In my lurking time here, I have seen many comments on Lemmy that criticize capitalism, but I think it’s not as bad as it is made out to be on here. I earn money by working, can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to. The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Admittedly, it is possible that I am wrong because I have never studied economy other than the short lessons from required college classes my first two years. Do you have any objective sources where I can start to learn? I tend to be liberal/Democrat, btw.
Your freedom to do those things under capitalism is wholly bound by your existing wealth, and wealth begets wealth. When your parents are well off, you can get into good schools, get better education, and ultimately get a better job and, really, be a better worker bringing more wealth into the already existing pool of wealth your family had. Those who have been disenfranchised by way of things like eminent domain, redlining, or the straight up prosecution of them and their fellow men simply don’t have that option to rise up. They don’t even have the opportunity to try and fail, they’ve failed by their very existence. At a macro scale, once you’ve reached the top (e.x. Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) you have the resources to not only out-do any of the competition but to sell products at a loss to starve your competition and bully them into submission, which big companies do all the time instead of investing in better products. It’s just good business.
Circumstance plays a lot into how much wealth you start out with and how much wealth you end up being able to accrue, so while it’s nice being not even at the top but even just the middle, it’s important to have the mindfulness to know that there are those below you who don’t have the same freedoms, and they’re not there because their businesses did poorly. Some of them are, but most are simply victims of greater powers stealing their capital.
Wouldn’t your comment equally apply to being a small business owner (let’s say blacksmith) under feudalism? As a good blacksmith, you will earn more clients and prestige, while poor blacksmiths won’t get repeat business. You might be able to expand your forge and hire more people to do the tedious work of making chainmail or whatever.
Yup. “Capitalism” has become a punching bag for people who are frustrated about some form of government protectionism or lack of interventionism. If you ask someone to define it, you’ll get wildly different answers based on whatever they’re frustrated by. The real problem is cronyism, where the “haves” get special treatment from those in power so both sides benefit.
Example w/ Musk and Trump
As an example, look at Elon Musk buddying up to Trump. There are two explanations (probably more) here:
Musk actually thinks Trump is the best thing since sliced bread
Musk wants protectionism in the form of more EV tariffs, which will absolutely benefit his cash cow, Tesla
This all happens under “capitalism” because Musk is motivated to get more capital, but it’s happening through government, which ends up essentially as a government subsidy of Tesla (and other domestic EVs) using taxpayer dollars (in this case tariffs). It’s not a direct handover of cash, but when your foreign competition needs to charge twice as much as they normally would, there’s less motivation for your company to drop prices.
Capitalism is intended to be a system where the market is largely separate from the government, but everything is co-mingled and people point to the knotted mess as “capitalism,” when really it’s a mess of different political ideologies all messing with market forces. What we actually need is for more capitalism, as in less government interference w/ the market, so market forces can actually fix things.
Potential solutions to better use market forces
This means:
less protection for corporations - rich people using tactical bankruptcies indicates a broken system
fewer regulations, but higher penalties - regulations reduce the penalties for bad action to a fine, we need lawsuits and jail time
fairer tax system - we currently reward capital gains far more than earned income, we exclude a significant amount of inheritance from taxation, and we have structures (trusts and whatnot) to further protect money from taxation; the tax system should be drastically simplified to reduce abuse
enforce anti-trust more consistently and frequently
There’s certainly more we could do, but the above should significantly help correct the major problems we see today. Right now, it takes a massive scandal for a wealthy person or very large business to fail, and the above would dramatically reduce the scandal needed to cause one to fail.
“More capitalism” doesn’t mean screwing over the poor either. In fact, if you look at the Nordic countries, they’re actually more capitalist than the US ins many ways, and they have solid social programs. The difference is that there are clearer boundaries between government and the market, so you don’t end up with as much weird “collaboration” between companies and the government.
I personally believe in UBI/NIT (Universal Basic Income/Negative Income Tax) instead of most welfare programs (perhaps keep Medicare/Medicaid, but replace Social Security, food/housing assistance, etc) to minimize the disruption of natural market forces. That would be a very capitalist-friendly solution where the government and the market stay in their own lanes.
