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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism just values what people value. If nature is worth more as a tourist attraction than a farm, that is what it will be.

I am not making excuses for capitalism here. I am just saying: you can either overthrow global capitalism and replace it with some new perfect system no one knows about yet OR we can start valuing different things as a society...

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The problem is that capitalism naturally "takes advantage" of weaknesses in human decision-making, especially around being abstracted from consequences (by time, space, complex routing, etc etc), that even the very humans in question frequently agree should not be the way it works.

That's just one of several problems. Another one is that economic systems often tell people what to value, and what products to associate with what feelings. People rarely start smoking because they like the taste or sensation.

“ Capitalism just values what people value. ”

Capitalism values what capitalists value.

It doesn't matter what the "capitalists" value if they have no customers.

But a person's values do not fully or directly translate through their consumer habits, and then through the actions of those higher up along the chain. There is a common fallacy that strong proponents of capitalism, especially free markets, believe in (or pretend to), which essentially goes: If you patronize x, you either condone all negative consequences of x's actions, or you're ignorant/hypocritical, and further, if it's the latter, the system should not or can not be changed to mitigate those consequences. But, every part of that is false by oversimplification.

But capitalism changes people

> Capitalism just values what people value.

Except capitalism's built-in incentives keep causing this huge megaphone to blare out CONSUME at a deafening volume 24/7...

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