Capitalism is Not the Problem
I have seen some "let's kill capitalism" sentiment expressed of late. Capitalism is not the problem, nor is any other economic 'ism inherently better. The key to "better" is in the implementation details.
Economists want to think of themselves as being a part of the "hard sciences" because Reasons. After-all they award a Nobel Prize in Economics, don't they.
There is a strong tenacity for non-scientists to use definitional-axiomatical thinking in a tempt to emulate scientists. Unfortunately our (USofA) educational system perpetuates this distorted perception of science. This abomination of a Weltanschauung facilitates ridiculous economic constructs.
The path to a solution was begun many decades ago, but a certain segment of society (aided by some very gullible elements of society) decided to scuttle the ship to enhance the flow of wealth to that certain segment of society at the expense of the very gullible elements of society. And all the rest of us have been swept up in the flow headed into the abyss.
First, we must hold these manipulators (Biblically referenced as The Money Changers) accountable. Then we must reinstate and upgrade long abandoned programs to get back on the track that was laid so many years ago. Following that, eternal vigilance will insure we can live in the society we were taught would be here by now. The path to a safe and sane future is not all that difficult to imagine or attain.
RIP
Comments
The Big Lie
Say "Taxes Fund Spending" enough times and the people start believing it is the Truth.
The Big Lie : the foundational tool of the Ministry of Truth, any day any year.
RIP
Yes, Capitalism IS the problem
Any system that:
a) requires infinite growth in a finite world
b) that rewards greed and selfishness
c) that increasingly concentrates wealth
d) that puts no value on anything freely given, like clean air and water
...is the problem.
We disagree because
Any system that:
There is no system that cannot be perverted. We were on the way to creating a fair and just society, but then …
RIP
"Capitalism" is just a word
The problem is the system and the shibboleth built up around that word.
The question is whether a system can be designed and implemented that will be fair and just, ecologically sustainable...AND profitable.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
I agree that Capitalism, strictly speaking, is not the problem.
However, Capitalism, as practiced here in the USA, IS the problem. A well regulated capitalistic economy, theoretically, could be a benign or even a net positive force in the world. During the span of time that you and I have inhabited this planet it has been anything but well regulated. In the absence of appropriate external restraints Capitalism will inevitably run amok, as it has here.
When money and power are involved a disproportionate number of miscreants and sociopaths will be attracted and in the absence of appropriate laws and enforcement they will abuse the system to the benefit of themselves and the expense of all others. Perhaps the scum would rise to the top whatever the economic system.
From where we find ourselves today it seems very unlikely that we can disentangle the corrupting influences that have become baked into the way we practice capitalism. Even more unlikely that this might be accomplished in the little time remaining before the Climate Change Juggernaut creates a global do-over. Practically speaking, the current manifestation of Capitalism IS the problem.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes
This
I don't know if we ever actually left the robber baron days where they bought the government and had them rewrite the rules to protect themselves above all others.
A century ago we were in the roaring 20's with high wealth inequality and here we are again with people saying that the inequality is just as bad as it was then. And lo and behold there might be a major crash coming again that will give us another great depression. In '09 congress passed Dodd Frank and in '14 they rescinded almost every rule they put in place to protect us from the banks. And the banks are again receiving billions every day and have been since September with not much squaking from from congress.
Trump just passed more business friendly tax cuts while congress just attacked our 401k's which will extract trillions from the middle class and really hurt the millennials. This was slipped into the latest defense bill that was passed in a bad way.
Congress and their masters are not even trying to hide their disdain for us lowly peons. I am betting that this is the year that congress will finally get their wish and attack SS, SSDI, SSI, Medicare and Medicaid as well as the other social programs. The French people are not letting up in their protests against pension reforms while many of us continue to sit in the ever increasing warm water that has almost reached boiling point.
Unregulated capitalism or regulated to benefit just the few who are making out like bandits?
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Karl Marx would disagree
If you removed all of the problems I listed above from capitalism, I don't believe you could call what was left "capitalism".
You and Marx are so very wrong.
It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong
but you haven't proven it yet.
A Tautology
If you wish to argue the tautology there is no point in discussing anything. The fact that history, common sense, and reality all reach a different conclusion has nothing to do with your point of view.
ipso facto the discussion ends.
RIP
I disagree.
