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Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m naïve, but to me the word “capitalism” is not an “economic policy” that can be changed through deliberate action, but rather a framework of analysis that makes predictions on supply, demand, and pricing in markets that are varying levels of free.

I’m confused when people in my generational cohort say things like “capitalism is unfair” or “capitalism sucks”, in reference to the system of government and benefits we have currently. Every economy has had forces that were usefully explainable with capitalism, even the soviet economy in the 80s. Markets abound, and capitalism is a powerful explanatory tool, so to me “let’s end capitalism” sounds a bit like “let’s end gravity”.

For somebody more in the know, this can’t be what people are meaning, right? Are they just trying to bargain for a “better“ social contract with fewer free markets? Any idea why they associate this with “ending capitalism”?

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"Capitalism" is used as the label for the policy one might more precisely describe as "regulatory minimalism"; the philosophy that opposes minimum wage laws, that opposes collective bargaining by employees, that opposes safety and environmental regulation, that opposes universal health care, etcetera.

This philosophy is associated with the term "capitalism" because its proponents tar any improvement of the social contract, acknowledgement of climate change, or balancing of negotiating power as "socialism/communism"- terms used interchangeably as a boogeyman rather than for any engagable definition, but always pitted as the opposite of "capitalism".

It's funny because most of the things people are struggling with are a direct result of government regulation. High costs for education, housing and healthcare are caused by regulation, not helped by it. Let student loans be discharged in bankruptcy and watch the cost of education drop like a rock. Get rid of zoning restrictions and watch house prices fall. Health care costs would dramatically improve if health insurance wasn't mandatory and people could buy it from anywhere (I'd happily get mine from India or South America if it was an option).

The market isn't the problem, it's government interference with the market that's the problem.

Healthcare and Education are both very affordable because of regulation in Australia where I live. It isn't regulation at all that is the problem with affordability you describe, it is the form the specific regulation you guys in the US have

"ism" words get defined for political purposes. And the overwhelming success of regulated capitalism over the past century has moved the definitions of socialism and capitalism in toward the middle, because the extremes are no longer politically tenable.

For example, socialism, to many of its proponents in 2019, means using the collective power of the government to tax the rich in order to purchase better outcomes for all citizens--even if those purchases are from private parties. Lots of people are in favor of "single payer" government health insurance... not nearly as many folks are saying let's force all doctors to work only for the government. That's what socialism meant 100 years ago. But that's not what socialism means today to most folks in the U.S.

Likewise, the popular understanding of "ending capitalism" in 2019 mean ending the political, regulatory, and tax regimes that enable complex financial engineering that results in huge paydays for Wall Street and tax avoidance for rich people and big companies. "Capitalism" in this sense is not intended to be a technical term referencing property ownership rights... the word is being more like the name of belief system or set of values--one that doesn't care about income inequality and poor people.

"Socialism vs capitalism" for most people in 2019 is really a fight over values and political priorities. The words are placeholders for systems of belief. It's not a fight about private property rights in general like it was 100 years ago. I mean, maybe it is to a few people, but not many, relatively speaking.

That is, lots of people are fighting about extracting wealth from rich people and huge companies... not many are fighting to end their own right to own any property, to surrender it all to the government.

I think in the broadest sense, they mean ending private control of capital.

This means that instead of capital being mostly in the hands of a few (the rich, or the state, in the case of something like China) they want it to be in the control of the people. This would mean that basically the people would control capital democratically, in most cases, but there are other systems like Mutualism which isn't necessarily democratic.

For many, they may want to end markets as well, for various reasons, but markets aren't the same thing as capitalism, as you seem to think.

Capitalism can be defined accurately in different ways depending on context, but industrial-era economists Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who spent their lives analyzing capitalism, understood it as a matter of political economy. In other words, it is nothing like natural law. It is a political matter.

Of the aforementioned experts, Marx was the most critical of capitalism, but most who are unfamiliar would be taken back by the amount of common ground shared between him and Smith.

Some basic working class complaints about capitalism in a very economic sense are concisely introduced in this essay: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...

Like most HN readers, Marx believed work is an integral part of a healthy human life. His concern was about the relation of humans with the value they produce. He gave a prescient analysis of what we appear to be experiencing today, in his Theory Of Alienation. See: https://www.marxists.org/subject/alienation/

>I’m confused when people in my generational cohort say [...]

Talk to them, and you'll realize they don't know what the fuck they mean either.

To generalize from my conversations, by "capitailism" they mean some amalgamation of: the fact they're poor, market forces in general, Government policy not providing certain goods/services, financial markets, non-post-scarcity, and snidely whiplash mustache twirling villains lurking in the wings.

But they also mean any aspect of society they don't like and can find a specious connection to market forces. Even if it's something that's just as possible under a communist/socialist government. It just wouldn't exist in their vision of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism.

Rerunning a comment of mine from five days ago, because it also fits here:

Rodney Stark says that the distinguishing mark of capitalism is that (at least part of) the profits are re-invested in better tools for productivity gains. In this view, "the existence of property rights, money, and the right to freely enter into contracts except when prohibited by law" are prerequisites, but they aren't capitalism. Capitalism is what you do once you have that foundation in place.

The existence of capital is an economic law. Private ownership of capital (i.e. capitalism) is not, it is an economic policy.

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