Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem? | Hacker News Reader

Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

fastcompany.com

44 pointsFripplebubby68 comments

Every system has problems. Capitalism is the best we have found at managing resources at scale. The problem of course is that wealth tends to create wealth, which causes wealth to accumulate at the top. This leads to a completely distorted economy, civil unrest, and eventually a crash. The usual solution is to task a government with making sure that wealth is taken from the top and reinjected at the bottom to keep the system from crashing. It's an ugly hack, but it's the only thing that has worked. The big problem with this is that wealth also tends to accumulate political power which weakens this check on capitalism. There's no easy solution, but the first place to start would be strengthening campaign finance rules and conflict of interest rules. The legislators should never be cozy with industry. In fact the heads of industry should be angry with government pretty much all of the time, if they are not then the government is probably not doing its job. Apple should be on a massive propaganda campaign about how cruel and unfair it is that all of the world governments are taking away their profits and giving them (indirectly) to poor people. They should be crying about how greedy governments have stolen like three quarters of a trillion dollars from them. Hedge fund managers should be angry about how the government is always there when they make huge windfalls. It should seems super unfair what the government is doing, because what capitalism does to the poor is just as unfair.

Oh, but business interests are always complaining. They face no price or consequence for griping. They set up TV networks to do 24 hour pissing & moaning, and they call it "news."

What blows my mind is that the middle class and the poor who should know better, are simply to damned lazy to stand up for themselves. And many of them simply want a strongman to tell them what to do. That is, when they're not fantasizing that they'll be allowed into the club of the rich if they only provide enough fealty. It's a completely warped populace.

The big danger, IMO, is the sheer frustration that the modern social and economic system puts on the demographic mentioned (18-29 year olds). "Maybe we should start smashing stuff until things are better" is really unappealing when you have a meaningful job, a spouse and children, a house, or are otherwise invested into the system. And when you're frustrated enough to have a negative view of markets, well, the field is ripe for extraordinarily dangerous mass movements.

Millennials are infantilized until later in life and, by and large, haven't been allowed to hold real responsibility until 22 or ever later. The affordability of passing gate-keeping milestones - such as owning a home, or getting a degree, or affording a stay-at-home wife and children - in terms of available opportunities has risen drastically. The divorce rate has risen tremendously, having an unprecedented rise in adults raised in broken homes.

Like, congratulations Baby Boomers, you successfully made housing and education expensive enough that your loans and real estate let you retire off the proceeds of people working to pay off their crushing debt. That just means a generation of angry single men in their twenties working pointless jobs, living with their parents, and frustrated with their inability to fulfill their social needs. If you're not scared of creating this demographic, you haven't studied history and psychology.

I think the deeper problem is that labor has no pricing power. Capitalism works for more people when people who earn a salary can buy things that increase real demand for companies. But workers are strapped for money, and have no real political assistance or prospects for a better future. Earning a living is increasingly a sucker's game.

Unfortunately, America's political system doesn't allow for a nuanced solution that gently puts the brakes on rampant globalization. Instead, talking heads who only play for ALL THE MARBLES see this as an either/or situation. I believe in the inevitability of globalization. The question we need to ask ourselves is, do we need to get there next week? Can we get there just a tiny bit slower? Can we create an economic space where people not living on space station Elysium (the 2013 movie) can have a life not defined by exasperating financial anxiety?

You can have capitalism and globalization without having policy that favors capital over labor.

The problem we have is that people consider existing policy agnostic.

Aren't unions the way to give labor pricing power? Of course the problem with Unions is that they are a big Prisoners Dilemma game. You need everybody in the union or the people outside of it undercut the whole system.

Globalism makes it extremely difficult to maintain unions without significant government support. Can you imagine a scenario where every textile worker in the world was a member of a union? How horrible would it be if they couldn't be kept as wage slaves and paid pennies per hour out in Bangladesh? Your clothes would cost more for sure.

but, it's more than that because true competitive capitalism would allow prices to come down, but technology companies designing system that don't pass wealth on to consumers. google advertising costs a fortune who pays for it in higher prices? why do companies need to keep upgrading excel?

