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Comment by stevofolife | Hacker News Reader

What a great anecdote.

I'm sad to say this - but most capitalism operates like this more or less, and capitalism runs the world. There is not enough integrity.

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A lack of integrity isn't necessarily a problem of capitalism, but it does mean that it needs active regulation. Otherwise the collection of capital and resulting accumulation of power will be abused. A knock on more controlled economies and such is that people will abuse the power that such systems give them... so we shouldn't let them get that power organically either.

100% agree. At least lack of integrity will never prevail. Active regulation with fairness is increasingly more important.

…active well-funded regulation…

…since a common anti-regulatory strategy is to strangle the funding…

It needs less regulation (regimentation) and more enforcement of basic laws like the prohibition on fraud.

Regulation is just another forum that can be corrupted.

What does capitalism have to do with this? This is a plain morality issue and human nature that does not have anything to do with the form of the economy. The same behaviour and even worse was in plain display in every communist society.

It does. The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a "profit". I'm explicitly saying capitalism is focused on "profit". Since you brought up communism, it has a different ideology which is not centered on "profit".

Does that make sense?

PS: Also I do not intend to debate capitalism vs. communism, I'm trying to convey the idea of "a society driven by profit".

And my point was that "profit" is not the culprit here, and that is why I took communism as example. People will do questionable or illegal things for variuos selfish reasons. Profit being just one of them, but the people that would do those things for profit would do the same things for other non so tangible advancement of the self ego. So the problem is not that the society is driven by profit but because there is a conflict of self vs society.

Its privatized power, trying to break out the containement vessel that is a democratic society. Once it succedds it continues to build little autocratic empires in the host, similar to tumors. The whole libertarian ideolog is just that, the secretions of tumors, trying to convince the host, that this is friendly, normal and actually a net positive growth to the creature being devoured.

Of course the anti-bodies, aka taxes have to be supressed, otherwise the defenses kick and and a normal society returns.

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