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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

When I hear stuff like this it just sounds like theological nationalism to me. "For what is a country, without God at its head?"

It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.

Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.

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Funny, I think the obsession with dismantling capitalism is a religion. "First, we must dismantle capitalism" is the Communist equivalent of "first, you must renounce other gods and accept Jesus into your life".

You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.

Nor will I. Capitalism must be dismantled because of the horrors it perpetrates on living people today. If you want to defend those atrocities you may, but saying this is the best we can do is a kind of pessimism I don't find in myself.

At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.

Despite not having studied history or economics or politics or war, surely you must see the risks of dismantling an economic system that has raised billions out of poverty without any type of replacement?

It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.

That doesn't feel like a particularly charitable reading of their comment. I don't think they're suggesting we just burn everything down with no plan for what comes after, they're simply stating that they believe we need to find a better alternative while acknowledging that they don't know what that alternative is yet.

They don't say "we should replace capitalism when stumble upon a better way of organizing human economic activity". Which is a pretty bland statement everyone agrees with.

They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.

That is a very strong statement.

But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."

Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.

"First, we must dismantle capitalism" is the Communist equivalent of

The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.

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