Big business and capitalism are becoming less and less popular with Americans | Hacker News Reader

Big business and capitalism are becoming less and less popular with Americans

businessinsider.com

49 pointsDocFeind27 comments

I'd be curious to see a breakdown by age. I can imagine a lot of people under 35 whose experience with capitalism was the great financial crises, the housing crises, and the continued eroding of "safe" jobs. Not to mention the meaninglessness that comes with wage labor. It's no wonder that people increasingly have a less favorable view of capitalism and a more favorable view of an alternate system.

The problem isn't the general philosophy of capitalism per se, but rather the utter lack of failing to control or mitigate the problems of how it's currently implemented, including the now-entrenched legal indulgences that concentrated capital has bought for itself. That such criticism is often shouted down by straw manning it as "socialism" (previously "communism") is itself part of the problem. Even this article/study reeks of this fake duality. Its better stat to focus on is that people hate big business. And of course people hate big business. On a spectrum of individual liberty, big business is right next to authoritarian government. The main separation is how much it's possible to avoid a given one, which is increasingly less and less.

In the name of "capitalism", our government has allowed big business to grow ever larger, become ever more inescapable, and often even delegates/cedes governmental power to big business. So really if anyone is reading this, getting angry at the rise of "socialism", and wanting to save capitalism - it's really incumbent upon you to be loudly criticizing both the foundational and emergent problems of capitalism as currently conceived. Because otherwise this frustration is just going to continue building, and we are going to lose what we do have, for good.

Right in absolute terms capitalism is fine. What's not fine? Corporate control without commensurate accountability at a corporate and personal level MDs and above; the fact that since Ragean corporate control has been in the ascendancy with top 5% more or less seeing all increases in net value or income.

Add on musk's trillion dollar payout proposal, no criminal prosecutions for 2008 housing crisis, cities paying for stadiums, corps ducking us taxes, offshore funds or corps for tax dodgers, and a general sense it's one set of rules for the top 5% and real reality for everyone else. Also add on us Healthcare, housing, and higher education is too expensive for the bottom 70% ... and you've got problems.

Ignorance. It mass induced, well condtioned ignorance, almost pathological.

If you ask me what the common factor across MAGAs, flat earther, crypto bros or esotheric nut cases is, my answer would be that.

Thank god no one in this thread has any semblance of power.

That’s because they see and realize that all the criticisms levied against alternative ways of organizing societies seem just as true about the capitalist path.

The boat is shrinking and the empire collapsing on itself. A finite world providing rise to infinite growth as ownership accelerates increasingly in the hands of the few.

> That could help explain why Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist state assemblyman, won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor earlier this summer with the support of young people.

My fear is that we are continuing to accelerate the younger generation toward that by doubling, tripling down on a system that isn’t working for people and punting on fixing it. We are continuing to deregulate, allow companies to union bust and remove any balance of power between businesses and workers.

In the minds of many, it seems like we need a revolution and not a reformation. And to the people charged with decision making, we need nothing at all. I would prefer we fix the system we have, but I’m increasingly worried that is becoming infeasible.

The President is currently demanding bribes and fealty from corporations in the open while sending the us military against its citizens.

If reformation fails then we are headed towards a dark place anyway.

> punting on fixing it

we could also make the same argument re: old folks in politics hanging on to their seats long, long after the point where they should be spending their days pushing a little white ball around the local golf course

Yeah, against the ugly smug face of Cuomo I’d choose anyone else too.

The capitalists are no longer capitalists.

Somehow we went from capitalism is the best system because it most efficiently distributes scarce resources to “give us all the money and power in the world because our large language model is going to usher in Star Trek!!!”

The grifters have one. Though you could equally assign the blame to the idiots who fall for it.

Efficient distribution of resources is the purpose of governments, not capitalism. No one goes into business with the goal of more efficiently distributing resources, but to increase their wealth as much as possible. That's the one and only goal of capitalism - to make capitalists rich.

The capitalism your comment bemoans the death of, like pure free markets and homo economicus, has only ever existed in economics textbooks. In the real world it has always been grifters and parasites all the way down.

I know I'm a minority but how can you even think we live in a capitalistic society when we're taxed and regulated on everything?

This crony capitalism with a big government colluding with big business is socialism with a wig on.

The fact that people who define themselves anti establishment yearn for socialism because "capitalism failed" is dangerous and will mark the end of the USA minarchist experiment: even if you leave a minimal government, you just need 250 years (of productivity, courtesy of capitalism) to become the largest government in the world - and eventually collapse.

Capitalism requires a free market with price discovery.

Its ironic that they promote the titled narrative when we have neither a free market, nor effective price discovery (due to dark pools and other actors). The lack of those things in fact point to the dominant economic model being closer to Socialism than Capitalism.

I never understood how people can think that the answer to the failures of socialism is more socialism.

"Free market" is an oxymoron. Without regulation, there is no market. Market rules were among the earliest types of law. The chief problem with our current system is that capital is largely unregulated. In capitalism, wealth flows uphill, and will naturally become more and more concentrated, eventually distorting both the markets and the political system. There has to be some active mechanism to oppose this uphill flow. The positive effect of capital regulation like progressive taxation isn't necessarily due to wealth redistribution to the poor (though there may be very valid moral reasons to do it), but rather wealth-decentralization to the less-wealthy. From a systems point of view, it's better to shift opportunity from someone whose chief qualification for it is their wealth, to several others who have less of a wealth advantage and so are more likely to be qualified on merit.