It’s basically UBI, but with income caps. So if you make above a certain threshold, your benefits reduce and completely disappear by a second threshold.
You seem to be a bit confused about what exactly capitalism is. Capitalism is the ideology of private ownership, specifically with regards to the means of production. It is contrasted with socialism, which is the ideology of public ownership of the means of production.
Capitalism is the ideology that allows for someone to own a factory, for example. It allows for them to possess it, in some nebulous way, and to therefore be entitled to the fruits of labor produced there. Even if they themselves did not work to produce those products. Capitalism is the ideology of private wealth accumulation and the ideology of class. It is the ideology of wealth inequality (as opposed to wealth equality where capital is shared equally among all). It is the ideology that creates markets out of supply and demand, specifically designed to collect as much capital as possible from people seeking products. Capitalism is protected by the state, which creates justifications for its existence and prevents the working class from uprising against capitalists. The state colludes with capitalists. They exchange political power for capitalists’ labor power. In this way, any party that is not explicitly anti-capitalist is necessarily pro-capitalist. To allow capitalism to exist is to protect it. In this way, capitalism is not just private ownership itself, but it is also the politics that protects such ownership and the states that choose to allow it.
Contrasted with socialism, the ideology of public ownership. Socialism is the classless ideology. Socialism is social welfare, including ideas like social assistance or UBI. Socialism allows for means of production, like factories, to be publicly and equally owned by all. It allows the fruits of labor produced in those factories to be shared by all. Like capitalism, socialism produces its own political ideologies. Socialism as a state of being requires some form of protection (much of the debate on the left can essentially be seen as “how should we protect an established state of socialism?”). As socialism is classless, and as its production is communal, it is open to encroachment by capitalists who will seek to establish private ownership and markets there. Most agree, some state or state-like entity must be established to protect the socialist society. In this way, any politics that are explicitly anti-capitalist must be socialist.
That’s how it often ends up, sure, but that’s not its defining feature. If you strip away all government (i.e. leave a bunch of people on a desert island), you’d end up with a capitalist system. It’s just the natural way of things. It starts with a market economy, and eventually market participants find they can pay others to grow their goods faster than trading/earning it directly, and some people would prefer to take the steady income of working for someone else over starting their own venture. If a venture fails, the owner loses everything, whereas the workers just move on to someone else’s venture.
When a government gets involved, it takes a monopoly on force in order to protect market participants from each other. Since it has that monopoly on force, there’s a lot of potential upside for market participants to get the government on their side. That’s why we see so much cronyism, because it’s a lot more profitable to get the guy with the gun on your side than compete in a fair market. But once you allow that to happen, capitalism becomes corrupted because you introduce ways to eliminate the inherent risk of market participation. It’s a lot harder to fail when you can get the government to make rules to prevent competition, letting you keep charging high prices for lower quality products and services.
Socialism as a state of being requires some form of protection
Exactly, and if that form of protection gets corrupted, the entire system is screwed. Look at what happened to pretty much every socialist state, the elites find they can get a ton of gain through treating their people unequally, and resort to heavy-handed measures to keep them in line.
The most successful “socialist” states (e.g. Nordic countries) aren’t socialist at all, they’re capitalist societies (and in many ways have a more free market than the US) with a hefty social safety net. Sweden has a high number of billionaires relative to their population. Why? Because they’re capitalist, not socialist. They do have a high tax rate, but they abolished their wealth and inheritance taxes in the 2000s, probably because they tend to scare away wealthy people and therefore local investment.
And I really don’t think socialism is actually classless, at least not when there’s a strong governing body. It just exchanges the capitalist “owner vs worker” class for “ruling vs worker” class, because there’s no way those in control will settle for the same living conditions as the workers. So it basically just trades someone who gained ownership through investment for someone who gained control (essentially ownership) through moving up in the party. To me, that means the owner is likely better equipped to run things than someone who “inherited” it through political maneuvering. Why would a socialist leader want to actually improve the living conditions of the people if they could just maintain power by killing off rivals?
