Hacker News Reader

Comment by pastacacioepepe | Hacker News Reader

The fact that you jump straight to Communism (without having the balls to openly say it) when nobody even mentioned it, that's a damning indictment of your education system. Or religious doctrine, I should say.

Ever thought that maybe Capitalism is just a small step in human history and that we can definitely do better? I wonder what happened to innovation, is it fine only as long as it doesn't threaten the status quo that keeps you complacent?

View on HN

There are loads of other economic systems. Feudalism, oligarchy, tribal pastoralism, you name it.

I was mainly thinking in terms of critiquing the idea that value is created by labour, since HyperSane mentioned it twice in comments.

It happens that the labour theory of value in central to Marx but it’s not exclusive to him. Adam Smith indulged a lesser form of it in one of his uncharacteristic slip ups in economic theory. However it is in Marx that it achieves its most vertiginous heights of absurdity, and through his disciples that the most damage was done by it.

There is a direct causal line from the LTV and some of the direst economic disasters in human history. The most egregious case, despite some strong rival examples in Soviet Russia, is probably Mao’s Great Leap Forward which among other things fetishised steel production. Production creates value and steel is the most important economic product, so everybody should make steel.

It’s the damage the LTV caused itself that I was talking about. Communism is a political project associated with it but not directly what I had in mind.

As for innovation, I’m all for it. Capitalism maximises individual freedom by putting ownership of capital and rights of self determination of labour directly into the hands of citizens. By maximising individual economic freedom it maximises opportunities for economic innovation. This is why free market capitalist economies are so creative and dynamic.

Capitalism is responsible for chattel slavery in the Americas, the genocide of untold native populations in Asia, Africa, Ireland, the South Pacific and the Americas; famines and environmental destruction around the world; destroyed the stability of most of Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America; and it has rewarded bad behavior like pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that we have irreversibly altered the climate of the entire planet. That's literally just skimming the surface - tetraethyl lead, CFCs, an anthology of chemical-related explosions and spills, the great Pacific garbage patch, depleted fisheries around the globe, the obesity crisis, the opioid crisis, the homelessness crisis, and so on.

I still stan (a version of) capitalism, I agree it's better than the other systems, but I do always get a giggle when people act like communism caused the worst disasters in history. They're not great, to be sure, but at least the Communists were mostly killing their own people through incompetence rather instead of killing the entire planet for avarice. It's humans all the way down, doesn't matter what system. Either you have accountability, or you don't and if you don't bad things happen.

Are you aware of the utterly catastrophic environmental devastation caused by the Soviet Union, and to this day by Chinese state industries? This is the problem with undemocratic centrally planned systems, with state controlled media. Complete lack of accountability.

Yes? I’m also aware of the catastrophic destruction that democratic, capitalist countries have done with no accountability - are you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com