Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

> Startups love to save the world, but look at the state of the world now—is this what it’s like to be saved? Is the world even a little bit better because of startups like Instagram, Uber, and Peloton? Startups are spaces of remarkable innovation, and they are experts at channeling the multivoicedness of code—just look at the network of voices that GitLab channels (visualized below). But under capitalism, these voices are distorted and constrained, and they cry “growth, growth!” as venture capitalists and founders demand user acquisition, market share, and revenue—in a word, they demand access to capitalist accumulation.

Imagine a world where everyone starts with exactly the same resources and access to identical education. There are no parental differences. Even in this scenario, because of the variability in humans, some will be predisposed to save money while others spend it right away, some will study hard while others spend all day hanging out with friends, some will be natural leaders that organize people and others will be followers.

There is no such thing as equality - none. No two people are equal and no system, even an absolute authoritarian nightmare, can enforce equality. Inequality is natural and expected.

Capitalism is the natural order - it's an emergent phenomenon. People save money, invest it into other good ideas, they get more money, they reinvest it, and on and on. Eventually giant pools of money form to reduce risk, smooth returns, and enable professional investors to act on behalf of less-sophisticated ones. This results in pension funds, sovereign wealth, and a small number of individually rich people.

The best you can do is forcibly take money from people and businesses and redistribute it. The best and fairest way to do this IMO is a straightforwards flat tax, but the tax code always and everywhere results in a Gordian Knot of favored industries, tax breaks, arbitrary taxes to attack some perceived enemy, and on and on.

There will never be a permanent revolution against capitalism, just temporary fits like in Cuba and Russia that eventually die off. Capitalism is a reflection of human wants - the innate desire to own your own stuff. Everything else fans out from the fundamental desire for private property.

>There is no such thing as equality - none. No two people are equal and no system, even an absolute authoritarian nightmare, can enforce equality. Inequality is natural and expected.

No shit sherlock. Nobody is asking for a magical world where everyone is the exact same god fearin' american as the last -- the point is to create systems that aim to create as equal OPPORTUNITIES as possible. Nobody is asking for equal outcomes. If you want to parrot talking points, you need to brush up on what you're stuffing the scarecrow with.

The entirety of human history until the late medieval/early medieval period, all those hundreds of thousands of years existed without capitalism despite resource inequality. It can be hard to see beyond the dominant social structures we see around us every day, but don't confuse them for inevitabilities. Things will eventually change and whatever replaces the current structures will seem just as obviously inevitable to our descendents.

But the thousands of years of civilization prior to capitalism were quite unequal with a wealthy ruling class and slavery.

A 2021 Oxfam report found that collectively, the 10 richest men in the world owned more than the combined wealth of the bottom 3.1 billion people, almost half of the entire world population.

Which doesn't invalidate the fact that there was a lot of inequality prior to capitalism. Kings, emperors, different classes and what not.

Arguably, the sheer scale of inequality now is much higher than back then. The players are different but the game is the same.

In all these thousands of years, capitalism existed. People traded with other countries. Those who got into trade got rich. People who were allied with the ruling class were rich. The people who were rich used their wealth to accumulate more wealth. It was pretty much the same as today in terms of the pareto distribution of power and wealth.

> Even in this scenario, because of the variability in humans, some will be predisposed to save money while others spend it right away

Solution: make money expire after e.g. 12 months.

You will own nothing and be happy <:o)

Unfortunately most people think the converse is true.

Unrelated but you most posted a comment many years back (below). Wondering if you have any tips on research / articles in this space?

> Yes, very nice. But it needs an update on structured documents (tree-like, as in HTML). And, ideally, it should be accompanied by work that addresses collaborative editing in such structured documents.

Not really. Perhaps have a look at the Prosemirror codebase. It can work with hierarchy and also supports collaborative editing.

Thanks!

Then people will just trade using something else which serves as a store of value.

I often wonder how people can’t understand how that is one of the most important things it takes for something to be considered “money”. Once it loses that people will immediately exchange it for something else and society will just use shells as a medium of exchange.

Also your “solution” is for the “problem” of people deferring consumption. I honestly can’t see how anyone would see that as a problem.

Ironically this is a Marxist argument, more or less.

But it lacks the historical dimension. Capitalism is a historical and technological phenomenon. One of the replies talks about it emerging in the Late Middle Ages. Of course it existed previously, in the form of a landed aristocracy, but the potential for concentration of capital didn't exist.

With the industrial revolution concentration of capital created the order we live under today. To describe it as natural is an unhappy choice of words. It is certainly engaged in the large-scale subjugation and destruction of nature.

Concentrated capital turns the machine up: it exponentially increases inputs and outputs, ramps up the engine, increases production, consumption, everything. It is a system that may be completely unsustainable.

You deal with the benefits of the system: good ideas, smooth returns, sophisticated investors. I don't see any appreciation of the costs: increasing inequality, environmental damage, immiseration of people in developing countries.

There may never be a permanent revolution against capitalism: it will simply be impossible to sustain.

Several things to unpack here.

Regarding the environment, every single action a human does, from building huts to skyscrapers, affects the environment. I don’t see the earth as a living creature, I see it as a ball of rock. If humanity went extinct, in the blink of an eye all the damage and changes we did to the earth would be meaningless. I want to keep the environment amenable to humans only because I want humans to exist - the earth is not a goddess, it is unthinking and unfeeling matter.

Regarding developing countries, more people in the last 100 years were lifted out of poverty than in all time, and that was directly because of capitalism.

Marx was a good philosopher and historian. However I fundamentally disagree with the labor theory of value, because all value is subjective. There is no direct mapping between labor cost and value to the consumer, labor is simply an input cost. You can create something with enormous value with very little labor.

> I don't see any appreciation of the costs: increasing inequality, environmental damage, immiseration of people in developing countries.

How is capitalism increasing inequality over what came before? There is more environmental damage now because there are a lot more of us with a lot more powerful technologies. But humans have always altered their environments to make them more suitable. One could argue that we (and our hominid cousins) became an invasive species once we started migrating out of Africa.

And if the developing countries are developing, it sounds like the people are becoming less immeserated over time.

Natural order is not necessary something we want, it can be, but not always.

Capitalism would be fine with private monopolies for instance, but from a market economy perspective that would be bad.

> Capitalism is the natural order - it's an emergent phenomenon.

So is war and taking things by force. The strong prevail and the weak perish.

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