So no, I largely reject socialism as a governing system because it’s way too easy to corrupt, and instead seek to borrow socialist ideas for how to operate an economy. Instead of governments owning the means of production, let’s instead look at co-ops. Instead of production and consumption quotas, let’s do cash redistribution from the wealthy to the poor so everyone can participate in the market economy (and a worker w/ a steady base income can take more risks and try to become an owner, or at least leave awful employers). A system like that can better weather bad leadership than one where the leadership has significant control over the economy.
Thats a pretty thorough reply which gives some further insight into the issues we’re facing. While the ideas certainly makes sense in a vacuum (especially with governments and markets staying in their lane), there is a major issue in that the very politicians managing the government would have a pretty big conflict of interest which would prevent the sort of reforms necessary, as most politicians would fall under one or more of the following:
They own/run businesses from prior to running for a political position- there’s always going to be a subconscious bias towards playing favours especially as they can go back to said business if they don’t last a term
They have a stake in the businesses that are in the free market
They could be receiving gifts and/or contributions from businesses that have a vested interest in having a politician that aligns with the business’ political agenda, including having a position for a politician if they lose a re-election bid
It’s really difficult to see how the government can be separated from the free market if the politicians are closely involved with the businesses, which can later be deemed as “too big to fail”.
Yeah, we need a lot of reforms to fix underlying problems that get in the way of progress. Some things that I think can help:
voting reform - STAR, approval, or even ranked choice voting to better reflect the will of the people
electoral reform - some solution to gerrymandering, either algorithmic redistricting or (my preference) proportional representation
reduce obstructionism - in the US, I’d prefer for the House to pass laws, and for the Senate to ratify them with a high vote tally (say, 60% to block a piece of legislation)
These are large shifts in how governments are organized, and potentially could be passed through large-scale public protests, like the Civil Rights Movement in the US. The public is incredibly hard to motivate, so organizers need to be really careful about which causes they push for. My preference is the second, because I think it has the best chance of creating positive, long-term change, and it’s something that’s pretty hard for politicians to competently argue against.
But do you earn enough? Does the working class earn enough? The general consensus for most people is no. The vast majority of wealth that the working class produces every year does not make it into the hands of the people who produced it, but rather the oligarchs who already possess most of the wealth already.
I can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to.
These are not exclusive to only capitalism. People were trading money for goods and starting businesses for thousands of years before capitalism was around.
The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail.
This is how it’s supposed to work in a merit driven free market economy, but that’s not how late stage capitalism plays out.
Many corporations are run by imbeciles and hemorrhage money, pursue short term profits at the expense of long term sustainability, treat their workers horribly, and rely on their monopolistic position in the market to survive rather than merit, competence, ethics, or quality. When they finally make an error that would normally bankrupt a company out of existence, they simply cry to the government for bailout money, and they get it every time because our politicians are bought and owned by billionaires and their lobbyists. This is the core principle of an oligarchy, which we are, and which capitalism always evolves into given enough time.
The rich get bailouts, the workers do not. This is a direct product of wealth inequality and regulatory capture that capitalism inherently generates.
The main argument against capitalism is that it leads to only a privileged few getting all the wealth, opportunities and freedom while the rest become wage slaves and debt slaves. It is the ultimate capitulation to artificial scarcity as if that’s somehow the best we can do as a species.
All the homelessness, overpriced healthcare and education, unaffordable housing, etc exists because of capitalism and it’s supporters look at this and say “good. fuck the poor.” or “this is the best we can do.”
I stopped being a libertarian because I was tired of the cynical capitulation.
You’re talking about free and open competition in a perfect competition marketplace.
This is an ideal (similarly far-fetched as communism/socialism*) where there are low barriers to entry, and consumers have good information to make well informed choices. In this world competition bid’s down excess profits in the long run - essentially to consumers benefit. not the benefit of producers. wages are low but it doesnt so much matter becauases competition keeps prices low.
Capitalism wants to increase the return to capital , so it works against competition to create market power (by many means including legal system power and regulatory capture as well tacit or explicit corruption) both over consumers and over their own supply chain (e.g. employees).
It inherits its legacy from rentierism and landowners who also like to monopolize land, ration it and have tenants bid up rents.