This article reads to me like a long list of problems caused by government and blamed on capitalism.

I'm biased though - I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and I've spent orders of magnitude more time considering these sorts of questions than the vast majority of people who are not so politically involved.

Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you has spent less time considering these sorts of questions than you have?

As a counterpoint, I'd suggest the thousands of political-science, economic, and philosophy scholars who all disagree with you (as do the vast majority of humans who have ever lived and appreciate the social contract).

You may be correct and everyone else may be wrong, but I don't think it's accurate to dismiss other people as not having considered things as much as you have.

Overall you make a good point. In the context of this article, I tend to think the OP comment has thought about it harder than the author. These articles like "Down with capitalism, didn't you hear 51% of millennials don't like it! And what about that fire in london?" are invariably written by radical left-wing disciplines where the authors have no evidence of deep understanding of the issues - here anthropology.

This article is not scholarly or deep. I'm not sure we could (or should) expect more, given its medium. It's a pop-politics article, so I found the scope to be appropriate. I also felt the implied intent was to inspire people to read deeper dives written elsewhere.

As for "radical left-wing," I don't disagree with the terminology. But I do disagree with the implication that the radical left-wing is a niche in the US. I'd say that it's quite mainstream, which you yourself support by suggesting that it's popular among Millenials (almost half the US population).

The author of the article also suggests that radical left-wing ideas are now mainstream, and I'd propose that that's the whole point. These ideas have become mainstream, so let's start calling them what they are: socialist ideas.

> Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you has spent less time considering these sorts of questions than you have?

Of course not, that's why I qualified that statement; to be clear that I was speaking about the general public, not those who hold a contrary worldview that merely disagree with me.

> You may be correct and everyone else may be wrong

I actually don't think it's a matter of "correct" or "incorrect" so much as one of values. I value individual liberty over all else, while others are more utilitarian in their approach.

> but I don't think it's accurate to dismiss other people as not having considered things as much as you have.

Of course not - that's why I enjoy talking about political and economics. One or both of the people involved are likely to learn something in the process :)

Sorry, but sounds like something straight out of /r/iamverysmart

Do you have any historic evidence that countries with smaller governments are wealthier & more efficient than countries where government spending is a large proportion of the GDP? (hint: it's all the western developed democracies)

> Sorry, but sounds like something straight out of /r/iamverysmart

Yeah, I was afraid it would come off that way and tried to soften it by qualifying my last statement. Apparently, it didn't work.

> Do you have any historic evidence that countries with smaller governments are wealthier & more efficient than countries where government spending is a large proportion of the GDP?

I didn't make that assertion. All I was trying to do is say that from my perspective most of the points raised in the article appear to be caused by government involvement, not by capitalism.

There's a quip in the show "Archer" (forget exactly the words) where Mallory tells everyone something along the lines of "move up to my tax bracket and see if you keep spouting that socialist propaganda". I found it hilarious because it is true for many out there that if you suddenly find yourself moved from your minimum wage job with Obamacare insurance into a position of making a huge salary with legit benefits, you suddenly shift your position on the fairness of Capitalism and whether or not people are getting too much from the government and how they should do what you did to get ahead.

Additionally, while it certainly appears that the richer get richer and it does nothing to help those that are struggling, you have to ask yourself whether or not you'd do anything different if it were you in the position of wealth and power to change how people earn money for the work they contribute. Then you'd have to wonder if people could truly come together and share everything under extreme government over site, but why wonder when there is decades of data to prove that it doesn't work?

yes, people are always motivated by self interest, even for what seems like altruistic actions the underlying motivation is that it makes them feel good about themselves.

