this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Well, everything is learned in comparison. I lived in USSR, and that OP meme for USSR would be just an empty frame. At least under capitalism there is this wealth that is being transferred and if it is democratic capitalism then a safety net can be created to correct for capitalism failures.
To be honest, the whole farce is the capitalism vs socialism argument anyway. It was just a an idea so that we can do us vs them.
We should be doing what's best for the country each and every time as best we can. In some cases this may mean socialism when providing free education which then enhances capitalismn having a smarter country average of people.
The problem is people don't realise we're not really capitalist. When everything's good for companies rich CEO's blame capitalismnin why they keep their fat pay checks and why if you don't like it you should leave. When everything's bad, CEO's blame society in why they deserve a free government bail out. Because the truth is, either way it's the people who get screwed over.
Sure we may have many companies with competing products (usually only 2 big ones) that's supposed to bring competition. Until you realise they're all largely owned by two main shareholder groups.
Simply having it worse doesn’t validate something that’s not quite as bad. The whole reason it’s called capitalism is because the driving factor is capital and everything else is secondary. It was literally made as a replacement to monarchies because the nobles and merchants already held all the money and could keep their undeserved power.
You should know as well as anyone else that you didn’t live under communism in the USSR. The USSR was stuck in the place on the way to communism because people didn’t want to give up their power. It was basically state-run capitalism at that point.
Correcting for the failures of capitalism is a waste of time when better systems exist that don’t require going all-in on extreme ideologies. If it takes bringing up the disaster that was the USSR to make it sound good then it’s just a joke and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
USSR economic system is called socialism, which is a step in direction to communism. Given that this might be a particular flavor of socialism/capitalism, nothing significantly different was tried experimentally, so to say.
I also disagree with the certainty of you last statement claiming that a better system exists, which I assume you mean communism. Existence of such system on paper does not mean that it works in practice. It is possible, and in my opinion is very likely that particular features of human brain, of human psychology makes the system relying only on altruism to be less effective that the system that relies also on material interests.
It is plausible that in future, with different level of economic development, and with possibility to directly modify brain pathways (or transferring to silicon all together) the situation can be different and better system may exist. But with current biological humans and present development level? I seriously doubt that.
What better system exists?
Holy shit this is a reach. "Maybe you can't afford to live under capitalism, but that guy on a yacht is having a nice time, so it's really all worth it. Imagine if we all couldn't afford to live? Then you couldn't see that guy's cool yacht!"
That's clearly not the situation in the most developed western democracies.