‘objective sources’, on economics? Good luck. economists are so bi-assed that most of them can spew shit out of two holes simultaneously.
both communism and perfect competition probably work fine in a small closed community, where everyone pretty much has repeated interactions with everyone - visibility - and there will be other examples where they each work fine-ish, but on a large enough scale, anomynity and human nature come into play. The reality is human trust is excellent, but some people will abuse it when they think they’ll get away with it and that destroys it.
In my lurking time here, I have seen many comments on Lemmy that criticize capitalism, but I think it’s not as bad as it is made out to be on here. I earn money by working, can spend my money on what I want, and can start a business if I wanted to. The best businesses are rewarded with more money while poor businesses fail. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Admittedly, it is possible that I am wrong because I have never studied economy other than the short lessons from required college classes my first two years. Do you have any objective sources where I can start to learn? I tend to be liberal/Democrat, btw.
Free market economy != Capitalism.
Your freedom to do those things under capitalism is wholly bound by your existing wealth, and wealth begets wealth. When your parents are well off, you can get into good schools, get better education, and ultimately get a better job and, really, be a better worker bringing more wealth into the already existing pool of wealth your family had. Those who have been disenfranchised by way of things like eminent domain, redlining, or the straight up prosecution of them and their fellow men simply don’t have that option to rise up. They don’t even have the opportunity to try and fail, they’ve failed by their very existence. At a macro scale, once you’ve reached the top (e.x. Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) you have the resources to not only out-do any of the competition but to sell products at a loss to starve your competition and bully them into submission, which big companies do all the time instead of investing in better products. It’s just good business.
Circumstance plays a lot into how much wealth you start out with and how much wealth you end up being able to accrue, so while it’s nice being not even at the top but even just the middle, it’s important to have the mindfulness to know that there are those below you who don’t have the same freedoms, and they’re not there because their businesses did poorly. Some of them are, but most are simply victims of greater powers stealing their capital.
Absolutely 100% false.
Wouldn’t your comment equally apply to being a small business owner (let’s say blacksmith) under feudalism? As a good blacksmith, you will earn more clients and prestige, while poor blacksmiths won’t get repeat business. You might be able to expand your forge and hire more people to do the tedious work of making chainmail or whatever.
I don’t know that anyone can ever provide an “objective” source on capitalism. Anyone who writes on the topic has inherent biases. Here are a few: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/1608462471
https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Down-Manifesto-KOHEI-SAITO/dp/1662602723
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/doughnut-economics-paperback/
https://www.amazon.com/What-Wrong-Capitalism-Ruchir-Sharma/dp/1668008262
https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-No-Accidents-Disaster_Who/dp/1982129689
https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-Despair-Future-Capitalism-Anne/dp/0691217076
Yup. “Capitalism” has become a punching bag for people who are frustrated about some form of government protectionism or lack of interventionism. If you ask someone to define it, you’ll get wildly different answers based on whatever they’re frustrated by. The real problem is cronyism, where the “haves” get special treatment from those in power so both sides benefit.
Example w/ Musk and Trump
As an example, look at Elon Musk buddying up to Trump. There are two explanations (probably more) here:
This all happens under “capitalism” because Musk is motivated to get more capital, but it’s happening through government, which ends up essentially as a government subsidy of Tesla (and other domestic EVs) using taxpayer dollars (in this case tariffs). It’s not a direct handover of cash, but when your foreign competition needs to charge twice as much as they normally would, there’s less motivation for your company to drop prices.
Capitalism is intended to be a system where the market is largely separate from the government, but everything is co-mingled and people point to the knotted mess as “capitalism,” when really it’s a mess of different political ideologies all messing with market forces. What we actually need is for more capitalism, as in less government interference w/ the market, so market forces can actually fix things.
Potential solutions to better use market forces
This means:
There’s certainly more we could do, but the above should significantly help correct the major problems we see today. Right now, it takes a massive scandal for a wealthy person or very large business to fail, and the above would dramatically reduce the scandal needed to cause one to fail.
“More capitalism” doesn’t mean screwing over the poor either. In fact, if you look at the Nordic countries, they’re actually more capitalist than the US ins many ways, and they have solid social programs. The difference is that there are clearer boundaries between government and the market, so you don’t end up with as much weird “collaboration” between companies and the government.
