Hacker News Reader

Comment by TFYS | Hacker News Reader

If people are still dying of hunger and preventable diseases in capitalist countries, then it has not lifted all of humanity. I wasn't saying some other system is doing better than capitalism, just that capitalism has not succeeded in bringing all of humanity out of absolute poverty.

Anyway, just because capitalism is the best we've come up with so far doesn't mean we can't do better. Would you look at the fastest car today and say "there's no example of a faster car you can provide, therefore this is the fastest car there can ever be". No, we can do better, especially with the technology we now have.

View on HN

Capitalism is not a designed system, it is an emergent phenomena. Even in the most restrictive, communist societies (North Korea) the black market is the primary way the common people don’t starve. As they accumulate wealth they continue to invest in their black market enterprises.

There is no alternative to letting people trade, which results in successful traders accumulating more than others. That’s it. There is no other system because it goes against human nature

Markets != capitalism. By limiting what can be owned and for what reason, we could get rid of capitalism without completely getting rid of markets. It'd be quite easy to prevent private ownership of land or large businesses without black markets for those things forming.

Your solution is to have the government restrict freedom at gunpoint. A solution with a long history of examples and attempts, of total failure

Capitalism relies on a government enforcing its rules just as much as any other system. How do you think someone can own businesses, buildings and large swathes of land? Because if someone tries to claim them as their own, the government will come and restrict their freedom to do so. We also quite successfully restrict ownership of people these days.

Government by definition (at least through Hobbes' Leviathan) is the restriction of some freedoms through the monopoly of violence.

It restricts your freedom of robbing others, of killing people, of not abiding by a contract, there are many "freedoms" you don't have that are necessary for society to function.

As the other comment mentioned, markets != capitalism, capitalism is a specific system to exploit markets but it doesn't mean it's the best way that will ever be found to provide incentives to produce what society wants or needs.

>> It'd be quite easy to prevent private ownership of land or large businesses without black markets for those things forming.

Quite impossible actually.

It is incredibly easy. All the state needs to do is stop recognizing such property claims, and, therefore, stop using its monopoly on use of force to protect them. Capitalism doesn't exist outside of a framework of property rights that allows for accumulation of capital, which requires a legal system to enforce it. Remove that legal system, and the rest collapses.

People have always traded, since the earliest pre-human artifacts. Trade makes both sides wealthier. Outlaw property rights and people will use other mechanisms to defend their property.

What the parent comment says is not to outlaw property rights absolutely, read the comment again "private ownership of land or large businesses", it's a very specific subset of ownership.

Trading and markets are not the problem. Unbounded accumulation of capital is. Capitalism is actually anti-free-trade and anti-free-markets because it creates a positive feedback loop where the more capital you have, the more economic rent you can extract from others, which can then be used to grow the capital. At the end of that loop is a degenerate market dominated by a single monopoly or a few oligopolies, not free in any meaningful sense.

Therefore, if society wants free trade and free markets, it needs to prevent this. And the easiest way to do so is by making unbounded capital accumulation impossible, by refusing to acknowledge it as legitimate property right past a certain point, and thus withholding society's protections for it. It doesn't mean that all property rights are gone.

There is no such thing as "rent extraction" in a free market. I am gaining capital because I am serving others well, so they voluntarily give me their money. Trade is not zero-sum, we are both better. Capital I accumulate is reinvested, or spent on things I want. There is no problem with capital accumulation.

You have come to the exactly incorrect conclusions

There's no free market with oligopolies.

No it's impossible, because if the state steps down, other criminal associations will take it's role. You are effectively saying, if we delete mentions of gravity in physics textbooks, it will cease to exit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com