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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

People always conflate capitalism with a free market. They're different things. Capitalism just means that capital (the means of production) is privately owned, rather than being owned by a collective of workers (socialism) or the state (communism). Controlled markets can still exist under capitalism, such as by monopoly. Standard Oil controlled the market for oil in its heyday and regulated the supply to keep the price stable to avoid the boom/bust cycles that happened before they consolidated the market. The government can still regulate the market, as it does extensively in the US, without changing the fundamental fact that the means of production are privately owned.

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Personally, I've come to realize that capitalism, communism, socialism are simply semantic pits that don't really mean anything. If you say these words to people they have wildly different interpretations of their definitions and the arguments that arise from this discord are usually both heated and pointless.

Words are meant to communicate things, if they aren't communicating your intent then why even bother using them? While they still have some vague relevance from a historical perspective, like when discussing the cold war, I think any contemporary discussion where one feels the use of these words might be necessary would be better off just listing their ideals directly instead of falling into this semantic trap.

Agree, these terms are bordering on meaningless. I think they suffer from reification, or something like it.

What's worse is that people will assign a meaning to those terms, not bother to tell anyone that meaning, and yet use the term in discourse with others who they know don't assign the same meaning. It's infuriating.

What everybody really thinks is "people should be free to do good or trivially bad things, and shouldn't be free to do materially bad things".

> or the state (communism)

That is also socialism. Communism is an imagining of what the world will look like after entering a state of post-scarcity. In fact, part of what is imagined in that is that we will become stateless. After all, absent of scarcity, what would you need a state for?

Now, it was once theorized that capitalists would artificially withhold entrance into post-scarcity and that the only way to achieve post-scarcity is, first, for the state to take over the means of production. This theory bred the Communist Party. States under rule of the Communist Party are often called Communist, but in that vein does not refer to capital ownership, but rather the party in power.

Socialism has never been fully realized, as under communism the surplus and means of production were controlled by the state, not the workers. It was state capitalism.

If you accept that socialism can exist alongside capitalism, then it most definitely has been realized. Travel to just about any rural area and you will find co-ops galore. A very least in providing means of production to farmers, but quite often beyond – telcos/ISPs, grocery stores, gas stations, etc.

If you see socialism as only some kind of state where capitalism no longer exists, then sure, we've never gotten there. Probably never will. Hell, even if post-scarcity communism is someday realized, it is equally possible that we got there by way of capitalism. Just because someone theorized that capitalists would put up roadblocks on the way to post-scarcity doesn't necessarily mean they would or that they couldn't be overcome.

Just wanted to point out that the distinction between communism and socialism is not whether it's the state that owns things. In fact there is no distinction. They are one and the same and both refer to workers owning the means of production.

There are different types of communism, based on what that means. i.e. Leninists would generally believe that the state is representative of the people, via dictatorship of the proletariat and all that. Whereas council communists would have none of that and would prefer no state and councils of producers and consumers, and once you start digging into anarchism, you will find a bunch more other varieties of communism.

Balancing the interests of private capital, the free market, the state (society) and workers is what Germany is trying to achieve with the Social Market Economy ("social capitalism"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy

+1 came here to point out what should be obvious: the US is not, and has never has been, a free market. There is, and always has been, "rules and regulations" beyond the "natural" which dictate the behavior of the market.

The closest thing I'm aware of to a free market was the cryptocurrency driven markets of the "Dark Web" somewhere between the rise and fall of Silk Road. Yet even that market was embedded within, and ultimately governed by, the jurisdictions the network was hosted.

There is no such thing as a free market without rules and regulations, rules and regulations are what allow a free market to exist.

This sounds an awful lot like doublethink.

What is so free about a central bank setting interest rates?

The “natural” rule of a “free market” without artificial rules is that he who owns the guns takes your stuff.

Someone using a gun to take your stuff has not established a market.

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