this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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In my lurking time here, I have seen many comments on Lemmy that criticize capitalism, but I think it's not as bad as it is made out to be on here. I earn money by working, can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to. The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail. I don't see anything wrong with that. Admittedly, it is possible that I am wrong because I have never studied economy other than the short lessons from required college classes my first two years. Do you have any objective sources where I can start to learn? I tend to be liberal/Democrat, btw.
Wouldn't your comment equally apply to being a small business owner (let's say blacksmith) under feudalism? As a good blacksmith, you will earn more clients and prestige, while poor blacksmiths won't get repeat business. You might be able to expand your forge and hire more people to do the tedious work of making chainmail or whatever.
I don't know that anyone can ever provide an "objective" source on capitalism. Anyone who writes on the topic has inherent biases. Here are a few: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/1608462471
https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Down-Manifesto-KOHEI-SAITO/dp/1662602723
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/doughnut-economics-paperback/
https://www.amazon.com/What-Wrong-Capitalism-Ruchir-Sharma/dp/1668008262
https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-No-Accidents-Disaster_Who/dp/1982129689
https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-Despair-Future-Capitalism-Anne/dp/0691217076
Yup. "Capitalism" has become a punching bag for people who are frustrated about some form of government protectionism or lack of interventionism. If you ask someone to define it, you'll get wildly different answers based on whatever they're frustrated by. The real problem is cronyism, where the "haves" get special treatment from those in power so both sides benefit.
Example w/ Musk and Trump
As an example, look at Elon Musk buddying up to Trump. There are two explanations (probably more) here:This all happens under "capitalism" because Musk is motivated to get more capital, but it's happening through government, which ends up essentially as a government subsidy of Tesla (and other domestic EVs) using taxpayer dollars (in this case tariffs). It's not a direct handover of cash, but when your foreign competition needs to charge twice as much as they normally would, there's less motivation for your company to drop prices.
Capitalism is intended to be a system where the market is largely separate from the government, but everything is co-mingled and people point to the knotted mess as "capitalism," when really it's a mess of different political ideologies all messing with market forces. What we actually need is for more capitalism, as in less government interference w/ the market, so market forces can actually fix things.
Potential solutions to better use market forces
This means:There's certainly more we could do, but the above should significantly help correct the major problems we see today. Right now, it takes a massive scandal for a wealthy person or very large business to fail, and the above would dramatically reduce the scandal needed to cause one to fail.
"More capitalism" doesn't mean screwing over the poor either. In fact, if you look at the Nordic countries, they're actually more capitalist than the US ins many ways, and they have solid social programs. The difference is that there are clearer boundaries between government and the market, so you don't end up with as much weird "collaboration" between companies and the government.
I personally believe in UBI/NIT (Universal Basic Income/Negative Income Tax) instead of most welfare programs (perhaps keep Medicare/Medicaid, but replace Social Security, food/housing assistance, etc) to minimize the disruption of natural market forces. That would be a very capitalist-friendly solution where the government and the market stay in their own lanes.
Thats a pretty thorough reply which gives some further insight into the issues we’re facing. While the ideas certainly makes sense in a vacuum (especially with governments and markets staying in their lane), there is a major issue in that the very politicians managing the government would have a pretty big conflict of interest which would prevent the sort of reforms necessary, as most politicians would fall under one or more of the following:
It’s really difficult to see how the government can be separated from the free market if the politicians are closely involved with the businesses, which can later be deemed as “too big to fail”.
Yeah, we need a lot of reforms to fix underlying problems that get in the way of progress. Some things that I think can help:
These are large shifts in how governments are organized, and potentially could be passed through large-scale public protests, like the Civil Rights Movement in the US. The public is incredibly hard to motivate, so organizers need to be really careful about which causes they push for. My preference is the second, because I think it has the best chance of creating positive, long-term change, and it's something that's pretty hard for politicians to competently argue against.