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Comment by zerocount | Hacker News Reader

It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.

It is a bit naïve to just blame the free market for everything wrong in the world. When I read complaints like that I wonder what "alternative" the author has in mind.

Capitalism in this sense also gave us much of the software and hardware that is praised on HN.

It is more accurate and useful to discuss which motivations, cultural shifts, or even psycological traits that have caused the decline in software quality and freedom. These are more practical than proposing mass economic realignment.

It's not about the free market per se, but rather a system that allows to turn the information asymmetry into money without consequences most of the time.

I'd like to see examples of well known good apples outside of OSS that care about performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy.

Even in OSS caring about performance, compatibility, security and privacy is the exception. The biggest projects do tend to care, but the majority don't. The biggest examples in OSS are mostly funded by capitalism to care ab out those things.

Although they have many faults, Microsoft has cared about compatibility for 30 years (you can still run DOS programs on your Windows 10 computer). They have cared about the security of their users since about 1999, and they cared about their user’s privacy for about 10 years before dropping it in favor of advertising revenue a few years ago. People still install Windows on new their computers, so it evidentially isn’t a big concern for most people either. Their support for accessibility technologies is probably better than most operating systems, though it’s a bit hard to tell from the outside. Performance is an odd one. It is my understanding that the Windows kernel gets high marks for performance, but aside from that almost nothing does.

It's not the fault of a system that rewards unethical behavior by having a massively skewed risk/reward profile for said behavior, it's the fault of people with low-normal levels of empathy who make rational decisions. Sure.

"The system harnesses the power of incentives to make people do the right thing!"

"But here the incentives point in the wrong direction."

"It's not the system's fault! People shouldn't follow those incentives!"

That same line of argument could work for socialism/communism. What country that doesn't use the free trade paradigm for their economy isn't some authoritarian nightmare of poverty and despair? Are they just bad actors using the system wrong, or is it a system that always ends that way?

Not always the case. There are non-democratic capitalist societies with varying degrees of performance, from great (Singapore) to awful (the entire post-Soviet space).

On the other hand, over-regulated or fully socialist societies seem to be incompatible with democracy, I'd agree with that one.

Corruption isn't a problem of free trade, it's a problem resulting from centralization of authority. A single (or small cabal of) regulatory gatekeeper is comparatively cheap to pay off compared to satisfying all interested parties. Bribe one person? Check. Bribe 10,000 without having it break the bank or turn into a PR nightmare? Not so much.

Clearly, our "free market" isn't really free, and our regulatory and enforcement strategies are the problem.

Bad environments make bad apples.

From a capitalistic POV, it's irresponsible not to exploit ("make full use of and derive benefit from") underlying economic systems, no? This is why a purely capitalist, free market economy would be a societal disaster.

if it's a near-universal problem, it's not "bad apples" it's bad incentives. IE, capitalism.

The exploitation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. The bad apples exploiting it are the people who own the means of production, and saying they're the bad part of capitalism might as well be saying "capitalism is only bad because of what makes capitalism what it is".

You replied to that comment using a computer. That computer is the means of production for software. You own the means of production here. What have you been doing with that capability?

> Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by.

Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.

>Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.

Sure, now tell me your opinion on this idea I have

Today for music there are many parasites that suck the profits and creators barely get something. So my idea is to make a cooperatives (or non-parasitic company) to help the creators of content. First step is to have mobile apps and here we just HIT the parasites, Apple and Google , any transaction or subscription will be taxed by7 this parasites. It seems impossible to make money for the right people without fating up the parasites.

When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.

>When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.

My issue is with "free markets" solve everything when most of the time you don't have free markets(like when you have too few competitors or when you have collusion not to compete ) , or when you forget to specify that free market would solve the problem but only after you make illegal all the bad or evil practices companies will abuse. If someone is an economist is there a theorem /law that proves that imperfect free market will covere to an evil state so you always need supervision to intervene when you notice the effects and apply a correction/bug fix ?

In my example with mobile applications we don't have free markets , where free market would mean you have many agents competing to offer you something, we have basically 2 competitors and this 2 are happy to be in a balance and share this big pie then aggressively competing to make happy the custoemrs but reduce their profits.

Don't confuse free with unregulated. Not even Adam Smith wanted unregulated markets. Free simply means everyone is equally free to play in the same market created by a system of laws and equal enforcement. And I doubt you'll find anyone defending monopolies or duopolies. All systems are corrupted, we just try to minimize it when we can.

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