Is it just me or has the tide of opinion on HN really shifted against capitalism in the past year?
It's not that any alternative is better, rather, it's that we have all been far too cherry and positive about capitalism up to this point.
You should be sad/unhappy to participate in the market. It is evil, the problem is that everything else is more evil.
If you look closely, the earlier comment is really about the apparent failing of intellectual property laws (which are antithetical to capitalism!), not capitalism. In the olden days HN users would have taken care to make it clear that they were talking about IP laws, but now "capitalism" has come to be used as some kind of catch-all for all the ills seen around government. Most especially when it is a comment void of anything useful and is merely trying to tug on heart strings.
Another commenter basically said the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44651323
But I maintain that is still a product of lower quality comments. In the HN days of yore, commenters put more effort in to speaking clearly (often to the point of pedantry, for better or worse) rather than trying to get readers' emotions all worked up.
I think the claim isn’t totally inaccurate. Claiming that companies prioritize making products last just beyond return windows because that maximizes profits is a critique of capitalism IMO. Since capitalism is about profit (capital) being the dominant signal as far as I understand it.
In my opinion, a lot of frustration about capitalism nowadays can be tied to Goodhart’s law. Profit being the measure and companies getting so efficient at optimizing it, that we’re starting to harm the things that profit is a proxy for.
Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production.
There is nothing about the private ownership of the means of production that inherently leads to the situation described earlier. You could end up in the exact same place if the means of production was community owned.
What leads us there is intellectual property laws, which create artificial monopolies. Go on, just try and copy that shitty product that only lasts 35 days, but modify it slightly to last longer to the glee of the customers, and see how long you last before lawyers are breathing down your neck...
That's part of the definition but not the whole definition.
Other parts of of the definition include:
Capitalism is about free markets.
Capitalism is about competition.
Capitalism is about converting the commons to private ownership.
Capitalism is about the more wealthy and powerful exploiting those with less wealth and power.
Capitalism is about mystifying how the system works so it's hard for people to imagine that it could work any other way.
Okay, sure. But IP laws prevent all that. As before, IP laws are antithetical to capitalism — and the source of breakdown witnessed earlier.
Or they use their influence to pass tax cuts primarily for the super wealthy that increase the wealth gap and erode existing social safety nets as we see with the "Big Beautiful Bill".
It's never just about the classic definition anymore than communism is, because there are always humans looking to look the cheat the system.
Do you mean interventionists, or, at least, opportunists? Welcoming politicians passing or rescinding laws that favor their industries is not in tune with capitalism, and therefore the people are not reasonably considered capitalists.
The USA is not really a capitalist state, if that is what you have in mind. It integrates some ideas from capitalism, to be fair, but also brings in a wealth of its own ideas. If you are desperate you could call it partially capitalist, I suppose, but even better is to leave capitalism behind and pick a word that encompasses what it really is. But, I know, when one falls in love...
> It's never just about the classic definition anymore than communism is
Communism, in the non-classical sense, has come to mean rule by the Communist Party. If you are implying that capitalism has come to mean rule by the Republican Party (and Democratic Party; there isn't enough difference to need to differentiate), I think that is quite fair. I would agree with you!
Which brings us back to IP laws being the problem. They are a legislative invention, not some kind of capitalistic principle. One that the Republicans and Democrats could fix, but choose not to. No doubt that is what the earlier comment was actually talking about — but poor choice of words given the overloadedness.
Which, again, stems from low quality content. In the olden days of HN, commenters were much more careful (pedantic, even) with what they had to say. Now commenters are just posting comments of little value and preying on emotions by using words that they know tug on heartstrings.
I mostly try to avoid the two capital Cs: Capitalism and Communism. These two terms mean so many different things to so many different people, I'd argue no other words have quite so much baggage or derail conversations quite so effectively.
Taking a side in that conflict means you'll be expected to answer for whatever evil people have gotten up to while paying lip service to your preferred ideology. I'd rather discuss how to improve our world using terms not arguably stained with the blood of millions.
This is exactly wrong. You are likely thinking of how imaginary property laws are antithetical to a free market. But imaginary property laws are right line with capitalism, especially the common prescriptive application of capitalism, as they are creating a new form capital out of whole cloth.
Not really. Capitalism was born from the need to manage real scarcity. Artificial scarcity does not fit into that model whatsoever. Trying to treat it as capital is how you get all these bizarre (and, to many, horrible) outcomes.
Yes, it seems like you're trying to deny that this is exactly what capitalism has become. It started off as a descriptive model for real scarcity. Then once that stopped being exciting, capital owners and their intellectual supplicants came up with rationalizations to create new forms of capital to be owned and controlled. For every person trying to no true Scotsman like you're doing, there's another arguing how imaginary property, or water rights, or Chicago parking meters, or hyperfinancialization in general makes sense under a whole host of assumptions like the efficient market fallacy. The side of entrenching interests inevitably wins, and we get the perverse outcomes everybody hates from late stage capitalism. The only sensible thing to do is regroup at a different metric/term besides capitalism.
How so? Yes, that's what capitalism has become. That idea serves as the entire basis of the discussion. If it were denied as you now suggest, what on earth are we talking about?
> The only sensible thing to do is regroup at a different metric/term besides capitalism.
Right. As before, this is what HN in the olden days would have done. Instead of redefining a word (and without even offering a new word to reference back to previous connotations), it would have created or found a non-conflicting word to fit the different scenario (to the point of pedantry). ...But that doesn't tug at the heartstrings in the new era of low value, appealing to emotion, slop. As was said at the onset, the changing definition of capitalism is what has brought on the apparent change in sentiment towards capitalism.
