I strongly believe (it’s a belief, not a fact), that appropriately controlled capitalism would be a good system. Then I look at all EU countries and the same problem pops up all the time: rich people get richer and richer. There should be a wealth cap of sorts. It’s unethical that some can have anything and everything while almost everyone else can’t.
Let’s then not talk about the control of the news/media that obviously follows from people accumulating wealth like literary dragons… or the whole lobbying industry…
So, I believe, but I also see all manners of counter-proofs all around me and I see no real solutions.
I think you might believe in market economy but not capitalism. Market economy is an economic system, capitalism is an ideology.
Capitalism is really the private ownership of production within a market economy. I don’t think that commenter was against private ownership, just more oversight in a capitalist system… which I think is workable.
It’s more specific even than private ownership. It’s about allowing businesses to incorporate as entities with limited liability so that multiple owners can pool capital while shedding risk.
If every shareholder of, say, Nestlé, were criminally liable for every criminal act that Nestlé committed, it would obviously be impossible for such an entity to exist.
The main issue with capitalism is the way it facilitates scale without accountability.
I think more oversight is a temporary solution. End stage capitalism is inevitable.
Tax anyome with over 10million in “worth” at 100%.
If theynare caught chesting with loop holes, take it all and put them in jail for harming others like you would assault or murder.
You could say that about any government system though. Every system will encounter someone or a group of people looking to corrupt and give gains to themselves. The endless pursuit of power and greed is what needs to be controlled, and as long as that’s not controlled and seal tight, every government will eventually fall.
Probably because there is some inherent flaw in human psychology that pushes many to hoard wealth and material objects to the point of absurdity, and somehow they or their like minded humans corrupt the system to allow more power and control consolidation. I don’t think we’ve manage to come up with a system that contains enough stabilizing rules to prevent wild excesses to damage the whole over time. There’s always going to be a segment that views themselves as exceptions and they will reshape, bend, and break rules to their advantage, and they’ll have their supporters.
I don’t think there’s any way to prevent people like that unless we have such rigid controls that society begins to look a different version of totalitarian, so is corruption, collapse and rebirth of all large systems inevitable?
I wouldn’t say it’ll always be inevitable, but I don’t think any current systems in place or theorized are the answer. I think so long as people try to think of developing a system of government with that in mind, there will be many answers presented and we’ll eventually find one that works.
Personally, I think one way forward is to use both UBI and capitalism for necessities and luxuries. The UBI gives everyone what they need - utilities, food, basic shelter, supplies like mattresses and toothpaste, healthcare, transport, fuel, ect. However, all material objects are generic in appearance and function. Corndog #1 (Jumbo), all clothing is white and boring, ect. Capitalism is used for buying interesting items, bigger housing, and so forth.
People like their individuality, which is something that capitalism is terrific at supporting. Unfortunately, capitalism is also terrible at allowing people to survive and establish a foundation for success. Thus, separation of necessity vs luxury. All work is for earning the money to upgrade lifestyle.
There are other things that I have in mind for making things more egalitarian, such as making schooling into a paid job. Many seemingly weird reforms like that would be needed to make economics work for society, rather than the other way around.
Indeed, I see nothing wrong with private ownership.
I believe it should be workable, but counter examples are uncountable.
There should be a wealth cap of sorts
Some sort of NG+
Once you reach a certain amount of wealth, you get a parade and then you give up all your wealth, get a new identity, and start over.
Maybe if you go over a certain wealth amount, you’re entered into Open PvP mode.
In software we say there are people problems and tool problems. You generally can’t solve one type with the other.
I think this applies here. Almost all economic models have positives, but given a chance individuals will abuse it to skew things in their favor.
I dont really see a good solution out there unfortunately, so I settle on the one that has worked in the past which is regulation.
At the end of the day, I think that the issue with this sentiment is that in some sense, control over something and ownership of that thing are virtually the same thing. If you have “appropriately controlled capitalism”, then you have someone other than the capitalists ultimately deciding what the implements that drive the economy are used for and who the dividends are given to. If that someone is just some individual or small group controlling it to their own interests, then you just have an authoritarian system (and frankly, its not really different from a capitalist system that has become sufficiently consolidated for the number of rich owners controlling things to be very small anyway, since those guys will also run things to their own interest). If theres some kind of collective/societal-wide control mechanism, and its actually sufficient in its influence to prevent the abuses of capitalism, then it isnt really capitalism at all anymore because those private “owners” just have a legal fiction of ownership. At which point, their position is doubly useless, so there is little benefit to keeping up that illusion.
