Why Is It So Hard to Imagine Something Better Than Capitalism?

[Banquet Meal]

i wish we could have the glitter feature all the time, not just on holidays

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

That was always the case though. In the past you had to rope some noble/merchant for money and if you fucked up the noble would claim ignorance. If you succeeded the noble got a good chunk of the money. If anything today liability is way larger since possible adverse affects can be massive.

The critical difference is neither of you are personally liable for the business' debts under the corporate structure. Your equity investment is at stake but that's it. It also means you can quickly sell your investment for other uses vs. the situation you're describing, where it would all be tied up in land, inventories, buildings, etc. that take a lot longer to wind down.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The critical difference is neither of you are personally liable for the business' debts under the corporate structure. Your equity investment is at stake but that's it. It also means you can quickly sell your investment for other uses vs. the situation you're describing, where it would all be tied up in land, inventories, buildings, etc. that take a lot longer to wind down.

I'd say that's more of a effect of advancements in technology than deliberate ideological decisions.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

I'd say that's more of a effect of advancements in technology than deliberate ideological decisions.

More specifically advances in contract law and the perceived benefit of the structure to investors. The medieval guilds were close in concept but not quite there yet on the legal side.

 

[kim foxx]

The critical difference is neither of you are personally liable for the business' debts under the corporate structure. Your equity investment is at stake but that's it. It also means you can quickly sell your investment for other uses vs. the situation you're describing, where it would all be tied up in land, inventories, buildings, etc. that take a lot longer to wind down.

corporations, in particular were a point of contention during the jacksonian era of american democracy. andrew jackson and his supporters were adamantly opposed to the unlimited granting of corporate charters, while the east coast money types were 100% in favor of corporate charters.

 

[Fapcop]

How about a planned economy turbocharged by AI, computers and the internet?

It could be argued that problem with the planned economy in the SovietUnion was not just the immense man power needed to plan everything from nuts and bolts to jet turbines, but also that the market had no real way to set prices without supply and demand.

A planned economy where you have computers to do forecasts and planning, databases and instant communication would likely work far better.

And before you say that market economies are always better, don’t forget about how much government planning, subsidies and price controls there is with agriculture.

 

[The best and greatest]

because capitalism isn't real, it's a catchall term for "when you don't give me your stuff"

Capitalist is a socialist pejorative for the liberal proponents of free market economics. None of the progenitors of what we now call 'capitalism' ever used the word themselves.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

It depends on the situation.

See, capitalism is one path to developing a country and it does great at that. Capitalism gave the base for the US to become prosperous, and it's working right now in China which under Mao was one of the poorest countries in the world and today is increasingly developed. But the end result of capitalism is always the same if you don't put the brakes on it. You get what Mussolini termed supercapitalism, where the winners at capitalism logically consolidate their power and subordinate everyone to them. When that happens, capitalism stops benefitting the people and benefits only the elite. Thus it is the nature of the free market to stop being a free market, because if I'm a megacorporation, why shouldn't I lobby the government to pass laws to prevent competition, ensure a source of cheap labor, etc. The difference between communism and capitalism can be summed up as communism crashes at the beginning, capitalism crashes at the end. End-stage capitalism is often misused by commies, but it's a correct term since it describes the corporate dystopia we live in and the average Redditor wants more of where they consoom product, corporations become their family, and new products are pushed like troon surgery.

That's why the solution is class collaboration. Businesses must serve not just their bottom line, but their nation. We had a great system of class collaboration in the West 1940s-1970s, where we balanced corporate and worker interests and permitted a managed sort of capitalism. Then we dismantled it because we let the elite send our jobs to China and then to "compete" we let them import millions of immigrants and turn our nations into economic zones. That's end-stage capitalism. Larry Fink and his ilk mask this unregulated capitalism with ESG scores which are meant to LOOK good but in actuality are used to browbeat corporations into compliance for his vision of how end-stage capitalism works.

Capitalist is a socialist pejorative for the liberal proponents of free market economics. None of the progenitors of what we now call 'capitalism' ever used the word themselves.

The term was popularized in English 200 years ago by David Ricardo who was a huge proponent of free trade and was in every way a classical liberal.

 

[Butterschmalz]

Its actually easy to imagine, once you solved the most important (((question))).

