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Comment by ktallett | Hacker News Reader

It will only get worse whilst costs are not regulated of essentials such as housing, food, utilities, and public transport. The rich need to be taxed on all UK based assets and income no matter where you live and we need to restrict profit and pricing accordingly. We can't keep being held hostage by those who wish to increase their bank balance year on year. Now we have no incentive right now as those who are in government make far too much from the status quo. We need to remove this current governmental style by removing the option to have multiple jobs and remove the ability to be given cash or any benefits from private companies whilst working for the public. Capitalism is failing the vast majority and we need to realise that.

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the government spends 50% of GDP, as much as everyone else combined

If you still don't have enough, it's out of sheer incompetence and greed

It's not capitalism, but corruption. Subsequent governments have been shovelling billions to tax avoiding multi national corporations without checks and balances. "Taxing the rich" is a distraction. Correct action is investigate corruption and cut spending. For instance NHS reliance on agencies - they pay agency for a nurse £2,500 a day, nurse gets £500 from agency if lucky, £2k goes offshore. That's how our money is sucked out of the economy. Multiple that by every local authority to government departments and you'll see billions are going to waste. But current government is too corrupt to do something about it. Soon they'll claim we have best food banks in the world and support for working people... whilst corporations are laughing all the way to the bank.

Capital is power in a 'free market'/liberalist world. I like the idea of free markets, but capital accumulation makes the capital owners able to decide more and more on policies that allow them to accumulate even more capital/power. in any case, most of it isn't corruption, it's only people seeking more capital for themselves and their families.

The rot is in the state: procurement rackets, sweetheart deals, and policy capture by corporations who get access no ordinary voter ever will. When a government sits down with giant asset managers, then magically “discovers” Digital ID is its national priority, that’s not the invisible hand at work. That’s the very visible hand of influence bypassing democratic process.

People love saying “it’s just capital seeking returns” as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. Accumulating money isn’t the issue. Being able to buy policy outcomes is the issue. Once private interests can tilt regulation, spending, and national infrastructure in their favour, you no longer have a market problem. You have a governance problem.

Food banks didn’t explode because Jeff Bezos has too many zeroes in his account. They exploded because governments funnel public money into offshore middlemen, contractors billing ten times the real cost, multinationals avoiding scrutiny, and regulators pretending this is all fine. That’s not the “cycle of capital”. That’s a parasitic state captured by rent-seekers.

I am pretty skeptical of rent-control like policies, but if is being proposed for somewhere else I completely support it.

Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?

>Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?

Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.

What is your reason for being sceptical locally?

Yes, I am not of the view that a public official should have a private career too. It creates influence.

Regulation is one of few solutions. Issue to solve is not make the rich more rich.

But as housing has been commoditized, it will be very tough fight to change it. Even people in governments can be land lords…

All other branches are commoditized as well and owned by big players who own markets.

Blaming capitalism for government failures while stating the solution is more and bigger government seems to be a misunderstanding of what the root cause is.

Are we saying that worldwide the significant changes are exclusively government failures worldwide? A government works with a people led view, not the grifters that exist at the moment, hence why I do not agree a publicly employed person should be allowed to have another job.

Oh, yeah. Regulating the food prices is the trick here. That went really well in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China... just to name a couple of examples.

It's funny that for some people, the answer of the enormous failings of Marxism is always "We need even more Marxism!"

At what point will it get worse, a planned economy or a free economy based on greed? Life is getting more unaffordable with each passing day. Corporations need to be put in their place given that politicians dont even have backbones anymore as soon as they smell corpo money.

A planned economy will always, always get worse. All historical examples show us that.

But you are free to give us an example of a planned economy that worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens. Just one single example will suffice.

P.S. I see the downvotes, but I don't see a single example. Just one...

So you are blind to the current economies, gotcha

I'm curious. What is an example of any economy that has only worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens and has never ever gotten worse?

What are your stats measuring good and bad and therefore what do you count as worse? Would it be better all have a home, job, access to education, food?

In long term, corporations can buy everyone, unfortunately.

This is the fact, and I would say that almost no one is immune to money offer. (You have to be very financially secured. But then, you are probably from the similar class as corporate people. -> simulate level of greed)

If you (as governmental employee) have some issue to solve, e.g. alimony or faster mortgage repayment, you are vulnerable… and you have to have very strong conscience not to accept any “services”. It is similar to be strong not to ear sugar or fat-loaded chips or drinking…

Are you trying to excuse politicians for being corrupt due to being vulnerable?

Of course, I don’t excuse them. But I see news about corruption all around so I think that it is very tough society mental issue to solve.

So much money flows through the government that I would say it is already a planned economy

Food production is heavily supported by the government in China in order to keep food affordable. Food price is also incredibly low in China. If that's failing that the Western world is in hell now.

Today's China isn't Mao's China.

Certainly, but it's officially communist, which is at least as true as western countries being capitalist free market democracy where every citizen is equal.

Per AI, comparative food production subsidies are the same in US and China. China spends a 2x total but they have more people so per farmer support is more or less the same.

So if that's your metric, US is at par with China.

US food is affordable. To the extent that food in China is cheaper, I'm pretty sure the main reason is dramatically lower cost of labor.

But the premise of your comment is just wrong.

Money doesn't grow on trees. It's taken by the government from people.

Subsidies don't make things cheaper. They just obscure the real cost and can be used by politicians to buy votes from pickFrom([farmers,students,renters,teachers,...])

If US government didn't spend $35 billion/year subsidizing food production, food would be more expensive but an average worker would have $214 more per year to spend on food.

We have oligarchic corporatism, not democratic capitalism, though I guess that is what is meant by the phrase ‘late stage capitalism’. The problem is that we already have regulatory capture, a more powerful regulatory system leaves us with fewer ways to escape the oligarchs control.

The problem isn’t the number of regulators or how muscular they are. It’s that there’s no functioning enforcement. You can design the neatest regulatory framework in the world, but if the people meant to uphold it look the other way, you may as well print it on kitchen roll.

Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.

So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.

In my opinion these institutions only had stated intentions of keeping democracy in check. I think they’ve always been tool for oligarchic forces to use against the masses and each other.

To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.

I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.

There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.

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