There are mixed marks that seem to work. The one I’m most familiar with is private health insurance in the Netherlands. The market is very strictly regulated, all health insurers need to offer the same basic package - a cheap package that covers all the basics. And there is intense governmental oversight to check that the health insurers cover what they are supposed to. The capitalist aspect and the market economy enter mostly on the non-basic packages.
You can notice how it’s a very slow moving market, but it still generates profits for the owners and profits the society as a whole.
I hope something like this could be implemented more widely, where a strong tax redistribution system and strong regulations in favor of the less rich can counter the evident downsides of capitalism without killing neither private ownership nor market economy. Like we haven’t killed car traffic, we have very strongly regulated it.
As a thought experiment, let’s say we both have a paper route. We are not in direct competition, but I am unable to expand my route because doing so would be treading on your route. I stop being able to do my route. Anyone could pick up my route, but you are in a position to gain more from my route than someone new to the business. Thereby, you pick up an outsized share of the route. This crowds both new and existing potential route owners.
The example is only about capital accumulation and state involvement. There are other problematic issues such as wage labor as addressed by the comic.
It is like you join new MMORPG and get fuked by 1kkk lvl players where you barely can get to lvl 10
I see you play Ultima Online.
But capitalism expect constantly growing capital value right? How is that possible?
Just about any economic system, if it was run perfectly, would be mostly fine.
The problem is people behave unwisely.
It was so unwise of me to be born into the group of people without generational wealth
The problem is that the capitalist system, by design, rewards people for exploiting others. In Communism that’s a rare bug to patch, in Capitalism it’s a feature.
I was pointed to Georgism the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
I’m starting to get convinced about it, even if there are aspects I haven’t fully wrapped my head around yet…
Georgism is insufficient. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem of capitalism: most people work, while a minority of people (capitalists) leech off the profit generated by workers. This doesn’t end under Georgism. There’s a reason why capitalists have spent 2 centuries creating propaganda against communism, anarchism and socialism but haven’t so much as touched Georgism.
Yes, I do indeed see how the capitalist notion of salaried workers that benefit their superior remains intact with Georgism. I can even understand why you might call it “leeching” given that working for a salary is often not much of a choice, since we otherwise have no income and therefore have no way to support ourselves.
But from my still-limited understanding of Georgism, it does also seem to aim for using land-value taxation to be able to provide everyone with a universal basic income. This would mean that salaried working becomes more of a wilful choice and at least some of the excesses of capitalism are successfully avoided. I don’t think I would even necessarily call it “leeching” in such a scenario.
There is a lot of good Marxist critique of Universal Basic Income as opposed to guaranteed labor for everyone. The fundamental issue in my opinion is that class war still exists, so for as long as capitalists exist and are in power, they will not allow for things that harm their profits. They will literally instill a fascist coup before allowing UBI to pass because it would threaten their profits too much, we’ve seen similar stuff happening to Salvador Allende, Mosaddeq, and a plethora of democratically elected leaders that wanted to reduce exploitation of workers.
Yes, that’s a very valid concern indeed. You’re right that under Georgism it may still be possible for an elite to corrupt politics in such a way that the Geogist values itself cannot be upheld. But it’s still a step in the right direction, and I think that’s more a political problem than an economic one. We also don’t really know for certain that if a society successfully implements Georgism that they will even let their elite gain such power. After all, it becomes much easier for the common folk to escape the capitalist treadmill. That may be wishful thinking if we would change to Georgism overnight and leave people with a consumerist mindset to their own devices, but maybe paired with an ideological shift in thinking, it could work.
But I would even be open to the idea that maybe it’s democracy itself that needs to be revisited.
But it’s still a step in the right direction
I don’t necessarily disagree, as I said in my initial comment my complaint about Georgism is with it being insufficient, not me being in principle against the morality of it. I just don’t see why limit ourselves to taxation of land ownership instead of the, in my opinion fairer and more all-encompassing, collective ownership of land and means of production. We can start by taxing land, sure, but why the hangup with that in particular? We could argue instead for collective ownership of all housing, all means of production, and all land, and this way the exploitation would stop altogether.