I'll be posting my diary "Capitalism is the Problem" soon.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Capitalism or survival, pick one
Survival is going to require an enormous sum of money invested without any hope of profit. Small start-ups in carbon capture are going nowhere because they cannot get funding without a profit model. I blame the climate mess on a capitalist model rewarding exploitation. I am convinced that we cannot solve this problem and must ditch capitalism. Why would you place society's very important resource - capital, in the hands of its worst people? Naomi Kline subtitled her book on the climate crisis Capitalism vs. The Climate. She is exactly right, and there are many more reasons than she gives. The world will have to pool all of its resources to avoid extinction. Relying on the wisdom and wealth of the oligarchs is a formula for extinction. Working together for a common goal and helping each other is the antithesis of capitalism. If we don't get rid of it then human civilization will become small bands of hunter - gatherers and zero opportunity for capitalism. So, one way or another it's dead. If we survive, society will look down on capitalism as a disease.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
sounds like a capitalist game show question
oh, gee I'll try survival for $100
Bob Barker: And the question is...
where is the strangest place you've ever had sex?
Contestant # 2:
up the butt, Bob.
I believe Leslie Ann Warren and Tim Curry said it best
@PriceRip
"Communism is just a red herring"...and so, ultimately, is capitalism.
The failed 19th-Century conceit of "social science" is the problem.
OP did a good job bringing up something I don't see enough of around
here, which is the problem of institutionally-sanctioned pseudoscientists
ruining everything out of (as my father* once jokingly referred to it)
"physics envy".
The trouble with even talking about "capitalism" is the risk of validating
(as Marx and Engels effectively did) the fundamental fallacy of "economics".
Having formally studied it myself, I've long-since concluded that, at best,
it is nothing more than a quirky and volatile subtopic of history - at worst,
a religion.
"Science" is the study of that which is objectively real - and as Philip K. Dick
(a man who would understand the difference between what is and isn't real) said,
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - unlike
almost everything to come out of the "social sciences".
The only exception I would make is psychology, which I have long considered the outer limit
of "soft science", HAS borne some some very important fruit in its time (mostly in the Good Old Bad Old Days before ethics panels made all the best experiments untenable), and tossed the Freud family in the garbage decades ago, UNLIKE some of these fields - and even then, it's pretty fragile.
Don't get me wrong, social STUDIES are good (as my father tells his often humanities-averse students, "we in hard sciences can tell you HOW to do what you'll be doing, but they can tell you WHY you're being asked to do it"), that's what I happen to have a degree in - but the conceits of "social SCIENCE", not only don't solve problems, THEY CREATE NEW ONES and spread them like plague-rats. The most you can say is that they've performed an experiment in reconstructing organized religion from the ground up...and succeeded.
The fact of the matter is, people have free will, and free will is Kryptonite to science.
As one of my high school biology teachers kept saying "science has limitations" - and not only
does it live and die by those limitations, it THRIVES by them. In contrast, "society" is all just a game of make-believe; the rules can be whatever we want.
* = My father just happens to be an experimental physicist and engineer - making him just about as "hard" a scientist as you can get.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
It's all so very elementary
I only ever have studied the most elementary of "stuff", everything else is way too complicated and over my head.
RIP
"We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth".
Teddy Roosevelt said that. Elizabeth Warren echoes that mantra. Teddy and her and many "progressives" are missing something important.
Explained more here.
Mes gentils!
The core of the small dispute between RIP and gjohnsit can, in my humble opinion, be resolved with a short "walk down memory lane". I do not know how old gjohnsit is; but I do seem to remember RIP to be a man of my approximate age.
Your humble scribe here is 61 years of age, a 1958 model. When I was a child, we had this thing in America called "free enterprise", an economic system related to capitalism but actually older than it and far superior to it. Under "free enterprise", if you didn't like the way something in the economy was done, you were encouraged to go and do it your way, and may the best way prevail, which it often did. Under "free enterprise", those who were not up to the point of starting their own businesses were encouraged to obtain any employments they thought they could perform; such restraints on trade as licensure and the so-called "need" for highly expensive higher education were restricted to places where such requirements made sense, such as teachers, medical doctors, surgeons, lawyers, master engineers, and such like. The education one could get for free, from your local high school, was sufficient to obtain for its holder access to genuinely adult-wage work; and if one felt the desire for higher education, it was possible to obtain it while paying for it with one's wages; the phrase "working my way through school" came from the America of these long-gone days.
