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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

That's actually a significant reason I am a capitalist. A capitalist, free-market system is one in which you are free to set up whatever little organizations you want, and they live and die on their own merits. There is no contradiction in running a highly socialist or even actively communist co-op in a capitalistic society, because it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom.

This is not a conventional definition of socialism or capitalism. I don't have a problem with that per se, since the terms have long since become so fuzzy as to be useless without definition within an essay, but it is a little odd to see you proudly labeling what would more conventionally be called libertarianism or capitalism as "socialism". In this context, I'm not sure this makes any sense.

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You’re missing the part of capitalism that deals with capital.

If your organization is, say, an automobile company, you can’t just get together with your friends and say “hey, let’s make cars and sell them”. You need a factory building, you need tools, etc., etc., long before you see any cars. The difference between capitalism and socialism, broadly speaking, is the difference between depending on private or public money to finance that initial investment.

How do socialists propose capital investment is supposed to be done efficiently, if it can't rely upon profit motive on the part of the investors?

Efficiency is not everything. If you steal something from me, it's incredibly efficient for me to come over to your house with a gun, but nobody would argue that it's moral. We should be looking to make a society that's morally acceptable first, and then optimizing for efficiency afterwards.

Secondly, while capitalism is efficient on paper, it often isn't in the real world. There's no such thing as a free market, and nepotism, politicking, and incompetence still run rampant. Every societal system has its share of problems.

I've come to believe that efficiency itself is moral. A system that perfectly adheres to all the nice-sounding deontological principles you can name, but leaves everyone in poverty, is less moral than a system with a few dashes of violence and injustice that leaves nearly everyone much better off.

I'd certainly agree that I have fairly utilitarian leanings. I _used_ to be super hardcore minarchist Libertarian. Maximizing everyone's happiness is a worthy goal.

I'm just not 100% sure what the best way to get there is. I don't think that just because the system kind of works okay now means that it will forever.

I _used_ to be super hardcore minarchist Libertarian.

Yeah, me too. And I think you're still making the same mistake I used to, in a different sense--you're picking nice-sounding, moralistic idealism over pragmatism.

Of the systems so far tested, some sort of Stateful mixed economy seems the best.[1] Of the parameters you can adjust in that system, we have observed various effects. The way to find whatever political truths we can is the same as the way to find other truths--empiricism. Empiricism is hard, especially with political systems, but it's better than moralistic or idealistic handwaving of any variety. It's not terribly convincing to philosophize about a political ideal. Why not take what we've got and find evidence-based ways of improving it?

[1] Of the systems so far untested, we have no data. They might turn out to be complete disasters, impossible to implement, or so strange almost no one outside a few logically-minded dogmatists would possibly agree to them. I would actually support voluntary social experiments in setting up different political systems, but you would have to make them compatible in some way with the status quo without hurting the validity of the experiment. Large scale nature preserves with small numbers of primitivists, protected by an existing State from redevelopment of the land or hostile violence from anti-primitivists, would be one example of this. Another is similar to something interestingly adopted by China: the "special economic zone".

"it is not part of the capitalism idea that you must run that way from top to bottom"

Well then it wouldn't be capitalism all the way down? It would only be capitalism on the outside, socialism on the inside.

Capitalism is a system in which individuals are rewarded according to what the market will give them. If you don't do that you simply don't have capitalism.

I don't think there really is a popular definition for capitalism. People who use the word always use it to mean what they want it to mean, usually in the context of praising or criticizing capitalist society.

The best definition (in my ever humble opinion) is that capitalism is a society where the means of production live in a free market, which is completely consistent with what the GP said.

I believe that the common definition in most folks' minds is that capitalism refers to the system we have today in the USA, where the government rewards business interests with handouts, protective regulations, and the like.

This is not capitalism, though. What people are experiencing and objecting to is corporatism [1].

I believe that if people would give real capitalism a chance, the result would be positive. But as it stands now, the economics are too intertwined with the politics. In order to successfully implement real capitalism, the power that the state wields to erect regulations that can be subverted would have to be stripped: we'd have to neuter the government. Clearly the government would never allow that to happen.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporatism

It can be argued that as soon as capital begins to concentrate, the benefactors begin to affect policy making to their advantage. Thus you end up with the current system.

Just as attempts at establishing communism end up with coercion and purges of dissent, theoretical capitalism ends up with powerful interest groups in practice.

Since Capitalism ultimately depends on the social relationship between owners and workers, where owners purchase the output of worker's activity for less than they sell it to an outside party that desires that output, accumulating and reinvesting the difference ( i.e. Capital ) I think that is a much more important attribute to focus on than the means Capitalist organizations use to determine prices. ( Markets vs State Planning ). The argument you are repeating is a distraction from this central fact.

From the point of view of the 95% who have no Capital, the 95% who only have their ability to exchange labor for currency, life is fundamentally the same. >40 hours a week traded to somebody else for the currency I need to pay for food, shelter, and entertainment. The value I create in that 40 hours is always greater than I was paid, and the difference is always accumulated by a better connected and more socially powerful minority. Markets and State Planning are superfluous details in this equation.

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