Kapitalism
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And it went pretty well, until they bought enough politicians to change it.
wrote last edited by [email protected]So taxing the rich is an unstable temporary solution, and more fundamental changes are required.
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I'm down. I think every year, we ought to take the richest person in the country and redistribute 50% of their assets.
And their body parts as well
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The ideals of capitalism were to punish the rich land owners/nobles who were wealthy without ever working and empower the workers who were poor despite working for their whole lives
Where are you getting this from?
wrote last edited by [email protected]The Wealth of Nations/Adam Smith
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Oh boy here we go. What is a corporation? What does it mean for corporations to not exist? How exactly does that even work in practice?
Yes creative scientist invent things spontaneously without expectation of reward. But no scientist will contribute as much as a well funded and motivated team with a clear goal. And I'm sure all the scientists love it when you tell them they won't be credited for their work and literally anyone will be able to take their idea and do whatever they want with it, that'll do so much to help foster humanity's innate desire to learn and be creative.
And it's about coercing people who won't act in good faith with the system into doing so. Most people would keep a secret to make money especially if their livelihood depended on it. Why force creatives to choose between sharing their works and profiting from them?
Private companies don't need intellectual property. A corporation will steal your creation and outcompete you in profiting from it if given the opportunity. Intellectual property laws are what stop them from doing so. Again, the system has been eroded and misused by companies but at its core it protects workers and their labour.
I'm sure all the scientists love it when you tell them they won't be credited for their work and literally anyone will be able to take their idea and do whatever they want with it, that'll do so much to help foster humanity's innate desire to learn and be creative
Literally yes. Why do you think every fucking scientist loves sci-hub and is against Elsevier, and even submits their papers to arxiv for anyone to read for free? You clearly have no experience in the field and are talking out of your arse
What does it mean for corporations to not exist?
Through the existence of exclusively public institutions, whether cooperative or government-owned, which don't work in direct competition but either in cooperation or in emulated competition (I.e. a contest instead of a struggle to drive each other off business).
And it's about coercing people who won't act in good faith with the system into doing so
This literally doesn't happen in public research.
Most people would keep a secret to make money especially if their livelihood depended on it
In public research it works backwards. The more you publish (i.e. make available to the public), the more you earn. You really don't seem to understand the concept of public research.
A corporation will steal your creation and outcompete you in profiting from it if given the opportunity.
Great, so make knowledge accessible to everyone and abolish private corporations.
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Maybe i should rethink my stance.
Don't bother, you tankies are incapable of logical thinking.
I'm sorry that you have to insult me like that. There are many ways to train healthy discussion habits.
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Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system?
It isn't common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged. That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.
Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as “Untermenschen” according to the infamous “Generalplan Ost”, which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn’t for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.
The same nation you are praising put him IN a concentration camp for no fucking reason other than potentially because of his race.
Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.
No, you don’t. You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy.
You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism, why are you doing this and why do you think the USSR’s racism should be praised?
It isn't common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged
Ever heard of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo?
That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.
The Gulag episode lasted less than two decades, by the mid-50s it was a thing of the past and never resurfaced in the country. Almost as if it was a mass hysteria response to Nazi infiltration, and not born out of a desire to oppress people inherently. Again, at the peak of the Gulag system, the prison population was similar to that of modern USA. Much more authoritarian if you ask me
The same nation you are praising
Yes, I'm praising this nation because even if it did mistakes, by industrialising eastern Europe and by eliminating Nazis it saved hundreds of millions of lives.
You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy
I'm not supporting the excesses of the Gulag repression, it's something that we can and should criticise. I'm supporting the rest of things of the country, which led to the saving of hundreds of millions of people from hunger, disease and Nazi genocide. The Gulag repression seems horrible until you realize the Nazis murdered 27 million Soviets at that time. It was an extreme measure carried out in extreme times.
You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism
I'm not. If he was jailed for his race that's wrong. You're just making too much criticism of the country thst saved Europe from fascism and which saved hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
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You could literally open up a book someday
That's what you should start with.
check your info, gulag inmates were paid.
Check, you i.. Tankie. Or just check another response to your moronic post.
cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia
Listen, you moron: millions of people died in Siberia, murdered by your beloved Stalin. Denying this is like denying holocaust. Go and fuck yourself you genocide denier.
You haven't read my comment because it's too long for your peanut brain, or refuse to address 90% of it because it goes against your propagandised beliefs. Have a good day, ignorant.
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The Wealth of Nations/Adam Smith
Just like the Bible, no one actually reads it
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Capitalists say the free market is king then they go and make laws to stifle and restrict it so they can make monopolies and gouge everyone out of their hard-earned income.
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The Game Boy alone proves this whole capitalist rhetoric wrong. It was the most successful hand held game system for two reasons, it was cheaper than the rest and it went through batteries slower, otherwise it was objectively the worst handheld game system on the market at the time. Look at the food you are able to eat, the clothes you are able to wear, and the place you are able to live and try to tell me the driving force on those decisions was quality. Capitalism is not concerned with improving anything, that is not the goal of the system.
The goal is to get the highest score.
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the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession
Workers aren't capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.
Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .
Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it's used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).
A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.
Now compare democracy with both systems.
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The Wealth of Nations/Adam Smith
Well it's blatant propaganda. Think about it, when people got rid of kings and 'nobles', they didn't take the wealth from them. Those people stayed rich and invested that money into business. The ruling class never changed, they just changed job titles.
