Comment by damosneeze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by damosneeze | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if the elephant in the room were addressed: We are Not in a capitalist society. We are in a corporatist society.

It took a joint collaboration between corporations and government to blow up the economy with the 2008 financial crisis. And then the government bailed out the financial elites. In a capitalist society, those who failed would go under. In fact, we probably wouldn't have reached that crisis point, because the Fed would not exist (and would not be manipulating interest rates), there would be no revolving door between corporations and government (Former Goldman Sachs CEO becomes Treasury Secretary, promptly gives trillions of dollars to Wall St; Former senior executive for Monsanto becomes head of FDA).

Granted, pure capitalism is not exactly possible given the flawed existence of humans and our fragile societies. But let's at least call our current system what it is: corporatism. Maybe even with a dash of nepotism, militarism and fascism.

You're the only voice of reason on this thread.

What we should be really scared of is a population whose majority clamors for democracy yet prefers to trust government over holding representatives accountable.

The problem is the people have been rendered powerless through mis-education to the point they've forgotten their non-interventionist history. Keeping guns is necessary but not sufficient for the government to fear its people.

People have also been convinced the only way to get educated is to go into debt, since independent thought is ridiculed on mainstream entertainment venues. That gives governments an opportunity to control what people learn.

It goes on and on but it all starts with what you rightfully noted, that this is no Capitalism, but Corporatism. I wouldn't expect a university professor (even an economist) to understand this finer point as I know first-hand those people either have approved opinions or they don't have a job in academia.

For those who only dabble in economics (and here I include up to Ph.Ds in Economics) here's a hint: if your economy only has one money, and its price is centrally controlled, as interest rates are by the Fed in the U.S., what you have is not Capitalism, because no saving of capital is taking place.

Great points.

On the topic of mainstream education, my brother is "unschooling" his children. They went to public school for one year, then he saw what was happening not only with the level of standardized education, but also the drills to "prepare" for school shootings. Schools prepare not by hiring security guards, but by having realistic simulations of a shooter, and having the children cower under their desks. Welcome to the new normal: Dept of Education's standards for dealing with ~~nuclear~~ handgun proliferation.

i visited my brother last year and it was interesting to see his kids interact socially. this is typically one of the big arguments that comes up for homeschooled children: How will your children grow socially? How will they learn to interact? After watching them at their golf practice, surrounded by tons of other kids, it was clear: my brother's kids were leaders, and the other kids were mostly followers.

his kids learn what they want, guided by their father's loose curriculum. They started learning algebra at 7, with the assistance of some very clever iPad apps. They read. They play games. And most of all, they enjoy life. They're not just waiting for recess. Or high school. Or college. Or their first job.

Those kids will be just fine.

Show me a society that is pure anything. Capitalism is an idea among many ideas that influence society -- pure capitalism doesn't exist in the real world.

> We are Not in a capitalist society.

You can't be more wrong. The term capitalism was pretty much coined by Marx to describe the system he lived in (where production capital is mostly privately owned and labor is a commodity). The definition still holds true today. Maybe you can call today corporatism on top of that, but then the late 19th century was ruled by corporations more than today...

I frankly don't understand this line of reasoning. Why don't you just accept the name capitalism for what it really is, why the need to "own" the term and twist its original meaning? We have plenty of perfectly good names for system you probably describe, such as libertarianism or anarchocapitalism or minarchism or propertarianism... It seems that you're just unwilling to accept that free markets simply tend to being not free as capital accumulates.

Leninism/Stalinism/those fucking Trots/Maoism isn't true Communism.

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