Your comment is basically saying capitalism is bad.
I agree.
I agree.
That's like saying:
- Slavery is bad.
- Then don't wear cotton clothes.
Maybe instead change the system so there's no slavery, and have non-slaves pick up cotton and make cotton clothes?
Non-capitalist countries can have computers and internet too. In fact most computers today are made in "communist" China.
No Most computers today are made in "Special Economic Zone" China that has exempted almost all communist economic policies in favor of Free market capitalism because even hard core authoritarian communists know that their economic model is a path to poverty for everyone including the leaders
EDIT: there was initially a typo in this comment. I meant "aren't free markets", not "are free markets".
If you do clearly you place no value on what most people call Basic Human Rights.
>> And I think it demonstrates that market based systems that are "free markets" can be quite effective,
I am not sure what you are trying to say here, everyone knows Free markets result in the best economic outcomes, that was my point. The argument I was countering was the Free markets are bad and socialism is good which history has proven wrong time and time again the only counter that socialist have is "those were not real socialism"
Any society more than a couple hundred people in size will fail miserably under a socialist economic model. Only Free markets provide for the best outcomes for the most people.
That is not to say there is no issue with capitalism in general, Crony Capitalism which is what you have with Heavily regulated markets like we see in the US is a real problem and is largely the cause of Wealth Disparity in capitalist systems,
I am further confused by your statement the Free Markets are better than "remove regulation at all costs" approach
Truly free markets have no regulation, so I am not sure what point you are driving at.
I don't like the human rights abuses in China. But that doesn't mean they don't do anything well. Such an argument is silly. I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example? Awfully. But that is only tangentially related to the merit of their overall economic policy.
> everyone knows Free markets result in the best economic outcomes
No they don't. There is a lot of evidence that free markets lead to better economic outcomes then soviet-style planned economies. That they lead to the best possible outcomes of all possible economic systems is a highly suspect claim given that the economic outcomes they lead to aren't all that great (e.g. high levels of inequality).
You seem to have in your mind that free markets and planned economies (which you call socialism, although there are actually many forms of socialism that don't use a state-planned approach such as market socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism) are the only possible economic models. But in fact there are many other approaches. For example the scandinavian model is a mixed economy with some free-market aspects but also a large state (32% of the economy is public sector in Denmark vs 17% for the US and 50% for China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...), and much stronger regulation than in the US.
> That is not to say there is no issue with capitalism in general, Crony Capitalism which is what you have with Heavily regulated markets like we see in the US is a real problem and is largely the cause of Wealth Disparity in capitalist systems
Regulation is indeed a problem in the US. But that is only because of the regulatory capture leading to ridiculous regulations that enforce monopolies. In other places (I live in the UK) regulation actually prevents monopolies (e.g. we have laws that anybody may start an ISP using the shared fibre/copper infrastructure) and leads to much better outcomes than unregulated markets. I find it hilarious that you think the US markets are heavily regulated when they are some of the least regulated amongst OECD countries
> I am further confused by your statement the Free Markets are better than "remove regulation at all costs" approach. Truly free markets have no regulation, so I am not sure what point you are driving at.
Having no regulation is what I am describing as "remove regulation at all costs". My point is that there is a lot of evidence that such markets don't in fact function better than a more measured approach of "regulate where it's appropriate". The political position that all markets ought to be as free as possible is almost as extreme as the one that economies ought to state run.
Well first and foremost Healthcare is not a right. It is a Service that has to be provided based on limited resources
Rights are things like Free Speech, the Right to Self Defense, the right to not have your property stolen, etc
Aka Negative Rights
The right to be free from abuse
Things like "health care" are not Human Rights at all
How is "the right to not have your property stolen" any different from "the right to not have preventable diseases from killing or harming you"? In both cases there is some external problem that is prevented through the use of resources: in one case it's the police and legal apparatus. In the other case it's healthcare providers.
Incorrect, in the US I have no right to policing either, I have the right to defend my property myself from people that wish to take it. Our Courts have held continuously that no individual has the right to protection from the police force.
We do not have Positive Rights in the US, never have and hopefully never will because in order to have positive rights one must infringe on negative rights to supply them
So while I have the right to property, I must provide defense of that property myself. I can also ask the courts to mediate if there is dispute over said property.
Similar with healthcare, and one area I believe government regulations today intrude on my rights. I should have the right to ACCESS to care, but I would not have the right to require someone provide me with care. So for example I should have the right to purchase any medical supply, drug, etc from any person that wants to sell those supplies free from government interference, but the government should not provide me with that care, and should not steal errr tax other people's labor to provide me with that care either
That is not a negative right, it is not a right at all.
The entire concept of rights, as understood by common law, is based on Natural Rights under a Lockean philosophy of Self Ownership, that you own yourself.
Under no conceptional understanding of natural rights would have have the right to take someone else's property.
So if we are going to start from a completely foreign concept of negative rights then we have no basis for a conversation at all
https://www.learnliberty.org/videos/positive-rights-vs-negat...
The positive/negative distinction
There is no way for a government to provide you with healthcare (positive rights) with out infringment of my negative rights to my labor (i.e they must take a part of my labor via theft what you call taxation in order to provide you with the right to a service). The only other way for a government to provide a service would be indentured servitude where they require a person to provide the service under threat of violence / imprisonment
That is why I reject the concept of positive rights, because they require that other people have their labor, property, or self ceased by the government to fulfill those rights that is fundamentally unethical to me
negative rights do not have this ethical problem
This is particularly obvious in the case of private ownership of land. Without private property rights I would be free to walk across and otherwise make use of that land it is your property rights which take that freedom away from me. And this isn't a theoretical issue either: prior to the enclosure of land in the 15th-19th centuries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure), most land here in the UK was common land that anybody had a right to make use of to graze animals and make a living. The expansion of private property directly took away that right and deprived many of their livelihoods. Even today we still have the Right To Roam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#United_Kingdom) and at least walk on private land which provides for significantly more freedom than is available in the US (there is close to zero danger of being shot just for walking somewhere in the UK).
For other property it's less obvious, but enforcing your property rights still requires encroaching on my liberty. For example, without property rights, I would be free to walk into a shop and take whatever I wanted to. Or rock up to your unlocked car and drive off with it. The only way that this is prevented is through active enforcement by the state. Ultimately, if I persist in doing these things then I will be physically imprisoned. And it takes significant resources to run the policing and justice systems, just like healthcare. Now obviously nobody thinks I should just be able to walk up and take your care. But other forms of private property are controversial. In particular the idea that you ought to be able to keep all of that wealth that people give you (without taxation). You are only able to hold onto that wealth in the first place because the state enforces your right to keep it. There is nothing a priori that says that the state (which ultimately represents its citizens) must always enforce that right.
To summarise, many "negative rights", including the right to private property, have exactly the same ethical problems as "positive rights". At which point it becomes a simple matter of what you consider moral and important. You're right that state-provided healthcare deprives you of wealth that you could otherwise have. But the reverse is also true. You having the wealth deprives others of healthcare that they could otherwise have. You just happen to think that property rights are more "natural" and important.
For starters, who said human their rights violations go wholesale with their economic policy (and you can't have one without the other)?
Second, well, the US is not some paragon of freedom either compared to many western countries.
From the largest prison population per capita (25% of the worlds inmates for 4% of the worlds population), to slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, seggregation until 1970s, Japanese interment camps, the only country dropping atomic bombs (and to civilians nonetheless), McCarthyism, mass surveillance, and so on, all the way to Bush, Trump, and co (including the multi-war supporter Obama), plus constant meddling on foreign countries, invasions and occupations, etc., all the way to waterboarding, and such, yeah, I'd take "socialist" Denmark over it...
Some of that is because many nations massively under report their prison population (aka China).
I agree that the US has over criminalized Society, namely in the failed attempt to curb drug abuse by criminal enforcement
>>to slavery
yes yes, the US is the only nation to ever have slavery in all of history... ::rolleyes::
>> Jim Crow, redlining, seggregation until 1970s, Japanese interment camps, the only country dropping atomic bombs (and to civilians nonetheless), McCarthyism, mass surveillance, and so on, all the way to Bush, Trump, and co (including the multi-war supporter Obama), plus constant meddling on foreign countries, invasions and occupations, etc., all the way to waterboarding, and such, yeah, I'd take "socialist" Denmark over it...
I guess that depends on where you place your personal freedoms, All of those things are terrible, most of them are historic atrocities that many nations unfortunately have in their past, or the more modern ones impacted a small number of citizens, and they all universally hated by the population.
However with socialism even Denmark style socialism my Income would be massively stolen errr "taxed", I would not have many of my core freedoms (aka Self Defense / gun rights), I would not have the same free speech protections as the US, etc.
These all do impact me directly...
At best it's a mix, but hardly "free market capitalism".
Because it's fake, you don't hate capitalism if you like Hacker News, even if you think you can. Hacker News is literally owned and operated by venture capital firm
Say you happen to be born into a communist regime but dislike communism. Getting out of it might not be feasible for any reason ranging from not being allowed to, not having the means, to not wanting to leave your community behind. No matter if you now want to completely tear down the predominant social-economical systems or just tweak them, either way you going to have to interact with them.
If you want to destroy capitalism, hacker news is probably not the most promising place to start. If your goal is to tweak it I actually think it is.
The original comment said “hate” not “is bad”; probably the source of a lot of the confusion in this thread lol.
> If you want to destroy capitalism, hacker news is probably not the most promising place to start. If your goal is to tweak it I actually think it is.
Idunno, even just calling it “bad” seems to imply that there are better things, which is not really a statement about “tweaking” anything. A statement in favour of tweaking capitalism would be something like “capitalism on its own can not reliably produce moral goods”.
I read that as a somewhat hyperbolic expression of dislike, like "I hate spinach" – strong dislike, but not actual hatred. I might actually say that I hate spinach, because I really can't stand the taste, but I don't feel hatred towards it. But yes, I guess that may have caused some misunderstanding.
> just calling it “bad” seems to imply that there are better things, which is not really a statement about “tweaking” anything.
Like an improved version of that thing. Case in point: My last batch of salsa verde was bad, too few tomatillos, too much seasoning, so I'll tweak the recipe with a note to make sure the rations there don't skew that way next time. I don't have to give up on my recipe for good, or on salsa verde for good, or on food for good.
> A statement in favour of tweaking capitalism would be something like “capitalism on its own can not reliably produce moral goods”.
There are different variantions of capitalism implemented around the world right now; there are parameters that can be tweaked, like with the German "soziale Marktwirtschaft", which was a version of a capitalist market-based economy with socialist elements. Even in the US, the flavor of capitalism in Roosevelt's day was quite a bit different from the one currently in place, I believe.