I'm sure there's a name for this but a modern day label could be the "Facebook Syndrome", where seemingly endless goals of altruism is at its core, motivated by self interest and feeling good about oneself, to the detriment of the people you profess to be helping.

I think it's called virtue signaling. and yeah, it's rampant on social media.

possibly or maybe there are actually a emotions called sympathy and empathy.

Everybody knows that capitalism has problem. The trick is figuring out what the next better bad system would be. And as far as I can see the richest, smartest and most powerful people are currenlty all thinking hard exactly about that question. So far nobody has found the answer, but suggestions are welcome.

No one has a concrete answer, but capitalism could work better if the market were freer -- and by "freer" I don't mean less regulated. I mean that people have more freedom to make choices.

For example, we don't currently have a free labor market because it's extremely expensive (in terms of time and money) for a low-wage worker to find a new job. Those people are trapped. If we had a better safety net for people at the bottom, the labor market could be more competitive.

Another example is lacking knowledge. The market could (and should) stop buying products that harm them, but sometimes the only party who knows the product is harmful is the producer. Cigarettes were an example for a long time because the tobacco companies buried their own research. The government now forces health disclosures on cigarettes, which makes the market work like it's supposed to.

There are tons of examples where a "socialist" policy actually leads to more personal freedom, more efficient markets, and less need for government intervention into individuals' decisions.

(I would include universal basic income as a social policy, but it's actually not! It's supposed by both libertarians and socialists. It might be the "next better bad" adjustment to our current system.)

The problem is if you're priced out of decent healthcare and/or education options it really doesn't matter how much extra spending money you got.

If you're arguing that health care and education should be free, then I agree with you.

If I were running a society, my goal would be an even playing field. Everyone has the same access to health care, education, and any other opportunity that affects their happiness. Beyond that, they would have the choice to pursue whatever they wanted.

My society could not exist now, nor could it exist in the past. Miserable, oppressed people were required to support everyone else (e.g. coal miners).

We're getting to a point in history where that may change. Robots might be able to do all the bad, boring, dangerous jobs.

Basically Wall-E.

Anonymity of elected officials.

Everyone complains about capitalism. Is there an actual solution? Is there an alternative that benefits the community as much as Socialism does? And then, what do we do with the crap parts of Socialism? Do we just TRY it and hope it works? There's never been a real plan set forth other than "Capitalism sucks!" or "Capitalism is the root of all our problems!" How do we solve for it?

Then... how do we get people to buy into it on a global scale without it falling apart under the weight of social discussions?

Neither is actually bad. Problem is always in people.

Http://Catallax.info

Giving it the old college try.

The experiments you're looking for are the socialist democracies of northern Europe. Look at the Netherlands for an example.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the ideals behind Distributism[0]. I just don't know, particularly, how to make it work usefully with sectors that benefit from economies of scale (like ISPs)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

You should look into various flavors of anarchism, like Syndicalism, that have tried to answer that question.

I wonder how much of it is the system's fault and how much is human nature's fault. Regardless of the system, there is always a group that will want more, be it money and/or power. Many of the problems cited in this article wouldn't be a problem if not for pure self interest and lack of empathy for the society as a whole. The JP Morgan reaction to the attempt of raising wages is the perfect example for that.

Consider that vast amounts of capital come from pension funds that invest in companies which have a duty to provide returns to shareholders. Would pension fund stakeholders agree on having lower pensions when they get old so that current workers earn more? Economics is far more complicated than altruism supposes.

Socialists/Communists not satisfied with 200 million+ deaths, must want to hit an even 1 billion.

Blows my mind people can even be calling for socialism while we have a real time implosion going on in Venezuela right now. It's ending like every other socialist regime in history, cannibalism, famine, riots, and murder. Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous.

Actually I'm not surprised, just look up Yuri Bezmenov's talk on ideological subversion he foretold everything 30+ years ago

You mention Venezuela, but what about India? France, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Denmark are all arguably socialist -- certain much more so than the US.