As for democracy being revisited, I actually agree but in a different way. I just don’t think real democracy is possible in a two-class system where a minority class (capitalists) have the economic power, and hence media power, and hence political power. I love democracy, but I don’t think we’ve had real democracy in the west, in fact we have very much the contrary. We saw it recently in France where the President skipped congress using emergency measure legislation in order to raise retirement age against the democratic will of the people. We saw it in Germany when Berlin had a referendum to cap rent prices and a judge invalidated it saying it was unconstitutional. We saw it in Greece when Syriza carried out a referendum to revisit the sovereign debt but couldn’t do it under ECB threat of being left stranded without control over their own currency. We see it in the entire western world whenever austerity policy is applied, because almost everywhere the overwhelming majority of people are in favour of free good quality education, free good quality healthcare and good retirement pensions. I just think that we live in a bourgeois democracy, where there is a democracy for capitalists but not for workers, who actually compose the majority of the population.
Sounds pretty cool, thanks for sharing
any solutions?
anything?
anything at all
useless
Every week we hunt and eat the richest one.
What do you mean when you say those words?
Edit: you’re wrong about what you think you mean based on a false dichotomy with another profoundly stupid¹ system, but also I dont think you’re using the right words for it, because the formal definitions of those words make your comment nonsense word salad.
¹still better than both what I’m guessing you mean and what the words you said usually mean
Please take a look facts about Finland where people are being equally poor due high taxation and bad economy. If you earn more than 5000€ per month, you will be in top 20% of the population. And besides all of these facts, some people still want to be taxed even more heavily “because rich people have too much”.
And yes, while I understand Finnish people are not poor by any means when compared globally, it is still a perfect example how you can keep most of the population “poor” while not producing millionaires or highly profitable business.
I am confused by your comment. What do you define as poor in this context?
It’s a consequence of having money that some people will earn more than others. What I want is that the lowest segment of the population can live with dignity and the highest cannot buy up a state. From what you are saying, Finland actually fills these criteria?
This is the artist: https://newsie.social/@royaards
His cartoons are amazing and he’s not afraid to call a spade a spade. Often Dutch politics, but also some international topics
I like how P. the carpenter is depicted shirtless.
It’s like if incredible cross sections did a book on politics.
These are brilliant
Nationalism is the same, with the guy at the top shouting “watch out, those foreign lads are going to steal your crumbs!”
that’s me falling because of my BPD
Big poopy diaper?
Being poor disorder.
borderline personality disorder
Black Mirror S01E02
Still one of the best episodes
Reminds me of the comics from the early 1900s!
JFC that’s apt.
that’s hyperrealist.
Gd does this one slap.
It will trickle down any day now, bro
Never before in my life have I ever seen more accurate depiction of trickle down economics.
Just a little too on the nose for my taste, but great non the less.
you mean like this? (same artist)
Exactly like this :D
wow, there’s a lot going on in that comic.
Imagine what one billion coins look like aligned end to end!
24.26mm wide quarter…6065km long line of quarters!
12.8billion in quarters would make a continuous line of quarters all around the earth!
Naa some would sink
I just don’t see any so-called communist countries without literally the exact same problems, so I can’t believe that capitalism is the cause. I think centralizing everything in a communism would be equivalent to monopolies and oligopolies in a capitalism.
Rather than promote communism we’re better off promoting more direct and fair democracy.
Not to support communism as a plausible solution, but all “communist” countries were what we call “state capitalist”. Communism is “worker control of the means of production” not “state control of the means of production”. Communism ideologically doesn’t have the “centralised” ownership of everything that you are referring to. But all “Actually Existing Socialist” countries like Soviet Russia, Cuba, China, etc… did have that centralisation.
All I’m saying is that when you see people advocating for leftist, progressive, social democratic, or “communist” ideas none of them are talking about state ownership of all industry.
Communism is “worker control of the means of production” not “state control of the means of production”.
There’s lots of interpretation of communism though …
I think there not being any true communisms despite the attempts supports my point. An Anarcho-Communism fails because it stops being an anarchy the moment one person grabs enough resources and gains enough authority to enforce their will on the rest. An organized democratic communism might work, as I already mentioned in my first comment, but that’s absolutely not what the sort of people in these threads are advocating for. Just scroll through and you’ll see people advocating for destruction of the state entirely, sometimes you’ll even see them mask off and say specifically destruction of western nations.
Hey man maybe don’t compare situations we aren’t in and face the fact that capitalism has failed once again. Think way back when you played monopoly as a kid, how did every game end? Even a boot smoocher like you should be able to comprehend this simple equation.
So you’re allowed to use practical examples but I’m not. You also skipped over my critique of the ideology and not the example, ironically supporting my point on accident when you criticized monopoly because in the previous comment I compared the centralized economy of communism to an oligopoly and a monopoly.
