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Comment by fghrthtb | Hacker News Reader

"Capitalism does not require the concept of a loser. It's the base human instinct of comparison to ones neighbor that requires the concept of a loser."

I would say that both benefit from the concept of a loser. In fact capitalism and this instinct go hand in hand. Capitalism is a frame work which works with this instinct.

Having said that it is also true that children have a natural instinct to play with their own faeces. Both this preoccupation with poo and the desire to elevate self at the expense of other should be discouraged.

Capitalism sucks, for the reasons eloquently outlined in this article.

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Capitalism, at it's core, is the freedom to offer people a deal and at the same time the freedom to reject deals. If you create something of value, you are free to ask something of value in return. Anybody is free to pay your price, to try to negotiate or to say no. Capitalism is a system where created value is distributed with the least amount of compromise to freedom.

Anything else I feel is sick capitalism, Banks repackaging unsustainable mortgages, hiding their inherent risks is not capitalism, it is lying, obfuscating and misleading. It is crime.

Capitalism is someone creating value and others willingly giving up their time and money (their create value) to get that value. Capitalism a beautiful system but it is ill and wrongly labeled in the current world.

The fundamental issue with that line of thinking is that deal-making only works when one of the parties is not under duress. If your life is on the line, you will take terrible deals, because you have no choice.

Capitalism is a system where the companies hold all the power and labor holds none- because if labor doesn't take the deal, labor will die. You can't negotiate a fair deal under those circumstances.

Which is why you need the government- social safety nets give power back to labor. So do unions. But both have been severely cut back in the past few decades.

Anyone can start a company under capitalism. You are empowered to create wealth yourself and enrich yourself from that creation. That's a beautiful thing and should not be taken for granted.

Anyone with enough capital, though.

In the 20th century you needed a lot of capital to start a company. In the 21st century, you don't.

So how much capital do you reckon you need to start a company, and why isn't that amount "a lot"?

A friend of mine got an MBA at MIT and started a company. He had to spend the first 6 months without any income, living off his savings. On top of the capital he needed to start it.

MIT provides a great book on learning deep learning. Amazon web services and many other big name virtualization services provide free trial periods for their services. A raspberry pi and a cheap tv and keyboard/mouse will get you the ability to write programs and you can get free phone service and internet with absurdly cheap smartphones available at most retail stores. All of the courses you need to work up to a masters in theoretical physics are available through MIT OCW and the perimeter institute or other programs(Stanford, UCI), and there are many programs that will help you with starting up a company. There's no excuse nowadays. A couple of years ago, yes, but now, there's no excuse.

Where do you get rent and food while you're earning the masters degree online?

Get a job as a security guard? Security guards have a surprising amount of down time when it comes to work, and one of my good friends wrapped up his degree while working as a security guard on campus. That's not what you want to hear though. What you likely want to hear is 'Free Monayz!' Well either you're taking that money from someone else who earned it productively or you're taking that money from someone who saved it in the form of inflation if you print it.

So let me get this straight: your solution to labor's subservience to capital is for all the millions of working poor to get jobs as security guards while earning degrees in theoretical physics?

I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.

What capital? We're not building widgets here. You take advantage of the resources that are given to you and make something of yourself. That's how it works.

And any labor force can organize, go on strike or simply leave. (edit: responded to the wrong post, sorry.)

I agree with this. It is why I feel healthcare (where your option may become: Pay or Die) is not a system that should be left to the free market but is better at it's place under a government. Of course this should be a government that operates with the consent of the governed, is kept highly accountable for it's actions and is insensitive to lobbying. I think that especially the latter is undoing many of the benefits of democracy.

Also, usually when people criticize capitalism, they're referring to "the current modern day manic deregulated post-neoliberal form of capitalism" as shorthand. People are probably okay with capitalism as practiced in the postwar era, when there were stronger social safety nets in the West.

Honestly, usually not. There's an argument to be made that capitalism causes industries to tend towards monopolies (or at least oligopolies) in many areas, monopolies centralise money, money equals power, power then gets used to remove safety nets in the name of making more money - so the current state of things is nearly inevitable. Even if the vast, vast majority of cases don't lead to monopolies, it only takes a couple of large industries.

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