Any economic system fails when practiced by corrupt or incompetent governments. There are many failed capitalist states, too.

Edit: if you want to talk about scaling, China and India are debatably doing well (or at least improving rapidly), and both countries have 1.3B people.

China had an interesting idea with special economic zones: let people opt out of socialism if they want to, but stay within the country and get basic protections.

None of those countries are communist. They have large social welfare states, and tax rates that might push 50%, but essentially rely on the free market for most economic decisionmaking.

In many ways China is closer to pure capitalism than most countries on the planet. The vestiges of "socialism" primarily live on in their authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-owned-enterprises. China is slowly moving away from the latter two as their massive problems are uncovered.

I wasn't talking about communism.

> authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-owned-enterprises

None of these are key tenets of socialism as the article formulates it.

As I've said elsewhere, historical socialism is not the socialism anyone is advocating. No one is suggesting Stalinism.

I don't know about a lot of other countries but India's economic boom started after liberalisation[1] in the 90s, before that India was far poorer.

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

The news must be covering up the ongoing massacres in Norway.

They seem to be covering up the amount of hand grenade attacks in Sweden.

Just a reminder -> social democracy is not socialism.

Why not? The state takes resources from the wealthy and uses them to provide services to the general population. That's socialism in a nutshell.

Try again. Socialism is where the government controls ALL means of production. They set how much toilet paper is produced daily, and they do it based on arbitrary means not supply and demand.

Social Democracy -- is capitalism with some programs added in, heck Police, Fire, and Roads maintained by the state are SOCIAL DEMOCRACY programs -- maybe you should have to pay if you want the fire truck to come put out your fire, call 911 what's your emergency? And can I have your credit card?

Dictionary definition: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole

Under social democracy you can still start companies, still own businesses, nobody's taking that away, we just want to make sure that those who earn the most off the backs of the people's work contribute to lift up those who are burdened the most at the bottom.

You've setup a strawman to argue against. Few people think that extreme is a good idea. History has proven that it does not scale well and is considerably less efficient at allocating resources than capitalism. It's also highly prone to corruption because the power is concentrated at the top, which is ironically exactly the same problem that capitalism has, even though those communist systems were built to solve the problems of capitalism.

In this US any talk about redistributing wealth will have your policy (and you) branded as a socialist.

>Few people think that extreme is a good idea

Unfortunately people has short memory. In the last elections here in Spain more people than ever voted far-left parties, including supporters of terrorist groups. Just the coalition between communists (Unidos Podemos) received more than 5 million votes.

Even convicted terrorists from ETA, and Terra Lliure won their seats.

Sadly, far-left and far-right populism is going up in Europe.

An option besides socialism though that looks interesting is the Venus Project, or Resource Based Economy -- where all goods and services are available to all people without the need for money, credits, barter or any other means.

1. Those countries are all capitalist economies, some with more economic freedom than the US. They can't be used to defend socialism/communism

2. We're on HN so we all now about scaling. There's a big difference between 5 million and 300+ million citizens.

3. The US subsidizes those countries in terms of defense and innovation in health care. Pharma makes their profits off us while they have price controls in those other countries.

http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

I think you meant to respond to me, but accidentally responded to someone else.

USA spends 50% of its budget on health-care and social security. Looks pretty socialist to me.

I agree, probably a big part of why the standard of living has dropped so much in recent years. We should reduce the budget significantly. Government massively missallocates resources

Keep up the good work. You are such a great example of Poe's law. I can't even

What's with the ad-hominem? At least in the healthcare market, There are good reasons to believe that the massive government intervention is a bad use of resources.

People on Medicaid claim to value the services at only 1/5 of their cost. If you taking that estimate at face value, if you shut down medicaid entirely and just paid each former recipient 20% of the price you'd been paying to provide health insurance, they would be better off. You can debate those numbers and methodology, but it's very suggestive, and very real.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/07/med...