We largely agree, except are you sure its capitalism that wealth flows uphill and not actually the money-printing fiat and their banker friends who are doing the debasement/stealing from everyone that holds dollars?

Non-reserve Money-printing creates runaway dynamics that inevitably allow state-apparatus to outcompete legitimate business in effect collapsing market over time.

Yes, the money flows uphill. Having more wealth means being able to make more wealth, faster. It's a feedback loop. True, some of that comes from printing money. But value is actually being created all the time (which means some new money must be printed all the time), and capital will capture an ever-increasing share of the increasing pie. The rate of this increase is faster than the wealth is created. You can see this in the widening income growth gap between the top and the bottom. In turns out that a rising tide can indeed raise all boats, but it raises the boats at the top of the income curve much faster than those at the bottom, to the point where the boats at the bottom are only infinitesimally better off while the income of the rich is multiplied many times over.

In an unregulated market competitors will disrupt big business.

In a regulated market big business will bribe the government and keep its monopoly, increasing inequality between the top 0.01% and the plebs.

The arc of the U.S. economy over the last 80 years contradicts your position. There has been reduced regulation since the Reagan administration, and also reduced competition. A few blips when internet companies "disrupted" an existing industry, but those industries fairly quickly consolidated on a small group of players.

You're describing regulatory capture, which is true in unregulated capitalism. When I say "unregulated capitalism", I'm not talking about business regulation---I'm talking about regulating capital itself. In a healthy, regulated capitalist system, the political influence of individual companies is diluted and there is greater competition. Business regulation is always needed to ensure things like public safety, contract enforcement, and fair competition. But when disproportionately large players politically capture the regulatory machinery, they tilt the regulatory playing field towards themselves. This is a symptom, it is not the disease.

> Capitalism requires a free market with price discovery.

Socialism != centrally planned/non-market economy, at least not in any political theory I've come across. Many socialist-ideologues of the mid 20th century landed on central planning as a particular implementation of its ideals (and one which was amenable to their own totalitarian inclinations), but "socialism" was a direct response to industrialized labor of the early 19th century, and specifically a reaction to the high degree of power capital-holders had over their labor force in this time. An anarchist commune with a barter economy is 'socialist' in this traditional sense, because the people doing the work own the tools they're using to do that work.

When most people talk about socialism they mean the Marxist-Leninist phase after capitalism and before communism (of course we never get to communism because the socialist parasites never want to leave the socialist phase) which is characterised.

You talk about socialism as a synonym of communism; Marx itself used them interchangeably in the 19th century - but it's not the common meaning in this century in my experience. Left-wing anarchists refer themselves as communists, not as socialists.

I'm not really familiar with this nomenclature, the left-anarchists I know generally consider themselves "libertarian" or "market" socialists (or just “anarcho-socialists””). I'm definitely interested to understand your point a bit further; good you point me to some left-anarchist thought around communism vs. socialism?

Socialism by definition is where the means of production cannot be individually owned, which presumes and dictates centralized authority to enforce this.

This is central-planning from a structural view, and people doing the work don't have ownership of their tools under such systems. So your anarchist commune as a socialism example can't really be called socialism if the individuals own their own tools, though socialist in a different context (as an ideology) may engender this in contradictory fashion.

> Socialism by definition is where the means of production cannot be individually owned

Possibly we're familiar with different strains, but my understanding is that it's less about what's individually/collectively owned and more about the relationship between the person doing the labor and the tools they're using to do that labor (ie. "do the workers own the factory or not?"). Social ownership of means of production is one proposal to achieve "workers owning the factory", but AFAIR there are alternatives.

Even granting that a central enforcement authority must exist, it's not clear to me why that enforcement implies planning. It seems to me that one could have a voluntary cooperative agreement with "town council" style enforcement of property relations (or even something like community-ownership with citizen equity), but still have unregulated trade and barter between cooperative members, or with entities outside the cooperative.

> socialist in a different context (as an ideology) may engender this in contradictory fashion.

I think it's important to also note that there isn't really a central socialist tradition; even at the outset of the movement there were disagreeing views on what properly constituted "socialism" or not. This does't mean that the internal belief systems of these traditions have some inherent contradiction, just that there are multiple paths one might take to similar conclusions, and that these don't always line up 100% when you zoom in on the details.

Your definition of Socialism is pretty narrow. The traditional definition basically just boiled down to "a system where the workers are in charge of their production", which encompasses a lot more ideologies and economic systems than just "everything is owned by everyone", Marxist style.

On the other hand, you're applying a much broader definition of "means of production" than is typically discussed in Socialist circles. Most Socialists don't have any significant issue with personal possessions, or the presumption of exclusive use of things that you consistently are using. The bigger concern for Socialists is rent-seeking on said right of exclusive use.

Basically, only a small subset of Socialists would have any issue with "that's Bob's hammer, don't use it without asking". Most Socialists would be opposed to "that's Bob's hammer, you can't use it unless you toss him a fiver".

An Anarchist commune is approximately peak Socialism, everything else is an (arguably) necessary compromise with the complexities of large scale society.

A perfect free market and 100% price discovery is not possible. So you cannot have perfect capitalism.

I don't think socialism is failing that much, not much more than capitalism in the US.

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