All inconvenient truths shall be wiped under the carpet. Capitalism is a great thing and has brought us very far but you have to wonder if at some point it isn't going to undo all of that progress and put us back where we started or worse.
Put another way, we pretend to give people we dislike the benefit of the doubt and they pretend to believe us, to avoid the unpleasant fact of an underlying social conflict.
The effect of money in politics is tremendous and if not for the degree to which corporate profits dictate government policy through lobbying and outright corruption has no equal other than in the one country where 'the market' is given free rein to abuse the country to whatever degree they can get away with.
I was all for harsh punishment of VW execs because of the diesel scandal, at the same time everybody was up in arms about that and this sort of thing gets a free pass without so much as a raised eyebrow.
Australia does that one.
That's more about the motives of people, all people, rather than a commentary on capitalism or anything else.
Essentially the United States just removed a bunch of stuff that is embarrassing to corporate interests, in order to allow them to pollute some more but this time without any accountability.
Maybe that _does_ boil down to just the political parties in charge at the time. If so then does politics trump capitalism?
Just think of all the copper in landfills.
That's just human nature.
There is no incentive for sustainability unless governments interfer, which would technically be against capitalism.
I think capitalism was a great system, it's just going to screw us within the next 100yrs or so. We definitely wouldn't be where we are without it though
Is there a system that incentivizes sustainability?
If there is any interest in producing anything... you're back to your same argument.
Meanwhile capitalist systems there are companies that produce renewable products and etc... seemingly more than ever before.
Sorry if I made it sounds as if there are any alternatives.
Capitalism is still the best system known to work, despite its incentives for pure profits at the cost of sustainability.
It's just good to keep in mind that... It's not good, despite being the best
Removing inconvenient truths has been done and will be done under any system. Be it tribal, religious, monarchist, communist, capitalist, or a loose band of tree huggers. It really does not matter.
But capitalism is so successful by the one metric that matters to it - money - that it has the potential to destroy everything else whilst still maximizing for that one metric. The concentrating effects of wealth make this even more likely. After all, people will rarely bite the hand that feeds them, guaranteeing docility whilst marching them right into the abyss.
Poverty does not have to exist. Having “only” 750million people living beneath the poverty line globally (and a similar proportion in the U.S., about 11%) is not success!!! It is a mitigation of failure!
[1] - One commenter on this site last week or so in the VC community commented there are “trillions sloshing around.”