Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

They didn't say that capitalism caused the problems, they said that capitalism allowed the shirking of responsibility.

...which is also wrong. Because if you read the article, the insurance company footed the bill for the cleanup.

I'm going to guess the actual cost far out weighs the multimillion dollar fine levied against the company, which their insurance paid.

And I'm going to guess your guesses are based upon your existing world view, which you are just reinforcing with no additional data.

That's how biases are formed.

The fines were described as being in the millions, what do you think the cost of this evacuation alone is? Hell, just the cost of the one employee constantly checking the levels for ~20 years is around a million. I don't have the exact data, but I have reasons for my guess.

Besides, you're criticizing me for the same thing you did by saying the insurance paid for the cleanup rather than the fine.

You just doubled down on your guesses with more guesses.

Yes, I guessed that twenty years of salary for a specialized public worker is around a million dollars. No real variation in their salary would make my point incorrect.

Why are you trying to make my "guesses" into a big deal rather than admit you misspoke about what the insurance company paid? Do you think that whatever fine they were levied predicted this necessary evacuation 20 years later?

Yeah, I think people conflate 'capitalism' and 'insufficient regulation'. Capitalism is a framework that requires regulation, even more so than communism or socialism, since the regulations are what defines how the markets work.

I think “insufficient regulation” is an almost necessary byproduct of capitalism. The search for profits leads to regulatory capture in every capitalist society I am aware of. I think this is because it is easier and cheaper to do things like lobby and have a revolving door with regulators and private industry than it is to actually compete with others. Competition is hard.

It's a necessary byproduct of any system run by people, which is why relying on a framework where able is preferable. That's why the US legal system relies so heavily on precedence: creating and agreeing on new law, and reconciling it with existing law, is cumbersome and slow, so make sure no one already did the work.

The benefit of both of those things is consistency.

Completely independent problem from capitalism, and it gets worse the more involved the government is in economic activity.

This is like saying that using hammers leads to eye injuries because people taking shortcuts don't wear their safety goggles.

Regulations are the safety goggles of society. The hammer is not to blame.

X is enabled by Y does not preclude X being enabled by Z. That's only when its an if and only if, but that isn't the case here. Capitalism and Soviet Communism are neither the only alternative social structures, nor some kind of logical negations of each other.

tl;dr would be: logical fallacy!

>If it’s enabled by capitalism, how do we explain Chernobyl

I don't know why I'm being treated like this for posting an obvious truth. Both capitalism and communism have both been root causes for environmental disasters. The question posed is not some clever rebuttal to blaming capitalism, but a simple mistake of reasoning. I guess I'm sorry to have been the one to point it out.

The owners of Chernobyl (the government) didn't declare bankruptcy and piss off, they spent massive moneys containing the problem. So, socialize profits, socialize losses.

Trying to stop catastrophes from happening needs regulation and incentives, both of these things are broken in capitalism by its nature. But its not impossible to have regulation and incentives in either capitalist or socialist projects.

The USSR government collapsed a few years after the Chernobyl disaster and didn't foot the bill of most of its costs.

It now costs huge amounts of money to Belarus, which gov has nothing to do with USSR nuclear projects. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53727243

The European Union gave (and, until now, gives) huge amounts of money in order to contain the problem, for example the sarcophagus. https://time.com/5255663/chernobyl-disaster-book-anniversary...

Both examples of socialized losses.

"Someone pays for losses" is always true.

"Socialized losses", as far as I understand it, means that the group paying for the losses is the same one as the one which is/was the beneficiary. Does someone think that EU citizens were set to benefit from the Chernobyl plant?

The saying is usually more like "privatize the profits, socialize the loses", which is derived from "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor".

The point of the phrase is that the people who are paying for the costs (tax payers) are not the ones who received any benefit or were going to benefit (profits, shareholders, CEOs, etc.).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism

Indeed, however the case in point is the Chernobyl disaster, and in the USSR there AFAIK were no profits/shareholders/CEOs...

My point is that such scam isn't specific to the degraded version of capitalism so common in our nations, which is in fact "crony capitalism".

I always found the tribalistic "crony capitalism" vs "crony socialism" debate to be a convenient escape from actually discussing the removal of cronyism.

So often true!

We patently cannot tackle cronyism thanks to any powerful institution. In fact anything powerful nurtures it.

Counting on government to hold itself liable for environmental damage is a proven bad default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com