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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

Exploiting externalities isn't just a capitalism thing. The Romans were well aware of the problems with lead plumbing yet they still used it.

The rampant air pollution in China is another example where you can't blame capitalism.

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What else would you blame? The air pollution ramped up with China opening up to capital markets. China has fewer social programs than Canada and many more powerful private companies than EU. Calling China communist doesn't make it any more true than me calling myself the Queen of England.

I think you can destroy the environment with industrialization using different distributive glosses. The Soviet Union did it with a very diminished sense of private property and limited internal markets. I think sometimes it is capitalist ignoring of externalities and other times it is socialist ignoring of externalities.

The soviet union most likely did what it did because it was totalitarian, not because it was socialist. A dictator can choose to pollute a river, but that’s kinda besides the point. The point is that the incentives that capitalism creates for individuals’ behavior will tend to drive them to produce without consideration for externalities. Even a dictatorship may arguably have more incentives against such, cause the dictator needs to avoid pissing off the people so much that they overthrow him. Capitalism instead explicitly accepts most behaviors which pursue profit regardless of their externalities. To the extent we don’t do that today, it’s mostly the result of changing our economy to be a more mixed model with government regulation.

China has lowered the air polution in their cities by a lot. They are investing heavily in renewables and fixing desertification.

I don't mean by that that China is a communist country, because it isn't. It is a dictatorship with a capitalist vision. But they are more socialist and people based than others.

Why can I say that? Because they are effectively trying to fix the problems that their capitalist vision has brought, like environment contamination, pollution and desertification.

You've given the wrong example and proven right the other comment: A strong government can fix the problems a liberalized economy can bring.

Of course. I never said that capitalism was always responsible for every trouble. Just that it's also a bad system, except of course for technological growth, in which case it's a great system. The common root is always technology.

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