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Comment by spanktheuser | Hacker News Reader

To clarify a common point of confusion: what you seem to be describing (personal property, market economy) is not unique to capitalism. Market socialism is not command economy and involves the use of markets and money to efficiently allocate resources. However, there's a substantial difference in corporate / business ownership; profits are generally redistributed to the workers and thus reward labor over capital accumulation.

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Market socialism is capitalism with a welfare state.

The US has capitalism with a welfare state.

Canada has capitalism with a welfare state.

Norway has capitalism with a welfare state.

Russia has capitalism with a welfare state.

Basically every country on the planet has capitalism with some amount of redistribution.

The socialism / capitalism "debate" is just bickering over the details of how much welfare. But lets be clear, every single one of these countries is capitalist. Every single one of these countries has businesses which can own property and money and make profits. Every single one of these countries has banks which charge interest (yes including muslim countries which have to play financial and verbal gymnastics to hide this fact)

Scandanavian countries and Canada are socialist as much as China and Vietnam are communist (they all arent). None of those places involve businesses which are required to distribute any sizable amounts of profits to workers. You are arguing nuances of how competing utopias (dystopias) maybe could exist because no where actually does those things.

Here go look at the wikipedia entry for socialist countries to see a dumpster fire of failed economies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states#Mar...

These places are THE MOST CAPITALIST because when everyine has nothing, money can get you anything. I bet you could easily buy human organs or child prostitutes in any one of the places on the list so Im going to say they havent created post capitalist utopias.

Rather than bet, you could try traveling to some of these places. I’ve been to Vietnam and Cuba. In neither country could you find anything close to child prostitution (I don’t think it’s possible to observe organ sales in the same way). In part I believe this is due to the relatively flat distribution of income and wealth. Neither nation is as rich as their former colonizer, but they also lack the widespread desperate poverty which would incentivize these transactions. Both states also invested heavily in controlling inflows of capital and currency from tourists and their immigrant diaspora which would permit concentrations of wealth in the hands of someone who would purchase such things.

I did observe rampant child or underage prostitution in Cambodia, Thailand, Haiti, the Dominican Republic of course, if the American judiciary is to be believed, among certain American billionaires, politicians, and members of the British royal family.

Returning to the fundamentals of the debate I’d enjoy seeing some justification For your assertion that market mechanisms are unique to capitalist economies considering they predate them considerably.

Capital concentration and investment is a fundamental economic activity. No moderately complicated society can function without it. Capitalism is just one way to organize this activity. There’s a case to be made for it that relies on empiricism rather than mere distortion and ignorance.

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