 

[macrodegenerate]

Reminder that Capitalism as a term and descriptor exists only to explain an opposite theory to Communism. What you are looking for is market economics which does work under systems which do not have funny money like the U.S. Only in funny money systems like the U.S. with blatant government and corporate collusion are the major issues you see today present. You don't see housing crisises in Africa or inflation problems. At the end of the day, two eggs are worth something else you can hold. No magic, no tricks just assets with real value.

Inb4 Africa is a shit hole. Yeah well at least the oppressors have faces and names. There's no warlord inc. or J.P marauder Stanley.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

How about a planned economy turbocharged by AI, computers and the internet?

It could be argued that problem with the planned economy in the SovietUnion was not just the immense man power needed to plan everything from nuts and bolts to jet turbines, but also that the market had no real way to set prices without supply and demand.

A planned economy where you have computers to do forecasts and planning, databases and instant communication would likely work far better.

And before you say that market economies are always better, don’t forget about how much government planning, subsidies and price controls there is with agriculture.

That helps, but even if we assume that the government's information systems are functional, that leaves the problem of the many kinds of information that are not accessible to the computer systems. Things like how much people want a certain good (as revealed by their willingness to pay for it), or the ideas that an entrepreneur would have. And all of this for what purpose?

Even assuming that government industrial policy is a good thing (that's a huge if) it still relies on markets to do the massive amounts of small planning (set every price and quantity of every little screw and nail and type of wood and so on) that it can't handle.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

imagining is one thing, implementing is another. just look at history for more than five seconds and without a homosexual lens.

without capitalism, homosexuals wouldn't be free to start imagining things in the first place. they would be eating bugs in the dirt, or enslaved, or dead. like in a third world country without capitalism. to accomplish things, you need capital. it's basically required. If you try to split this up equally, you will come up with something that probably isn't as fair as what you had originally. example: let millions of migrants into your nice capitalist country because you assume you can afford it. reality: you just steal money (from your socialist programs of social security!) to pay for these new people you feel should be given a better life. But again, this was only possible because of capitalism in the first place. the boomers engaging in capitalism, paying into the system, creating massive wealth by contributing to fractional reserve lending 401ks, etc.

Capitalism didn't build your infrastructure or your highways buddy, the government did that.

 

[gagabobo1997]

I want to see Corporatism be a thing again.

True corporatism in the modern day would be cyberpunk
Which would be awesome

 

[Neodanthril]

Because the agents of capitalism are very good at jingling keys of social issues in front of its potential detractors
The best most recent example is occupy Wall Street. In the last days of that movement you had people taking over the mega phones talking about the "progressive stack." Ie, the great awokening was created as a social issue to diffuse frustrations at current economic realities into stupid shit that at worst does nothing to the economic engine of your oppression and at best is a cudgel to beat over the head of everyone that was just protesting

 

[dick brain]

Because trying to create a government composed of people is like trying to create a cup composed of water.

 

[Lords Greatsword]

Capitalism is also one of few systems that genuinely prioritizes responsibility by refusing to bail out the lazy and the foolish.

I mostly agreed with you but what about the shit that happened with the 2008 housing market crash? There were a shitton of banks handing out risky loans left and right and when it was all said and done they just got bailed out anyway.

 

[Dick Johnson]

Capitalism is pretty entrenched because A: it's very good at adapting to forces that seek to damage it* (how many shirts, patches, stickers and buttons do you see with something communist on them? Anticapitalism can be very profitable) and B: it's a logical progression of preexisting socioeconomic forces. It's not hard to draw a line from the cottage industries and bartering, to mercantilism that exists alongside feudalism, to Industrial Age capitalism. It's a natural-seeming development, and any sort of alternative tends to rely on tearing down the current system in order to put the new improved system in its place rather than allowing a gradual shift with minimal coercion.

And those alternatives usually rely on humans being other than what we observably are. And pointing these issues out to a proponent of an alternate system will often end with said proponent uttering a variation on 'Why can't you just believe that something better is possible?'

Now, something better is possible. And likely. Human history shows that 'things get better - eventually' is how things tend to work. But trying to force 'something better' at gunpoint has thus far resulted in 'something worse'. I could be wrong, and there may well be some guns that get pointed in order for something better to actually happen. But I'm thinking that any system that can successfully replace capitalism will do so because it's able to generate better outcomes overall than capitalism, and this will likely happen in response to technological and political developments (much as the Industrial Revolution cause the shift from mercantilism to capitalism).

How about a planned economy turbocharged by AI, computers and the internet?

