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Comment by throwaway3699 | Hacker News Reader

Big difference.

Not to the bodies in the graves there isn't.

Tell that to the people who were enslaved and to the people who starved to death.

Slavery is not a function of capitalism, though. Capitalism is being able to 1) firstly, own yourself and your body 2) thus sell your labour however you wish. It's the alternatives economic systems that prevent you from being free.

And yet capitalists imposed slavery upon multiple places around the world, often for decades or centuries.

Putting emotions aside for a second, slavery is very inefficient in a free market. It is not a coincidence free countries are all capitalist (and vice versa).

So are famines, but that didn't stop the market from starving millions of people, either.

When did markets cause famine? We are living in an age of wasted food because we have so much cheap crap (as well as high-quality) available. People are too fat because there's no barrier to over-consumption.

Whereas a socialist system causes famines due to central planning leads to poor decision making.

The causes of the Great Irish famine were those imposed by capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Causes_...

The market decided that the starving people who harvested crops didn't need to eat them, because people would pay more for those crops elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_ex...

10 million people starved in the Bengal famine: https://www.mensxp.com/special-features/today/27992-the-forg...

How would socialism have dealt with the first scenario? My understanding is there simply wasn't enough food to go around, and no economic system can fix that. Capitalism at least provides a profit motive to solve the problem (eventually).

The Bengal famine was a top down project specifically designed to profit. There is no "free market capitalism" in that scenario.

That's because the United States invades free countries that aren't capitalist.

Oh yeah. The US is guilty as charged, but there's no such thing as a free country that's not capitalist, until we live in a post-scarcity society. Technologically we are many centuries away from that.

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