like the wage, they can always go elsewhere (given that they are skilled workers, not workers who can find no other job in some company town or something).
Your argument possesses a fundamental mistake that most venture capitalists make: that the demand is infinitely elastic but supply is completely fixed; in other words, the manufacturers being able to perfectly impose what consumers want to consume.
I don't see where I imply that supply is fixed. I don't think that makes sense even from a VC point of view, since the company they fund is itself another manufacturer or producer of goods, thereby increasing the supply.
What you and other billionaire boot-lickers ignore is that earning $10 million from starting a company is very reasonable, "earning" $100 billion is just stealing from many thousands of employees. We really should NOT need a logarithmic scale when talking about wealth inequality.
Except the labour theory of value is utter nonsense. It lead Marx to argue that railway workers, helping transport goods to where they were needed, contributed negative value and were parasitic on manufacturing labour.
Ideas, leadership and capital are vital to a functioning economy. Every time a system has been set up that denied that, and it has been tried many times, the results were catastrophic. In several cases tens of millions of people dead catastrophic.
Indeed. Eventually the interests of capital owners force them to fail. Like when the CIA backed a military coup by a fascist general to overthrow a democratically elected socialist. Because US investments were threatened.
No economic system can mitigate toxic politics. Regulatory or political capture by economic interests is always a threat. As is political seizure of economic assets or resources. These are human failings you find in any system. This is why rule of law is so important.
A society doesn't simply implement socialism (or any system) and call it a utopia. There will always be forces and counter-forces. Fascism will continue to find a way back into any system it can.
We can both completely completely agree on both points. There are no magic wands that will solve corruption and rent seeking. These are both human flaws. I’m not even against a dose of socially managed resources and services where it makes sense. Cheers.
Cheers! Indeed a bit of planning can work, even in a mostly capitalist system. Take WalMart as an example. It's annual revenues dwarf the GDP of many small countries. And yet it is centrally managed, planned, and rather efficient!
The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.[6][7]
The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a general United Mine Workers of America strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I's southern Colorado coal mines.[8] The strike was organized by miners working for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and Victor-American Fuel Company. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident during the Colorado Coalfield War and spurred a ten-day period of heightened violence throughout Colorado. In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, bands of armed miners attacked dozens of anti-union establishments, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville.[6] From the strike's beginning in September 1913 to intervention by federal soldiers under President Woodrow Wilson's orders on April 29, 1914, an estimated 69 to 199 people were killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews has called it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States."[2]: 1
The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Socialist historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".[9] Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. The Ludlow townsite and the adjacent location of the tent colony, 18 miles (29 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of those who died that day.[11] The Ludlow tent colony site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.[11] Subsequent investigations immediately following the massacre and modern archeological efforts largely support some of the strikers' accounts of the event.[12]
It’s inexorably true that means of production control the outputs.
It’s unavoidable that whoever has power over production has power over those who rely on those outputs.
Unless you’re advocating for the destruction of factories, the razing of homes, etc. you’re in favor of capital. We’re just discussing who is going to control the capital.
> However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.
Capitalism is the system
where someone can claim ownership of land/buildings/ideas(typically due to prior ownership) aka "capital". If the laws don't allow someone to make and hold that claim of private ownership, how would the "laws of capitalism" still apply?
> Capitalism is the system where someone can claim ownership of land/buildings/ideas(typically due to prior ownership)
Typically due to paying someone to invent/build them, then continuing to capitalize on essentially someone's else work.
That's the problem. I think we would be in much better situation if the person who worked on something reaped majority of benefits, and not boss of their boss.
Instead we have IP producers needing to produce thru their whole productive life, while having their IP ownership assigned to corporations because that's what their employment contract allows, and nobody else in society being able to benefit (without paying not-the-author of it), even tho near everything relies on what came before.
That then can be used by corporations either long enough to stifle innovation and competition (patents), or even long enough that nobody involved is alive anymore (copyright law), all while paying far lower taxes than people they hire.
Like, capitalism might have some problems but they are by far exacerbated by how law around it works. Any technology that increases performance by far benefits the owners of company the most and they pay less taxes on top of that.
>Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics
Silvio Gesell has developed an economic system inspired by Darwin. I don't mean social Darwinism, I mean that he deconstructs the economy down to self preservation and group preservation instincts which are biological necessities.
Self preservation is necessary to survive. A biological organism that does not self preserve will be selected out. This means that self preservation instincts represent egoism.
You might now say that this is the end, capitalism has won, except there is also group preservation.
Group preservation requires self preservation as a prerequisite. If you cannot meaningfully self preserve, you will most likely contribute nothing to group preservation as there aren't many situations where dying outweighs the cost of raising a member of the group.
This means self preservation instincts play a significant role all the way until they start threatening group preservation.
An organism that exclusively specializes in self preservation would always be a lone wolf with no socialization. The problem with this theory is that it would imply subsistence which is the opposite of capitalism. In other words, capitalism cannot be the result of simple egoism and self preservation because people would simply leave the capitalist society for the sake of self preservation if it were to become too stressful.
Thus there must be a significant group preservation instinct in humans and they have been evolved to survive in groups. In other words, capitalism has to leverage group preservation instincts somehow and therefore it is just another flavor of socialism or communism except in favour of people with capital.
Now, you can take it too far and entirely rely on group preservation instincts like communists claim but that doesn't work in practice either as self preservation overrides group preservation. Only people who have their basic needs met can engage in altruism.
Thus you can't expect a society consisting exclusively of altruists or egoists. Instead you would expect evolution to hit just the right balance between the two and that would imply the absence of both capitalism and socialism. It means both are an aberration that cannot be explained biologically.
Yes, that would imply that people can choose to participate in a market economy but it doesn't mean they have to and market economies don't have to be capitalist.
>Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics.
Theoretical economists have no concept of capitalism except maybe Keynes. In classical and neo classic economic theory there is no such thing as "capitalism". In theory it doesn't exist. There is a market economy with zero coercion and it does not intrinsically favor capital. You can't get richer through unfair means or corruption in these models either.
The gaps between the model and the real world are then filled with dogma and ideology. For example, you can just say that a positive return on capital represents a voluntary high time preference even if the return is higher than what would bring the economy into equilibrium.
The real world starts exhibiting cycles that make no sense in the model, meh. Let's claim capitalism is a constant of the universe even though biological dynamics imply the opposite.
> Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming.
Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.
I said, "majority of the day focused on gathering food, not "spent gathering food". If this seems like an arbitrary distinction, allow me to provide an analogy. Most teenage boys spend the majority of their day focused on having sex, but very few of them spend the majority of their day actually having sex (if they're even having sex at all).
As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".
It certainly depends much on the regional setting. Humans pushed to the boundaries of landscapes which support their existence. If you are a hunter gatherer in fertile jungle setting you might make do with 2 or 3h per day of hunting or gathering. If you live further north or south or in more arid regions that might take more time.
