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Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

Nonsense. There are things where the pricing mechanism of allowing free enterprise allow us to search for and converge to an optimum. There are other things where information asymmetry, problem opacity, and transaction costs mean that it's better handled a different way.

It isn't an ideological problem. You'll see this choice in places like companies, where people band together to solve a problem rather than invoicing each other to get to some objective.

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More like, the free market works great for certain things (integrated circuits) and horribly for others (prisons, highways).

Between that you have a range of things like healthcare, education, transport and postal systems.

Where you draw the line does correlate heavily with ideology.

Communism on one end and anarcho-captialism on the other.

I don't disagree, but our current socioeconomic/government system leads us to wildly bad situations where we have privatized industries hellbent on extracting every last cent possible from disadvantaged populations (in every sense of the word) and then using that money to further their aims and resource extraction via influencing legislature.

It spreads, it's self perpetuating, it's sick, and it is a disease.

I am in agreement on there being a problem where you can turn money into legislation. That does destabilize the system through regulatory capture. Haven't encountered satisfactory solutions yet.

That's markets, not capitalism. Capitalism is specifically the arrangement where the means of production can be bought and sold (on the market). It's only been around since the industrial revolution - prior to that the means of production were too simple to do this sort of thing with, and there was just land and labor. Markets have been around a lot longer.

Non-capitalist but still market-based systems are possible. You can have worker ownership (worker co-ops like Bob's Red Mill), consumer ownership (consumer co-ops like REI), state ownership (national healthcare or municipal utility companies), or some mix of them. These organizations can and often do still compete with each other on the market.

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