It could be argued that problem with the planned economy in the SovietUnion was not just the immense man power needed to plan everything from nuts and bolts to jet turbines, but also that the market had no real way to set prices without supply and demand.

A planned economy where you have computers to do forecasts and planning, databases and instant communication would likely work far better.

And before you say that market economies are always better, don’t forget about how much government planning, subsidies and price controls there is with agriculture.

AI might well be the technology that causes the replacement or radical change of capitalism. Command economies are bad at market optimization, and it seems like for every sort of good that they produce on par with capitalist economies, they've got something that they fall down on. The obvious example is military materiel vs consumer goods in the USSR. But there were plenty of bad outcomes that were just as bad as their capitalist counterparts, some of which were unique to a planned economy**.

But machine learning seems poised to be able to replace a large percentage of the workforce without opening up new jobs for those workers to move into. Combine the advances that allow for that with a big swath of the population being unemployed and you've got a recipe for people demanding some sort of change, and having computer models of the economy that are updated in nearly real time through the vast quantities of received data from every corner of the economy might be the Magic 8 ball that is able to more efficiently direct the use of resources than the free market currently is.

*Something that I've seen online is right-wingers shaking their fists as FDR for the New Deal and Muh Socialism Muh Handouts, but I've also seen left-wingers lament that the New Deal probably headed off a full blown socialist revolution in the US.

**Soviet whaling knocking the shit out of populations despite the fact that there wasn't much of a market for the whales is an environmental problem that flat out wouldn't have happened with a capitalist economy. Some central planner in Moscow wanted Line Go Up on whales, so fleets caught whales, and whales got turned into expensive fertilizer because there was insufficient demand for whale meat and products. Under a capitalist economy, the ships wouldn't have been profitable to continue operating and would have been sold off or converted into fishing vessels.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I mostly agreed with you but what about the shit that happened with the 2008 housing market crash? There were a shitton of banks handing out risky loans left and right and when it was all said and done they just got bailed out anyway.

That was the government, so not capitalism. "True capitalism" would've purged the entire system and absolutely fucked over FAR more people and caused a FAR worse crash, but once recovery set in within a few years, we would've been good and the economy would have been a lot healthier. Or perhaps it never would have recovered, because when you operate capitalism in a globalist economy, the optimal thing is to ship jobs overseas and make convoluted supply chains to save a buck.

And those alternatives usually rely on humans being other than what we observably are. And pointing these issues out to a proponent of an alternate system will often end with said proponent uttering a variation on 'Why can't you just believe that something better is possible?'

Ironically, true capitalism of the sort libertarians and ancaps speak of is one of these too. It can't exist because it inevitably welds itself to the government. This has been true since the days of the East India Company spendingn a fortune lobbying the British Parliament and of course outright taking over the Indian states in which it operated for the sake of doing business.

Now, something better is possible. And likely. Human history shows that 'things get better - eventually' is how things tend to work. But trying to force 'something better' at gunpoint has thus far resulted in 'something worse'. I could be wrong, and there may well be some guns that get pointed in order for something better to actually happen. But I'm thinking that any system that can successfully replace capitalism will do so because it's able to generate better outcomes overall than capitalism, and this will likely happen in response to technological and political developments (much as the Industrial Revolution cause the shift from mercantilism to capitalism).

The problem is that you need to define "better." We don't need a better system than capitalism like the mythical automated luxury gay space communism, because it's a disgusting, perverted system that would make people even more degenerate. Capitalism is already good at turning people into degenerates, hence the porn industry, Big Pharma/psychiatry/plastic surgery industry pushing transgenderism, and sex toy entrepreneurs like the people who invented the balldo. The line going up forever, societal progress, all of that isn't a good thing, quite the opposite in fact when you realize where it will take us. Remember that communist countries are generally very conservative, because communism doesn't believe in pushing diversity in hopes of selling things to minorities.

So that's why we don't need a replacement for capitalism (because it would be even worse) and we need to hit the breaks on capitalism and abandon the idea that "muh free market" is some sort of virtue. Capitalism is not good. Capitalism isn't bad, but it isn't good either.

 

[Wodanaz]

Capitalism didn't build your infrastructure or your highways buddy, the government did that.

yes they did because in america the economic system is capitalism. dumbass nigger.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

yes they did because in america the economic system is capitalism. dumbass nigger.

Ah yes, the "Capitalism is when the government/private companies does things I like, communism/not real capitalism is when they do things I don't like"