I personally believe in UBI/NIT (Universal Basic Income/Negative Income Tax) instead of most welfare programs (perhaps keep Medicare/Medicaid, but replace Social Security, food/housing assistance, etc) to minimize the disruption of natural market forces. That would be a very capitalist-friendly solution where the government and the market stay in their own lanes.
First time hearing negative income tax but sounds like an idea i had after a nice walk after the edible kicked in lol
It’s basically UBI, but with income caps. So if you make above a certain threshold, your benefits reduce and completely disappear by a second threshold.
Milton Friedman was a pretty notable supporter.
You seem to be a bit confused about what exactly capitalism is. Capitalism is the ideology of private ownership, specifically with regards to the means of production. It is contrasted with socialism, which is the ideology of public ownership of the means of production.
Capitalism is the ideology that allows for someone to own a factory, for example. It allows for them to possess it, in some nebulous way, and to therefore be entitled to the fruits of labor produced there. Even if they themselves did not work to produce those products. Capitalism is the ideology of private wealth accumulation and the ideology of class. It is the ideology of wealth inequality (as opposed to wealth equality where capital is shared equally among all). It is the ideology that creates markets out of supply and demand, specifically designed to collect as much capital as possible from people seeking products. Capitalism is protected by the state, which creates justifications for its existence and prevents the working class from uprising against capitalists. The state colludes with capitalists. They exchange political power for capitalists’ labor power. In this way, any party that is not explicitly anti-capitalist is necessarily pro-capitalist. To allow capitalism to exist is to protect it. In this way, capitalism is not just private ownership itself, but it is also the politics that protects such ownership and the states that choose to allow it.
Contrasted with socialism, the ideology of public ownership. Socialism is the classless ideology. Socialism is social welfare, including ideas like social assistance or UBI. Socialism allows for means of production, like factories, to be publicly and equally owned by all. It allows the fruits of labor produced in those factories to be shared by all. Like capitalism, socialism produces its own political ideologies. Socialism as a state of being requires some form of protection (much of the debate on the left can essentially be seen as “how should we protect an established state of socialism?”). As socialism is classless, and as its production is communal, it is open to encroachment by capitalists who will seek to establish private ownership and markets there. Most agree, some state or state-like entity must be established to protect the socialist society. In this way, any politics that are explicitly anti-capitalist must be socialist.
That’s how it often ends up, sure, but that’s not its defining feature. If you strip away all government (i.e. leave a bunch of people on a desert island), you’d end up with a capitalist system. It’s just the natural way of things. It starts with a market economy, and eventually market participants find they can pay others to grow their goods faster than trading/earning it directly, and some people would prefer to take the steady income of working for someone else over starting their own venture. If a venture fails, the owner loses everything, whereas the workers just move on to someone else’s venture.
When a government gets involved, it takes a monopoly on force in order to protect market participants from each other. Since it has that monopoly on force, there’s a lot of potential upside for market participants to get the government on their side. That’s why we see so much cronyism, because it’s a lot more profitable to get the guy with the gun on your side than compete in a fair market. But once you allow that to happen, capitalism becomes corrupted because you introduce ways to eliminate the inherent risk of market participation. It’s a lot harder to fail when you can get the government to make rules to prevent competition, letting you keep charging high prices for lower quality products and services.
Exactly, and if that form of protection gets corrupted, the entire system is screwed. Look at what happened to pretty much every socialist state, the elites find they can get a ton of gain through treating their people unequally, and resort to heavy-handed measures to keep them in line.
The most successful “socialist” states (e.g. Nordic countries) aren’t socialist at all, they’re capitalist societies (and in many ways have a more free market than the US) with a hefty social safety net. Sweden has a high number of billionaires relative to their population. Why? Because they’re capitalist, not socialist. They do have a high tax rate, but they abolished their wealth and inheritance taxes in the 2000s, probably because they tend to scare away wealthy people and therefore local investment.
