this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Well-regulated capitalism on the other hand has resulted in an explosion of technological advancement like no other era in human history.
The key is regulation. Not too little, but not too much either. Some things, like minimum wage, are clearly under regulated. Other things, like mandating USB-C, are honestly better left to the free market (and I fucking love USB-C.)
I used to think this was true too, but then I realized that the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it's incompatible with democracy and regulation. That's why literally every capitalist country on earth (including the wealthy ones) has a problem with regulatory capture, corruption, and buyout and supplanting of the actual government.
Capitalism encourages the greediest, trickiest, and most selfish people to rise to the top and stay there through a mixture of brute force and media manipulation. In essence, it's not much different than totalitarian authoritarian governments, it's just more subtle.
Look at Fox news and right wing media bubbles for instance, or the Democratic party which opposes ranked choice voting whenever it can and constantly says one thing and does another. Humans are too greedy, selfish, and short-sighted to live and exist for long under a system like capitalism. How do we know this? Look around, climate change and pollution's already serious and it's not changing anytime soon.
We're probably already fucked, and we just don't know how much we are just yet.
Capitalism builds on competetion but favors behavior which eliminates competitors. This inner tension of capitalism makes it easily degrade into an authoritharian system. But it does not make it the same as one. Regulation is needed to maintain fair competetion which sounds paradoxical but is also a tension in the capitalism as such.
Democracies struggle with capitalism but they struggle much more with planned state. Struggle is in the nature of free agents of democracy, so it does not have to suggest incompatibility.