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Representatives aren't emotionless puppets that respond to money. They're people, and they can be good or bad. In this case, they're bad, and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies.
> that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit
This is also insanely deluded and ignorant of reality. Every communist country in existence has power deals between bureaucrats in charge of the state, and bureaucrats in charge of producing things. This is a result of human nature, and capitalism doesn't come into it at all.
in your example they’re both bad—both the original aggressor and the one refusing to enforce against that aggressor.
we need to mitigate against this desire to find The One thing to blame. By their very nature complicated situations will have many problems, rarely simply one. we need to remember this so we don’t accidentally stifle conversations by saying “No! It’s this other thing! Not what you said!” we need to recognize this when we find ourselves falling into this trap.
keep in mind, in your scenario, if the elected representative were to enforce against the aggressor, the aggressor would go to jail because their actions are bad—-this tells us that no, it isn’t only the elected person. Both of the parties in your scenario are actively making the situation worse.
it’s both. they both deserve our derision.
The point that I'm trying to make is that, while evildoers will always exist, we don't have very much agency over their actions. You don't have very many options over the actions of a bad company (or person) - but you do have the ability to hold your representatives accountable and protest and vote against them if they don't make good laws and enforce them.
So, even though evil companies/people should be shunned, at the very least we know that there's always going to be some of them around - but our representatives are ostensibly acting in our bests interests, and have more responsibility, power, and accountability than the bad actors, so we should focus on them instead.
That is - the same amount of energy applied to our representatives will do far more good than applied to bad companies.
another solution, actually boycott immorality. morality was pushed from society not so long ago, at least in the US, and what you see is the result. why wouldn’t you follow the letter of the law and screw over large swaths of people if it’s legal?
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2022/
The average CEO nowadays is paid 344 times more than an average worker, while in 1978 this figure was "only" 21 times.
And indeed, lots of it goes to prevent serious penalties, like lawyering-up, lobbying, (deceitful) media campaigns, bribing "scientists" and "doctors", etc. Just look at Big Tobacco's playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement and see it playing out with Big Oil and climate change, Big Chem (PFAS in our water), etc etc. And, let's not forget Big Tech, with companies like Twitter/X where fascism now thrives, and Instagram/TikTok/Whatever who mine our attention.
These companies have grown, much like tumors, to be overly powerful, overly protected, and overly influential. And they wreck havoc on our societies and planet. Their attempts of "self-regulation" are laughable, and so far also laughable have been our governments' attempts to reign them in.
My point is that the kind of corp feudalism we see now is a direct following of unrestrained capitalism/libertarianism. Unless we reign in the companies, break them down, make them pay fair wages and hold them responsible for their societal and environmental impact, we will drown in our own garbage.
And yes, it's capitalism to blame, a philosophy where you optimize only for profit, throwing all other values out the window, in the hope that the (non-existent) "invisible hand" of the market will somehow fix everything magically.
it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism. we can’t keep giving human behavior a pass and blaming systems that literally cannot take any action on their own. we see this with guns as well, the problem is not the system nor the laws, the problem is people. i wish you luck in fixing people, as many have tried before you and failed.
It's the same reason you don't allow 10 year-olds to operate a vehicle, cause it can be a danger to society.
> it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism.
This statement is the equivalent of hand waving. Capitalism is a system made by humans, it's not some divine order. We have toppled other flawed systems in the past, feudalism (kings and queens heads were rolling), slavery, and we can do the same with capitalism.
These large complex systems have a life on their own and are susceptible to laws that individuals within can't predict/influence, so it's not human nature. Humans are largely compassionate, cooperative creatures. But the system in which we are placed influences our behavior to a huge extent. In this case, the system is definitely the problem, because it has bugs and corner cases that make it collapse, one way or another, and behavior that we consider "bad" to flourish.
Capitalism, let's call it for what it is, has become money-based feudalism where the most ruthless and sociopathic people "succeed". How else would you call Big Tobacco's disinformation campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement#. This purposeful misinformation of the public is surely evil. How else would you call tobacco execs' behavior if not evil and sociopathic? The capitalistic system is basically cutthroat lying and stealing and extraction of value with a false veneer of fairness and law.
