this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Markets and currency have existed for thousands of years. Capitalism has existed for barely more than 200 years. Markets don't create capitalism. However capitalism destroys markets.
Unregulated agriculture also destroys land. Just because something has negative effects over long-term unregulated use doesn’t mean it should be abolished despite the positive effects. Just because a system is older than another doesn’t mean it’s superior. Or do you yearn for serfdom?
What positive effects has it had?
The only reason I pointed out the age is that markets and currency often are, and were being confused/conflated with capitalism.
I actually advocate for a system 100 years newer than capitalism. And even then I push for a version of it that has been modernized to fit current realities.
Well, the device you are reading this on is a product of capitalism. Whether it’s a phone or a computer, it has hundreds of chips made at hundreds of factories in at least half a dozen countries, all the parts had to be brought to a place and assembled, then brought to another place and sold to you. And you likely didn’t even have to pay for it in advance before it was assembled and ready for you to use!
Did you eat food today that wasn’t grown near where you live? “That’s just trade” you might say, but it took a significant investment of capital to set up the system of trade that got it to you, at the very least the ship or the train it was transported on, if not the equipment used to grow and harvest it. If you ate a banana or chocolate and you don’t live in the tropics then you only ate those things thanks to capitalism.
Are you wearing shoes? Are they completely hand-made by an artisan, did you commission them to be made and come back in a year to pick them up, or did someone invest in capital so you could buy them in a store?
Did you go to college? Did you pay to have the school built and the teachers hired to teach you, or did someone raise and donate a bunch of capital to create it? Did it own a farm you had to work to pay for its operation, or does it have an endowment it can invest as capital to raise money to pay for some of your education? Just because it’s (hopefully) a non-profit institution doesn’t mean it would exist without capitalism.
Just look at the improvements in the living conditions of a huge portion of the planet over the last 200 years when we had capitalism, then look at the improvements for the 200 years before that. Haven’t there been more improvements in more people’s lives since capitalism than before it?
Look I know it’s not a perfect system, it needs regulation, and it’s not the right tool for every situation but generally it blows mercantilism and feudalism out of the water, and it’s done better than every planned economy so far.
No it isn't. It's a product of human ingenuity. People invented things before capitalism. And they continue to invent outside it. In order for things to be a product of capitalism, you have to show how they couldn't be made outside of it. And yet those very same phones are made outside of capitalism today. Not to mention their precursors were made even in Soviet, Russia in the '70s and '80s.
The one that truly unique thing you might be able to attribute as a product of capitalism. Is the unavailability of affordable housing in general.
Wow! And the rest of your spiel. It's like you have no idea what you're talking about. Trade went on for thousands of years before capitalism. Things were manufactured in Russia all throughout the 19th century without capitalism.. oh now I remember your name. You posted this exact same heavily debunked bullshit response in another reply to me once before. Well I'm sure you post it to a lot of people. I was going to say no one could be as hilariously wrong as you are without trying to be that wrong. And it turns out I was right. You are trying to be wrong.
OK then, what has socialism produced? Remember you have to show what it produced can’t be made under capitalism, or any other economic system.
Anyone can tell someone they’re wrong, but if you can’t explain why, why should they believe you?
Economic systems themselves don't produce anything. They're economic systems. That's the whole point. Anything produced under capitalism could be reasonably produced under socialism, etc. It is simply a different way of doing things. But you do make a good argument against your own argument.
Yes, tools don’t make things, people using tools produce things. And capitalism as a tool has been used to produce a lot of things, a lot more than socialism. But like any tool, you don’t want to use the same one all the time for everything. Economics is about incentives, and different systems put the incentives in different places. You don’t want to run a prison on capitalism because it incentivizes imprisoning people. But if you’re running a country on a planned economy it’s difficult to incentivize people to work harder just because the government said so, even if it was a democratic decision that people should work harder.