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Comment by cbeach | Hacker News Reader

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with an alternative to capitalism that isn't communism, or some dilute form of communism.

We have socialism - the erosion of capitalism to provide a reward for those that won't or can't work.

What's your "new possibility"? Without a proposal, your point is moot.

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We are moving into a direction of nearly full automation. Most of us in this community can probably envision a world were robots do all the "blue color" work and lower "white color work" and soon even more with the progress we make in AI (Deep Blue as the most prominent example)

Over the next decades we will lose millions of jobs and need an highly educated workforce for the fewer jobs remaining. But for some people the saying "you cant teach an old dog new tricks" will come true and this part of society needs a way to live in dignity. Talking for example about Truck/Taxi Driver / Assembly Workers / Mailmen you name it.

We as a society have a choice to make and i hope it wont be one you can see in several Dystopien movies.

We have seen communism and it did not work now we are on the full side of the other spectrum of capitalism and it does not work as well (Income inequality). Unconditional basic income could be one solution of many.

Unconditional basic income would be my choice. Its advantages unify the Left and Right.

Capitalism can't be communism because one is a financial / economical system and the other is a political system. The two are related but not always in the same way. European countries, especially the Scandinavian ones are very Socialist and capitalist. China is an even 'weirder' example. There already are many different forms of capitalism as an economic system under different political systems.

Scandinavian countries aren't nearly as socialist or successful as non-Scandinavian socialists claim they are:

http://www.bullshitexposed.com/scandinavian-socialism-debunk...

I absolutely don't understand the point this website is trying to make, apart from "Norway is backed by big oil", which is true and the suicide part (which cannot be linked clearly to the economic model), everything else is either really subjective or does not account for the difference of purchasing power in the different countries.

EDIT: Because I was downvoted:

> "1. Scandinavia isn’t really all that socialist"

Socialism does not have the same meaning in Europe and in the US and apparently, this was forgotten. They are liberal socialist countries, if you prefer.

> "2. Scandinavia isn’t actually as prosperous as liberals like to claim"

Raw GDP is unrelated how people actually live, I don't get this point.

> 3. Scandinavians have lower gross and disposable incomes

There is no mention of purchasing power, you can't buy the same things with the same salary in Dollars, it's comparing apples and oranges.

> 4. But money isn’t everything! What about the poor?

There is no mention anywhere in this part of the poverty rate of the different countries, just a graph of the poverty in the US (which does not argue for his point).

> 5. Norway is backed by big oil

Yes, and what about the other ones ?

> 6. Scandinavians aren’t as happy as Americans

Suicide rates are much much more than just economics themselves, and I don't understand why this is there.

Banks that work properly would be the ideal form of capitalism, to me. In Canada at least, very little lending takes place to people who want to increase their capital doing useful things, unless you already have $10M+ in assets in order to get fancy AR-secured credit lines and other secured loans. The only way to get a loan is to tell the bank you want a house (capital gains but no value creation) or to go on vacation (consumption). In theory, you could create capital doing productive things, store it in the bank, and they lend it to others who can do useful things with it. I am thinking small business, as opposed to vacation consumption. I would be pretty "Liberal" or socialist about how I allocated money to small ventures. Almost anyone could get a small loan to start a venture, and then how that goes determines their lending credibility in the future. Again, I am sure this is where we started, but we are far from it now.

Your definition of every form of economics that isn't an extreme libertarian version of capitalism as "communism or a form of socialism" makes further discourse moot.

That's a bit of a straw man. But anyway, if you want to contribute something to the debate, why not suggest an alternative system?

It's not a strawman, it's literally what you said.

Here's 4 alternatives to capitalism: http://thenextsystem.org/new-systems-possibilities-and-propo...

Some of these, like Participatory Economics, have lots of literature/tutorials behind them.

I would say that a "new possibility" would be acknowledging that a 100% capitalist society (whatever that would look like) is about as sensible as a 100% socialist society.

I don't want to buy food from a state controlled organisation because they'd be crap at it. However, I'm not keen on healthcare being provisioned individually and privately or relying entirely on the market for policing or national security.

That's the "dilute form of communism" I was referring to. Socialism is not a "new possibility."

I concede, though, that nationalised health and defence has major benefits.

My extremely humble suggestion is merely that acknowledging that a "free market/capitalistic" approach works best for many things and a "collective/socialistic" approach works for other things and stop pretending that its all of one or all of the other.

I think the main difference between the moderate supporters of free market vs. moderate supporters of socialistic approach (who are not pure libertarians or pure socialists) is the question of the default.

"Socialist" would say: "It looks like all-around outcome might be better if this thing is regulated or restricted - so let's do that".

Free market supported would say "let's not mess with people's freedom unless it is clear that not intervening in this particular instance is overwhelmingly harmful".

For what is worth, I think many people favoring state intervention have a hard time making distinction between "I don't like this thing" and "this thing should be forbidden or restricted".

I'm interested that you associate socialism with regulation and restriction - I guess as I'm from the UK I tend to associate it with service provision, particularly the NHS which is an avowedly socialist endeavor (and a pretty successful one at that).

A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

NB I agree about your point about the default - I would very much go with the assumption that the free market should be left to provide services unless there is a really good reason why the state might be good at it.

Well, having NHS as a citizen also comes with mandatory participation in financing it's operation - you can't opt-out of financing the NHS. That is the regulation and restriction side of equation.

That doesn't make it automatically bad of course, socialized healthcare is probably a good example where socialism works.

"I'm enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd." --Garry Kasparov

"Free market" people are very happy messing with people's freedom if it suits them. Just look at IP laws. The "free market" people were also very happy to get bailouts during the financial crisis in 2008. They wont as much state intervention as everyone else.

We are simply not talking about the same people.

We already live in a form of communism: "But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” — which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. ... Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism — and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one." (http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-hope-in...)

I'd be happy with socialism if it meant fewer pointless jobs filled by employees that don't want to do them. I see this as a major problem with our current system.

Did you even read the article? He's talking about the future when machines make scarcity close to moot.

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