You must have forgotten to read the thread before replying (or were blinded by your own irrational emotional connection to the word capitalism)?
It seems like you're trying to invoke some pure version of capitalism that wasn't corrupted by imaginary property and other government giveaways [0], wasn't corrupted by money printing debt treadmill demanding ever-more assets to collateralize, didn't result in ever-increasing wealth concentration, etc. But this isn't what we have, and it's not clear that we could have even possibly had something different. Thinking that a problem can be solved merely by applying more vigilance is the fallacy of fundamentalism.
By regroup at another term, I mean describing the things we like about capitalism, so we can hopefully have some of those things even as the modern distaste for capitalism as a whole grows. Hence the reference to free markets in my original comment [1]. Things like private ownership, decentralization, competition, individual liberty, a stomach for some inequality, and so on.
[0] radio spectrum is another good example. Turning most of it into exclusive privately-administered slices definitely solved real problems, especially of technology at the time. But this was blessed by academic hand-waving away the downsides (Coase) to support the lucrative agenda. And it has certainly created real entrenched problems in the current day - now most innovation is being done in the tiny slices of unlicensed spectrum.
[1] FWIW "free market" is still probably not a good term to rally around given how much it's already been staked out by people interested in control rather than freedom, only looking to apply "freedoms" that increase their own power
In actuality, what we really have is feudalism — with us turning more things into land!!!
You can play that silly semantic game all day long, but the reality is that, in practice, intellectual property is not considered to be the same as capital. It has its own set of rules that are unique to it and, especially in the USA, it is considered something extra special in way that is entirely unlike capital. Actions speak louder than words.
Yes, it is capitalism because that's what we've decided to call it, but that is possible because the definition of capitalism has changed over time to accommodate. Take your time machine back in time and tell the people that capitalism is made up of the random ideas you came up with on the spot and they will look at you like you have three heads.
IP laws puts things into overdrive. It makes it impossible to compete. If you had a normally functioning environment, any time someone tried to capture excessive wealth, someone would just straight up copy them and that would be the end of it.
But since the law prevents copying others, contrary to the idea of capitalism, certain people are able to build moats. That's how you get the Bill Gates and Elon Musk's of the world. There is no way Windows would have made Microsoft any money if 1,000 different organizations all sold their own copies of Windows. But as the law gilded Gates to act exclusively...
Land eventually suffers a similar problem, to be fair. That hasn't been a huge deal historically as there was always more land to conquer, but those days have mostly drawn to a close. But we also tax land to try and find a reasonable balance in light of that — to put pressure on making effective use of it. IP, on the other hand, is generally not taxed at all.
There is motivation, though! The wealthy don't want another wealthy guy to have it — they want it for themselves. That's why we have property tax, so that the owner actually has to find a good use for it, else be compelled to give it up to other other wealthy guy who wants it even more.
> since you have the people with the wealth and power determining the laws.
The problem is the opposite, really. The average Joe makes the laws, and Average Joe doesn't want to risk their job that depends on intellectual property. Musk wouldn't bat an eye at squashing Gates like a little bug if he could, but Joe working at Microsoft is deathly afraid of what happens to him if Gates is challenged.
> You allude to a “normal functioning” capitalist environment but as counterintuitive as it might seem, that’s what we have.
You're right that it is basic human nature. But capitalism emerged to try and work around the limitations of human nature. That's its whole purpose. However, it largely predates the concept of intellectual property, so it doesn't really have that idea woven into its fabric. Hence why IP is bolted onto the side, with all kinds of bizarre effects because of it.
You mention that wealthy people support property tax because it harms their competitors even though it harms themselves. I haven’t heard that one before. Why wouldn’t elites just write laws that benefit themselves and hurt others instead? This explanation for property tax seems incomplete to me.
Yeah, and look where that got him. He got to play pretend politician for a short while, but soon realized that it wasn't going to get him anywhere. Everything he wanted to change — including eliminating IP laws, as it happens — failed and it wasn't long before he ran away crying.
Trump is a stronger example of someone who is successfully, at least to some degree, usurping power from the Average Joe. However, I am not sure you have made a good case for his wealth being behind it. Hitler (Godwin's law, yeah, yeah) seized power away from Average Joe in a similar fashion while he was rather poor.
But Trump is an unusual case anyway. His behaviour is quite unlike what has been seen in the past (in the USA). It is not like being wealthy is a new invention.
> Why wouldn’t elites just write laws that benefit themselves and hurt others instead?
Exactly! If the wealthy had all the power, why wouldn't they just enact laws that say they get everything and everyone else must become their slaves? Why beat around the bush with all kinds of stupid half-measures? The reason is because the silly half-measures come from Average Joes trying to improve things, but to not compromise their personal situation (e.g. harming their job) in the process.
> This explanation for property tax seems incomplete to me.
Sure. I'll let you know when my series of textbooks on the subject is finished. But, there is only so much room in an HN comment.
Just how it seems to me from the UK/Europe, obviously capitalist countries and actual socialism certainly a minority stance, but it's just not such a big deal at all. I don't even think they really mean 'capitalist' though, it's more like what would be framed here as 'tax mega corps more' or 'no more non-doms' or calls to block anti-competitive mergers. A debate baselined at the extreme of capitalism perhaps, whether there should be any controls at all, or everything left to the free market.
'Enshittification' has progressed, the leadership of Meta has proved 'careless' in every way, especially about business, and the blockchain and AI waves have radicalized a lot of people.