I can smell the leather through my screen.
Maybe you should stop licking boots, then.
Maybe if you weren’t so good at capitalism you could share? I know it’s scary to think about a world where one day you won’t get to wear the boots, but that’s your future son. Also you should revisit what the word “through” means.
Alternatively, learn the meaning of words.
I think the so-called communist countries in the 20th century (like the soviet union) failed mostly because they didn’t motivate enough people to work hard enough.
The 20th century was a time of much innovation, where lots of growth was required to keep pace with the ideas people had. So, for growth you need hard-working people to do it. Capitalism had that because harder working people got higher wages. In communism “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”.
Nowadays, the situation would be very different because we don’t have so much growth anymore, so there’s less demand for human workers. So even if we can’t motivate that many people to work hard, it would mostly be fine because we don’t need so many people to work in the first place …
They failed because they were dictatorships. A bunch of greedy people grabbed power when the previos state fell and their citizenship were forced to endure starvation, hard labor, and class divides.
I just don’t see any so-called communist countries without literally the exact same problems
This comic refers to wealth inequality and appropriation of wealth by an owner class. This is not what happened in communist countries despite what CIA propaganda would have us believe. The top 1% in the USSR only had about 4% of the total income, compared to 20%ish for modern, capitalist Russia and similar figures for USA and such. Also the top earners were not corrupt bureaucrat politicians, but highly trained professionals like university professors, prominent artists, and other members of the intelligentsia. Similar figures are true for communist Cuba, Maoist China, etc.
Communism can be the most democratic system. For example, Vietnam is right now starting a process of dismantling a lot of bureaucracy and state power and to give power to local communes to have budgetary decisions, administrative power, etc. Luna Oi, a member of the Vietnamese communist party and a youtuber, has a very recent video talking about it.
This post has the word Capitalism™ written at the top. The USSR had a massive prison industrial complex which still holds the record for highest percentage of population imprisoned on earth, the CCP and Cuba are dystopian nightmares.
Lmfao thanks for not arguing against inequality, which was the point of the post, and moving the goalposts to “vague authoritarianism during WW2” because I literally proved you wrong with real-world data.
The USSR had a massive prison industrial complex
Simply not true. The USSR GULAG system was essentially dismantled during the 1950s, when the Nazi threat was eliminated, and the imprisonment rates dropped dramatically afterwards. Mass imprisonment was a temporary measure imposed from the threat of Nazi sabotage of the country, and it was a dark chapter of the Soviet Union that lasted less than two decades, whereas the socialist experiment lasted 70+ years. This is in opposition to an actual ever-growing prison industrial complex like that of the USA, which is systematic because it generates immense wealth for some corporations.
the CCP and Cuba are dystopian nightmares.
Poor Cubans, enjoying higher life expectancy than the USA, highest number of doctors per capita IN THE WORLD, and recently passing a Democratic referendum to reform the constitution in order to enshrine LGBTQ rights. Poor Chinese, seeing increases of 5% of consumer power yearly with an average inflation of 0%, truly harrowing.
Stop spreading false CIA propaganda, the community is called “actual socialism”, not “USA propagandized left-punching faux-socialism”.
China is not very communist if i may say
I explicitly said Maoist China. China’s wealth inequality has risen since the market reforms.
Regardless: the Communist Party of China controls 60% of the stock market and has powerful direction over the economy; it’s the largest producer of Electric Vehicles and batteries, and produces 93% of the world’s Solar Photovoltaic modules, has an extensive high speed electric railway network, promotes reforestation projects in China and abroad, builds civil infrastructure in the global south, and hasn’t carried out wars, sabotages, economic blockades or invasions of any country in the past 40 years. Also, the Chinese people enjoy the highest degree of satisfaction with their government of any country in the world. Sure, they’re not my ideal form of government, in that private companies exist, inequality is still comparatively high, and healthcare and education aren’t completely free as was the case in the Soviet Union, and importantly they’re not helping emancipatory anticolonial projects to the degree that the Soviet Union did.
However, the Chinese model of government is still orders of magnitude than what we have in the west, not just inward but especially outward. Call it by the words you wanna call it, but Socialism with Chinese characteristics is still much better than what we have in the west.
Nothing has effectively changed since Mao, the same exact CCP is in charge of China, in fact real estate rentals continued even after Mao’s famous execution spree.
Proving that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Market economy had been essentially abolished under Mao, and the Deng Xiaoping reforms brought back a market economy. This is a huge change, hardly “nothing changed since Mao”
