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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

Money is just a representation of time spent on some productive work that the market sees value in. We have money to make trade more granular, and to have fewer exchange rates.

Furthermore, this article isn't at all about finding "a way out of Capitalism". It just shows that to a certain degree, people value not being burdened with guilt.

Does that mean a society would work without money, and with people just "doing the right thing" so as not to be burdened with the guilt of not having done the right thing?

No. History has shown — over and over — that this just does not work.

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History has shown over and over that societies based on money don't work either. They're inherently unstable politically and ecologically and make very poor use of human potential.

If your idea of human potential is an iPhone and an app for controlling your washing machine from the sofa, you're going to disagree with this.

If your idea of human potential is a peaceful and sustainable culture with the resources to maximise education, personal inventiveness, and creativity; to make consistently game-changing leaps in scientific understanding; and to colonise the solar system, you're not going to be quite as impressed.

The idea that there's a trade-off between money and "people doing the right thing" is not convincing.

Belonging to a successful culture requires some form of dues-paying. That's not avoidable.

The challenge is to make sure that the dues aren't just a tithe to bad-actor opportunists - which is the basis of the current system, especially in the US - but provide unquestionable economy-of-scale opportunities and benefits that are disproportionate to their "cost" - however that cost is realised in practice.

My idea of human potential is giving them the freedom i decide what they value. Incidentally, capitalism does exactly this. Free markets, free minds. All societies fall short of this ideal, but America definately delivers more than anyone else at the moment.

What "freedom" are you talking about? Most people can't even afford the luxury of knowing basic facts about their world. Like a fish which doesn't know it is in the water, they don't know that they are immersed in the propaganda bubble.

How many people do you think control all of the media? Do you think the goals of these 0.00001% are aligned with ours?

How does capitalism provide freedom?

The American laissez faire system seems to be falling apart at the seams. Power and wealth is becoming more concentrated while seeking to solidify that position through limiting the freedoms of the lower classes.

Regular people are burdened with student debt and health care costs all within a back drop of little to no social support. Unions striking for better working conditions have their corporate controlled health insurance stripped away. Banks write balance sheets as they see fit, devaluing your wealth and causing financial crises. The list goes on.

Being forced in to wage slavery to survive in this system doesn't sound particularly free.

> Being forced in to wage slavery to survive in this system doesn't sound particularly free.

That's like saying I was forced into heroin addiction because I felt bad. Let's be real for a second: people have choices, and the concept of being forced to do something or be something simply does not exist. Or, alternatively, you could say that everyone is forced to do everything they do. But either way, it means the same thing.

Capitalism and free markets are different things and a few threads here have lumped the two together. Capitalism just means the capitalism is owned privately. Capitalism drives towards monopolies and central control just as much as a totalitarian state does. Enforcing, regulating and supporting free markets is what keeps capitalism in check. And while rare you can have socialist free markets.

Absolute nonsense. Capitalism is the one system which has lifted more people out of poverty than any other.

Trade has also done more than anything else to keep nations at peace. It’s not just apps and iPhones, and it reveals your naïveté for having suggested it.

Having found something that works well doesn't proclude finding something that works even better.

Before capitalism, violence used to solve more problems than any other means.

Slavery also lifted people out of poverty. Because, you know, the slaves weren't considered 'people'.

> Having found something that works well doesn't proclude [sic] finding something that works even better.

I'm not suggesting it does. There might well be a system that works more favourably, but I don't know what that would look like and I have never heard anyone suggest anything that isn't some flavour of Communism hiding behind the extremely arrogant position of "but it's never been tried! It would work if we did it my way!".

The fact that you dismiss "anything" that's a flavour of Communism isn't encouraging - as is the disdain for "It would work if we did it my way!". The whole concept of "working if we do it my way" is the history of all mathematics, science and even modern day economics. It's the foundation of liberalism, the system you cherish.

Many philosophers in normative social theory would argue that we have to treat their proposed societies as hypotheses. Consider the analogy to Fermat's Last Theorem - although for hundreds of years we tried to crack its proof, many proofs ended disastrously, but some of them actually opened up whole new areas of mathematics despite not reaching their goal. As such, they also served as learning experiences.

I think the same can be said for normative social theory.

> The fact that you dismiss "anything" that's a flavour of Communism isn't encouraging

Communism's historic death toll is far from encouraging either.

> as is the disdain for "It would work if we did it my way!"

That "my way" invariably boils down to "oh, people just wouldn't be corrupt if I'm in charge." That's the recurring utopian vision. Then when it doesn't exactly go to plan, you get forced labour, internment, and executions.

> The whole concept of "working if we do it my way" is the history of all mathematics

Completely irrelevant.

>Communism's historic death toll is far from encouraging either.

I do not dispute death tolls, but I do dispute the idea that you should argue using this point in favour of capitalism, which has similar consequences out of issues such as structural poverty and imperialism.

>"oh, people just wouldn't be corrupt if I'm in charge."

No serious academic Communist/Marxist/Socialist claims this. The fact you think that's what the claim is shows that you get more information about arguments for Communism from Internet memes and fora than you do from people who work with the topic.

>Completely irrelevant.

No it's not. Your point was that "it'll work my way" is fallacious logic. My retort was that this same logic is used in all normative social theory and indeed many other areas of human endeavour too.

> No serious academic Communist/Marxist/Socialist claims this.

Ah, yes. Quite so.

Tell me, must a "serious" academic Communist also be a True Scotsman?

Not at all, but he must be someone who knows his onions when it comes to Communism, or Marx. I don't get my opinions on liberalism from caricatures on HN, and I don't get my opinions on Marx from anonymous 4chan users.

Go look up some photos of the Ukrainian genocide, then get back to me. My Grandmother's family fled Stalin's murderers with just the clothes on their backs.

A few fun facts:

At the height of the Genocide Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 25,000 per day.

Nearly 1 in 4 rural Ukrainians died as a direct result.

The Soviets dumped 1.7 million tons of grain on Western markets during the Genocide amounting to nearly 1/5 of a ton of grain was exported for each person who died of starvation.

Over 3,000,000 children born between 1932-1933 died of starvation.

I would rather just start shooting right now than risk a single day under communism in any form. Right. Now.

In current days Venezuelans are re-living the horror. The hell they are living there, it is beyond comprehension.

> Capitalism is the one system which has lifted more people out of poverty than any other

I often hear this, but is it really true?

The millions lifted from poverty in USSR and China, was not due to capitalism.

Thanks for replying. Don't get me wrong, money is a great representation of time, I said it's just not equivalent.

The article points out what happens if you put a monetary value on it. In this case perverting the relationship between the parents and the caretakers, by removing empathy and introducing economic status into the equation.

A way out of capitalism is the realization that physical resources are always worth more than money. How to make that concept scale, I don't know, but it gives me hope to see a daycare center take a small step towards that direction.

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