There has also never been a system (under capitalism) where peoples wealth is taken from them when they die.
The whole idea that under Capitalism everyone "Starts from 0" is just laughable.
Capitalism was never a punishment for nobles who didn't work, it was a way for them to continue to stay in power, and still not have to work.
The vast majority of wealthy people were born wealthy. The vast majority of people who start from 0 will die with basically 0.
Adam Smith himself was born wealthy.
Very occasionally, someone like a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs will come along and be successful, but they are the exceptions to the rule. And most of their wealth came from exploiting people.
A few professions could be a path for poor people to succeed, like for example Lawyers, but you have to have the money for Law School in the first place, so most of them came from well off parents.
Capitalism wouldn't exist if it were a fair system.
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Is no one going to talk about how a rune pickaxe is WAAY more expensive than a bronze pick?
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This one is appealing in that they refund the fee even if it's from some other bank. So you can go to the ATM at the corner shop that charges $3 to withdraw, and get that refunded at the end of the quarter. Most banks don't have fees at their own ATM, but this is no fees anywhere. For rich people.
There's a few credit unions that will do that even. (With a refund limit per month ofc)
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Copyright and inheritance can’t exist in a capitalist society
Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth and the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession. Over saturation of a given market is fixed by the invisible hand where people just move onto something that gives more hours
Copyright used to have a hard limit in years. Inheritance used to pack a substantial tax.
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In a classic example you have a village with 2 bakeries, one of the bakers came up with a machine to kneed the bread, so he can make more bread and sell it cheaper. This is sort of the story people tell to show how great capitalism is.
But we have reached a point where that one bakery now owns a chain of bakers, adds ingredients to the bread to make it more addictive, skips on actual ingredients needed for bread and replaces them with sawdust, made donations to the current political party so any competition has to jump through hoops to get a bakery license, etc.
Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
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Is no one going to talk about how a rune pickaxe is WAAY more expensive than a bronze pick?
Not if you're using duplicate item cheats
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Now compare democracy with both systems.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Democracy is a form of government.
Capitalism and Socialism are economic systems.
You could have a Democratic Socialist system, if the majority of people wanted it.
You could have an Authoritarian Dictatorship that allowed Capitalism.
It's a little more complex because people are used to living under Capitalism and many people don't really understand Socialism and would fight against their own interest to revert to the status quo, as a result some socialist philosophers have suggested not giving people a choice but to accept socialism, a so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat", but even in such a system you could have a constitution that enshrines socialism as the the economic system, while still giving people the ability to vote on everything else.
For example "Private Property" could be abolished. Factories and business could be owned by all of the employees as a whole and the profits shared equitably. After a short time living in such a system it would be unlikely that the majority of people would vote to return power back over to just a few individuals.
This would likely depend on the transition going smoothly. Give people a little hardship and the knee jerk/reactionary response would be to proclaim they were "better off" before.
The main problem with Socialism is that people are so used to having 'rulers', that they simply do not know how to act in their absence. This creates a seeming 'power vacuum'. Unscrupulous individuals can use that fact as a way to assume the roles vacated by the formerly rich and powerful in the name of being a force that maintains the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", when very often they seem to become dictators themselves.
In my personal opinion, violent revolution will always lead to that outcome. If we ever want to evolve as a society, people must first understand what Socialism actually is and why it's the best choice for the majority of people. We must freely choose it, because it's the right thing to do.
That is made extremely difficult because the rich and powerful like being rich and powerful, and will use every bit of their resources to ensure they stay rich and powerful. It's easier to convince cops to side with them to keep them in power by sharing a tiny bit of their wealth, than it is to convince them to do the right thing, when they aren't even sure what the right thing is.
There is a reason that Education is a political battleground in the US. If people were actually taught the truth, they probably would choose to do the right thing. The capitalists won't allow that to happen if they can help it.
Anytime you see someone trying to cut funding for education, or try to have a whitewashed version of history taught. This is the reason.
This is also the source of "Red Scare" propaganda and fear mongering. 'Keep people scared, ignorant, and confused' will probably be the subtitle of the last 100 years if they make a movie about it in the future, provided the Fascists and/or Capitalists don't win.
Edit: JFK once said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." I think there is a lot of wisdom in that and I wish people in power would take it to heart, though I know they wont.
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In a classic example you have a village with 2 bakeries, one of the bakers came up with a machine to kneed the bread, so he can make more bread and sell it cheaper. This is sort of the story people tell to show how great capitalism is.
But we have reached a point where that one bakery now owns a chain of bakers, adds ingredients to the bread to make it more addictive, skips on actual ingredients needed for bread and replaces them with sawdust, made donations to the current political party so any competition has to jump through hoops to get a bakery license, etc.
Even in the best case s scenario - bakeries compete making uniform quality products without involving political shenanigans - the price of bread is independent of the cost of production.
What you're looking for as a business is the "clearing price", which is the price at which your (sales * price) generates the maximum revenue.
New capital that lowers per unit cost does not change the price. It raises profit margins. Only when multiple vendors in competition have access to this capital does the clearing price fall.
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Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
Agreed. I feel as though capitalism is a good option for things which can have elastic demand. Luxury items, entertainment, etc can all benefit from a competitive market because I have the luxury of not needing to buy them. On the other hand, I do absolutely need food, housing, and healthcare in order to live. Applying supply and demand principles when demand must be inelastic only leads to people getting hurt.
My dream system would be one in which, as a baseline, all human requirements for survival are provided no matter the situation, and where currency is only used for luxuries.