- Theoretically, we are all equal in front of the law. In practice, the rich can lawyer up and get away with things that a normal person wouldn't be able to
- Theoretically, all of us, through hard work and enterprise, can "succeed" in capitalism. In practice, it's much more important who your daddy is, where you were born, and where you studied (which is also influenced by money)
- Theoretically, the government system in which we participate has elected bodies which are supposed to protect us from harm (e.g pollution, climate change, etc). In practice, money has allowed large corporation to buy politicians, lobbyists, campaign time, influence public opinion, etc.
So, you see, in capitalism, the system is very very rigged, it promises one thing, but, behind the scenes, it's all about money. Everything is optimized for money, everything else is thrown out of the window (including people, nature, morals). There is only one option to defeat this rigged system, and that's not individual action, it's collective action.
Strikes work, greedy corps can't actually survive without their workers doing the work.
The pandemic made many people re-evaluate what's important, and we saw that it's the lower paid professions that were the "essential ones": nurses, delivery drivers, sanitation, etc. Why are they lower paid then?
Now we are back to pretending nothing ever happened and corporations really hard are trying to make it business as usual again, trying to put you back to the office, trying to raise their prices and blame it on inflation.
But guess what: with the fabrics of society unraveling together with the natural world, when there is no drinkable water and no food to eat, and fires are raging everywhere, you will realize that capitalism was the cancer causing all this. You'd be regretting you didn't band up with others and acted up sooner.
But then this is stepping on an enumerated right. If we remove or make it difficult the right to own guns, what’s next? Freedom of speech? That one was attacked recently as well. So no the solution is not to further limit rights due to the hoplophobia of a few, the solution is actually what you’re trying to stop. Prior to recent history, it was quite common for a child to have a gun. They didn’t go around shooting people then, so what’s different? (removing morality such that people are only scared of breaking laws, and nothing else).
The rest I didn’t read because this isn’t a blog and you tried to compare capitalism with feudalism.
I understand capitalism doesn’t allow you to be lazy and have no job, but that’s a feature not a bug.
It may be enlightening to read some of the GP's other comments, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41290361
> The perverse incentives of capitalism will never create good social change
...and you just outed yourself as being extremely ignorant of basically all history, as the vast majority of socially beneficial inventions and rights of all time have come from capitalist countries.
I do agree with you that this is a failure of regulation. However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in, capitalism actively FIGHTS regulation.
Whether it's lobbyism, hiring "scientists" to challenge independent studies, outright tax evasion, or simply accepting fines for disaster after disaster (oil spills, bad plane design, data sales) because they can afford it. Hell, politicians now are deregulating our countries by privatising or de-funding branch after branch (see the NHS in the UK).
Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale, and our governments are as deeply involved as the corporations, not out of maliciousness, but due to how the system naturally drags everybody and everything in, with its need for constant growth. You know what else constantly grows? Tumors.
Sure we do need powerful regulation and regulation enforcement, but we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/pete-buttigieg-free-market-hungr...
"Pete Buttigieg: Hungry Babies, Regrettably, Are Just the Price of the Free Market"
Is worth preserving.
I'd say not, and I will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past, where it belongs, along with slavery, feudalism, fascism and other obsolete and harmful human societal arrangements.
This is, again, deeply deluded and detached from reality.
People always fight those who hold them back. This applies to employees fighting bosses, children fighting parents, companies fighting regulators, citizens fighting corrupt governments, and different bureaucrats fighting each other in socialist and communist systems.
It's blindingly obvious that this phenomenon isn't specific to capitalism, and outright false to claim that it wouldn't happen in any other economic system. (and, in fact, it would be much worse in command economies, as history clearly shows)
> Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale
Again: there's no "at its current stage" - there is corruption in government that has allowed bad actors to run rampant. The fact that tens of thousands of companies are behaving reasonably trivially disproves your claim that this is a "stage". This is bad actors, which have always existed, and always will continue to exist, that are now less checked than usual because of regulatory failure.
> we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this
...which proves decisively that you have no idea what you're talking about. This is not an argument - this is emotional pleading.
That describes a lot of your posts, actually - pleading. Because there are no logical points made, just a lot of emotionally manipulative, trivially-false statements.
> will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past
...and there's the activism, which comes with the typical lack of understanding of reality that is common to proponents for communism.
You should visit North Korea for yourself and see how alternative systems to capitalism actually work.