And I really don’t think socialism is actually classless, at least not when there’s a strong governing body. It just exchanges the capitalist “owner vs worker” class for “ruling vs worker” class, because there’s no way those in control will settle for the same living conditions as the workers. So it basically just trades someone who gained ownership through investment for someone who gained control (essentially ownership) through moving up in the party. To me, that means the owner is likely better equipped to run things than someone who “inherited” it through political maneuvering. Why would a socialist leader want to actually improve the living conditions of the people if they could just maintain power by killing off rivals?
So no, I largely reject socialism as a governing system because it’s way too easy to corrupt, and instead seek to borrow socialist ideas for how to operate an economy. Instead of governments owning the means of production, let’s instead look at co-ops. Instead of production and consumption quotas, let’s do cash redistribution from the wealthy to the poor so everyone can participate in the market economy (and a worker w/ a steady base income can take more risks and try to become an owner, or at least leave awful employers). A system like that can better weather bad leadership than one where the leadership has significant control over the economy.
Thats a pretty thorough reply which gives some further insight into the issues we’re facing. While the ideas certainly makes sense in a vacuum (especially with governments and markets staying in their lane), there is a major issue in that the very politicians managing the government would have a pretty big conflict of interest which would prevent the sort of reforms necessary, as most politicians would fall under one or more of the following:
It’s really difficult to see how the government can be separated from the free market if the politicians are closely involved with the businesses, which can later be deemed as “too big to fail”.
Yeah, we need a lot of reforms to fix underlying problems that get in the way of progress. Some things that I think can help:
These are large shifts in how governments are organized, and potentially could be passed through large-scale public protests, like the Civil Rights Movement in the US. The public is incredibly hard to motivate, so organizers need to be really careful about which causes they push for. My preference is the second, because I think it has the best chance of creating positive, long-term change, and it’s something that’s pretty hard for politicians to competently argue against.
But do you earn enough? Does the working class earn enough? The general consensus for most people is no. The vast majority of wealth that the working class produces every year does not make it into the hands of the people who produced it, but rather the oligarchs who already possess most of the wealth already.
These are not exclusive to only capitalism. People were trading money for goods and starting businesses for thousands of years before capitalism was around.
This is how it’s supposed to work in a merit driven free market economy, but that’s not how late stage capitalism plays out.
Many corporations are run by imbeciles and hemorrhage money, pursue short term profits at the expense of long term sustainability, treat their workers horribly, and rely on their monopolistic position in the market to survive rather than merit, competence, ethics, or quality. When they finally make an error that would normally bankrupt a company out of existence, they simply cry to the government for bailout money, and they get it every time because our politicians are bought and owned by billionaires and their lobbyists. This is the core principle of an oligarchy, which we are, and which capitalism always evolves into given enough time.
The rich get bailouts, the workers do not. This is a direct product of wealth inequality and regulatory capture that capitalism inherently generates.
The main argument against capitalism is that it leads to only a privileged few getting all the wealth, opportunities and freedom while the rest become wage slaves and debt slaves. It is the ultimate capitulation to artificial scarcity as if that’s somehow the best we can do as a species.
All the homelessness, overpriced healthcare and education, unaffordable housing, etc exists because of capitalism and it’s supporters look at this and say “good. fuck the poor.” or “this is the best we can do.”
I stopped being a libertarian because I was tired of the cynical capitulation.
The funniest thing is that the final stage of unbound capitalism means no estate and then, when they need help there will be nobody to save them.
citation needed
You’re talking about free and open competition in a perfect competition marketplace. This is an ideal (similarly far-fetched as communism/socialism*) where there are low barriers to entry, and consumers have good information to make well informed choices. In this world competition bid’s down excess profits in the long run - essentially to consumers benefit. not the benefit of producers. wages are low but it doesnt so much matter becauases competition keeps prices low.
Capitalism wants to increase the return to capital , so it works against competition to create market power (by many means including legal system power and regulatory capture as well tacit or explicit corruption) both over consumers and over their own supply chain (e.g. employees). It inherits its legacy from rentierism and landowners who also like to monopolize land, ration it and have tenants bid up rents.
‘objective sources’, on economics? Good luck. economists are so bi-assed that most of them can spew shit out of two holes simultaneously.