As the article mentions, if you take away Medicaid people still have access to the prime mechanism for socialized medicine in the US: the law that prevents hospitals from turning away emergency patients.

This time they'll get it right. Don't worry comrade, ignore that in order to make it work, the government will take property from one person and give it to another at the barrel of a gun, whether they agree or not.

This is more equitable.

This sort of "analysis" is absurd on its face. There is nowhere on Earth that you would want to live that doesn't have a government that takes property by force and gives to others.

Taxation is necessary to live in a stable society. The question is, how much to take and how to spend it.

We've seen how our current path works out. The rich accumulate more and more wealth and with it more political power until such time that the masses are sufficiently poor and disenfranchised that they engage in a bloody revolt.

property is defined by the government. unless you can defend it yourself.

Capitalism has caused hundreds of millions of deaths as well, without the same military interference that socialist countries have experienced. Your analysis needs a lot more nuance.

Another required nuance is the difference between modern socialism, Marxism, and Stalin-Leninism. Lumping them together is like suggesting that the US has the same form of capitalism as Saudi Arabia.

No one is proposing anything remotely similar to Stalinism/USSR-esque or Nazi socialism. When people bring those things up, it's a straw man.

Can you give me examples that come anywhere close to Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc?

Sure!

America did it twice: native genocide and African slavery.

if this were reddit..I'd say "Username checks out...".. but this isn't reddit.

One thing I'm curious about...Trump says Let's make America Great again--was he talking before white people came and before the genocide? Or after? Was he talking about Slavery? Or the lynch mobs of the KKK? What about criminal enterprises and suffering during Prohibition and the Great Depression?

Damn, I long for the an FDR style leader to come along, well at this point we need quite a few to fill congress and start making America about the people again, not corporate interests.

While socialism/communism were good excuses to concentrate enormous amount of power and dictate every aspect of people's lives, the ideas were never the problem. It's just those concentrating wealth want you to believe otherwise, so they can keep get wealthier and wealthier. It's not that hard to help the poor without a dictatorship, the system is already in place in every country in the world, just one small law and there will be no more homeless, poor and unhealthy, only slightly annoyed and less rewarded rich.

Thats an incredibly unfair comparison. You're judging communism based on the merits of its intentions and ideas, meanwhile condemning capitalism for its failings in practice.

Oh of course. Next time when we implement socialism, nobody at all will be interested in concentrating power and abusing it for personal benefit. How silly of me to think that might happen for the hundred and first time after a hundred times in the past.

People will always do this.

The goal becomes to leave the power in a democratized space, as socialism dictates. When labor members own their fair shares of the companies that are interacting on the market, they will make decisions socially and profit proportionally. Exploitation in its current form will be greatly reduced. Naturally any economic system bears its own unique issues to contend with, but these can be addressed in time for what seems at this point to be a net improvement in inequality.

Great. Let's confuse socialism with communism yet again. At least it invalidates your argument from the start.

Socialism is government ownership of capitol. Communism is a hypothetical end state where everyone collectively controls the capitol.

In my mind they are fairly easy to confuse.

Sure, if that's your definition of communism. The only communism I've ever experienced or read about on our planet, however, is the opposite, where one or a few people control everything, not just capital, and subject everyone else to persecution. So really, it shouldn't be that hard not to confuse it with socialism if you look at the actual manifestation of the ideology instead of the bullshit that justifies it.

Wow, you really have a lot of things mixed up here. How can you make such strong claims about socialism when there are so many factors involved, e.g. we did not see socialism implemented without a dictatorship. Also, why didn't you try to compare deaths caused by capitalism.

> Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous. This blows my mind. You think that obesity is due to prosperity, when all those poor people who cannot afford decent food and physical exercise are the ones who are getting obese.

Please, consider refraining from posting before trying to understand correlations and connections between multiple factors from which you draw such strong (and very misleading) conclusions.

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