Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst system except for all the others.

Open source doesn't represent socialism, which has a history of mass deaths and economic and literal starvation. Open source just says, "I wrote this code and you can use it without paying me."

To make an economy work, though, people have to pay for stuff -- which means they have to earn money. Open source projects, including all the big ones, are funded by profit-making, capitalist businesses. Whether it's being propped up by Adobe (like the awesome Blender) or Microsoft (with VS Code), you have to make money to be able to give it away like that. Even personal open source projects are funded by that person's money, probably from a job.

View on HN

I know how simple it is to say "socialism = mass death", but it's not meaningful.

Was Roosevelt a socialist? Certainly some at the time said he was a socialist or even a communist.

Or as VP candidate Walz said: "One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness."

Walz's comment is surely aligned with what the OP meant as socialism.

"Capitalism" doesn't simply mean "pay for stuff", because people used money and worked on personal and shared projects long before there was capitalism.

And it's not like capitalism doesn't have its own history of mass deaths and economic and literal starvation.

This is also not correct. No form of socialism has worked and therefore, empirically, it does not work. Capitalism, however, has raised the standard of living for more people across more socioeconomic classes in more places than any other idea in human history, and that's provable on any measure of the quality of human life.

> This is also not correct. No form of socialism has worked ...

The problem is in how one draws the line to define "socialism".

I mentioned how Roosevelt was called a socialist and communist due to his New Deal. Was that socialism, or was it not socialism?

I highlighted how "One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness." That's why "socialism" as a blanket term is pretty meaningless.

If you can't define socialism, you can't tell if it worked. If your definition excludes examples which others have said is socialism, and which seem to work, which definition should we trust, and why?

> Capitalism, however, has raised the standard of living

How do you prove that? How do you disentangle correlation and causation? (As an aside, 'standard of living' is usually measured in economic terms, often coupled with growth, so choosing that definition is not unbiased.)

Can we attribute the upcoming climate catastrophe to capitalism? If 500 million people die from it, can we say that capitalism caused mass deaths and economic and literal starvation?

Socialism and communism are easily defined by Marx's 10 Planks.

In terms of raising the standard of living, those are all standard terms and metrics. In terms of causation, money earned by people gets spent by them to raise their standard of living. Don't let people who want to control you pull the wool over your eyes and start thinking that giving them all your money and power means they would make things better for you. They won't. They never have. Those are true facts.

For more on the underlying concept of liberty vs. statism and why only the former can deliver any kind of results, I highly recommend Ayn Rand's short essay called, A Textbook of Americanism [0].

[0] https://fee.org/resources/textbook-of-americanism/

That doesn't really help at all. That list is why some people say the US is a socialist country, that Roosevelt was a socialist or communist, etc. For literally the first DDG example, http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/TenPlanks.html .

I know they are standard metrics. I don't think they are good metrics due to their built-in assumptions.

This thread has nothing to do with "giving them all your money and power means they would make things better for you". My observations were 1) "socialism" is such as broad term as to be meaningless until pinned down - and DonnyV clearly isn't talking about Marxism, and 2) a market economy clearly does not require capitalism as people earned money and had jobs long before there was capitalism or mercantilism, so your connecting the two is not a valid argument.

I ask again: Can we attribute the upcoming climate catastrophe to capitalism? If 500 million people die from it, can we say that capitalism caused mass deaths and economic and literal starvation?

No. And how did we get from history to conjecture? We use oil because it's cheap and comes out of the ground, not because of capitalism. If you could get socialists to volunteer to build and run solar energy systems for free, then we would have those already.

Oil also contributed enormously to the rise in the human standard of living everywhere. There is no mass extinction from climate change happening now. Humans survived the ice age.

You cannot sell me communism by calling it socialism and appealing to future climate fear. You are absolutely asking for people to give over control and money, as that's exactly what socialism requires. Peace. Out.

> No.

So all the good things belong to capitalism and all the bad things are something else. Got it.

> We use oil because it's cheap and comes out of the ground, not because of capitalism.

Where did the capital come from to build those oil wells? Who funded the security companies, and the lawsuits, and the governments? Why is it that the people most negatively affected happen to also be the ones with the least access to capital?

> You cannot sell me communism

I'm not. I'm saying to not put blind faith into capitalism, including to imply that a market economy and being paid requires capitalism.

But since anything regarded as a negative critique of gung ho capitalism is termed 'socialism' or 'communism' or 'Marxist', ... guess that's what I am.

I have a post above somewhere above but CO-OPS. I agree that capitalism has worked wonders but it is not the only route to success.

Churchill's famous quote wasn't about capitalism, it was about democracy, which isn't the same thing at all. Here's an article with his full quote and the history of the idea he was expressing:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/12/08/democracy-worst/

I'm fully aware of that, hence calling it a paraphrase. Perhaps I should have used the term allusion.

Churchill never said this about capitalism, he said it about democracy.

That's what paraphrasing means.

To paraphrase Churchill, the HN commenting system is the worst system except for all the others.

To paraphrase Churchill, pineapple pizza is the worst pizza except for all the others.

To paraphrase Churchill, Japan is the worst country except for all the others.

Not really, you have to paraphrase what was actually said not completely distort the original meaning to push your narrative.

My intent here is not to distort the meaning but rather to apply it, fully intact, to the concept of capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com