I can also tell you when all this started going away: the Nixon Administration, my early teenage years. Under Nixon, free enterprise started its looooong decline into monopoly capitalism, of which gjohnsit correctly stated:
When Richard Nixon took office, there were several hundred mutually-independent media content creators. Today, there are six non-competing ones with essentially identical boards of directors. Deregulation has shoved our poor Nation down the fastest roller-coaster railroad to what Lenin described as "monopoly capitalism". We have super-huge megabusinesses like Walmart which are both monopolists and monopsonists in many of their markets: the only sellers of most of the needs of life, and the only buyers of local labor or products. If you live in these markets and want to do better than Walmart says you can do, then just how do you go about doing it? And as the monopolies grow bigger, the personal labor market goes away in favor of endless requirements for licenses, certifications, higher education degrees, lifestyle inspections, credit scores, and all that sort of detritus which has no bearing at all on the ability and willingness to do the job, but is a very convenient means of kicking fully qualified applicants to the curb without consideration.
That's what we've lost.
gjohnsit, you are right about today's capitalism being as bad as we describe. RIP, you're right about free enterprise being able to create and maintain a decent and reasonably rational society. But how do we get back there?
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
1948 model From Poverty
I am about half way (thematically) through writing an explanation.
The answer is rather straight forward. However, hermeneutics is a tyrannical master, so if I don't get the words right no one will listen. Even so, I suspect most people here won't care for what I have to write.
RIP
well said
kudos.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
This happened:
The fact that Americans will not lead themselves out of the world's most obvious, avoidable, and easily remedied problem is the deadly curse that hangs over us all.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
You and I are in total agreement.
And it just occurred to me that some ignorant idiot might decide to tar me with some ridiculous rightwing conservative label …
I am, in fact, a radical leftist. But, not one of you could possibly know who I am because of the nature of this forum.
RIP
We do agree. I was just about to add:
The people's complacency in the race to the bottom was accomplished with the world's most obvious sabotage:
A two party duopoly that polarizes the critical faculties of the people into intellectual paralysis.
A public education curriculum from which any common study of economics has been completely eradicated.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
public education curriculum
bereft of:
reality based economics
social theory
unbiased history
geopolitical events
critical thinking skills
alternatives to computers
PriceRip will LOVE this one!
This, in turn, because of a public education curriculum from which any common study of serious mathematics has been completely eradicated. The teaching of all symbolic math -- anything beyond basic arithmetic -- is seriously bolluxed, and it's easier to cut economics than it is to fix math instruction so it works. You can't teach calculus, or anything dependent thereon, "to the test" and expect it to work. Actual comprehension of concepts is required, and conveying that to students can't be done instantaneously.
PriceRip's Why Johnny Can't Do Quantum Physics relates to these matters. The same problem applies to economics, and for the same reasons.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Don't get carried away
Math is the least of economics — which are practical skills, knowledge, and resources that should be taught in K-12 to empower all citizens against the abuses of unregulated predatory capitalism and a corrupt and increasingly privatized government.
And don't discount the intuitive in apprehending the quantum state. I would have thought you knew that.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
A Critical Point you Articulate
If all you have are the senses with no creative spark you have no business attempting elementary particle physics. The quantum realm is inaccessible to the classical mind, full stop.
RIP
Thank you for confirming that.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Not sure which -ism it is
It could be termed late stage capitalism or corporatism or something else, but whatever -ism that has dominated the American economic development my entire life is at the core of the problem. Highly recommended Canadian documentary on the subject, The Corporation from 2003 (link updated):
Pre-industrial capitalism was/is different
. . . than the globalized corporate capitalism we are at the mercy of today.
Neither was/is any great shakes nor was Soviet-era socialism/communism.
But yea, stages. So any consideration of capitalism needs to take historical circumstances into account, not just consider it in terms of a philosophy or an economic system somehow unrooted from history. Same as socialism.
Just for curiosity
you may want to peruse the following website. Each topic has an interactive chart to show changes over time. The world has actually made impressive advances, especially in the developing countries in the last 5 decades. We must be doing something right.
If you export the job . . .
of an American worker at GM making $30/hour to a third world country where a worker's hourly rate goes from $2.25 to $3.00, you'll move a lot of people out of poverty. Forgive me if I don't share your enthusiasm. And developing countries compete with each other to attract investment by keeping such inconveniences as environmental regulations to a minimum.
moving jobs to spread out poverty
yeah, so the workers in Detroit lose jobs
but the workers in Malaysia can buy rice
compassionate conservatism
Assuming this “Democracy” chart
includes the US population among the 56 who live in a Democracy, we can safely consider the good news these self congratulatory charts represent as examples of “clapping louder”.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes