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Comment by pharos92 | Hacker News Reader

I am so sick to death with the statement that "capitalism isn't working." We don't live in a capitalist economy, we live in a corporatist economy.

Almost all the negative aspects of this current economic climate come down to:

[1] Government misspending/policy at the behests of 'special interests' and

[2] Monopolies that go untouched.

When you realize that the government creates 9/10 monopolies, and that the remaining aspect of the equation is both fiscal corruption (at worst) or incompetence (at best), you realize that more government (socialism - event 'democratic') IS NOT the answer.

True capitalism is responsible for much of the innovations, competition and successes of the 20th & 21st centuries. Sure there are aspects that it needs to answer for, and be held to account for - but that should be/is baked into the capitalist model.

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I believe you're right, but you must realize that your statement is similar to that some communists make: "real communism/capitalism/whateverism has never been tried yet," i.e. the No True Scotsman fallacy. The fair question to be asked is, "How can we restrict the state to prevent bastardizing capitalism and falling prey to corruption?" Capitalism seems to be much more resilient to it than communism, but we need to figure out how to further strengthen the state against this, because it's clearly slowly failing.

The problem here is that too many of the detractors of socialism only recognizes a single version of it, a.k.a USSR and its off-spring. It doesn't matter how much democratic socialists were against it (and persecuted by it) at its inception, during its reign, and after its collapse.

What example do you see of Socialism that started out democratic and still went down in misery?

This implies a capitalism that somehow exists outside corporatism - what many contemporary leftists argue in various ways - from Graeber to Pikety to Varoufakis is that these distorting forces have been baked into capitalism since the beginning in much the same way that authoritarianism was baked into the attempt at communism.

That is - there are market-based socioeconomic systems and socialist economic systems out there waiting to be experimented with and built that could avoid these things, but they aren't capitalism or communism, they are something different.

(also by the by, you can accept a Marxist critique of capitalism without accepting a Marxist blueprint for the solution. The (very) basic premise that capitalism is a machine for accumulating power in ways that allow one to distort the market simply because of the way that return on capital works, and the results of focusing on maximizing extracting value from human labor is pretty straightforward and, in my mind, pretty easy to demonstrate empirically at this point.

I see no reason at all why corporatist, crony, regulatory capture etc Capitalism isn't the natural outcome of capitalist capital accumulation (and thus power). The incentives to pursue those things seem completely logical to me.

You speak of 'false capitalism'. 'True capitalism' is infallible, because as soon as any problem arises, it is now 'false capitalism' :)

Government funded research is responsible for much of the innovations, competition and successes of the 20th & 21st centuries.

Let's be honest: Every single company which is dependent on the internet has the govt to thank for their success. There's just no way that the internet would've been a success without govts.

I do agree that we live in a "corporatist economy" (neo-feudalist more like it) though and I agree that [1] and [2] are issues.

I believe that the solution is more democracy, more equality, and more socialism.

The phrase "more equality" should terrify anyone who has anything invested in this world.

It should terrify slaveowners and royalty more.

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