Hacker News Reader

Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

My lament against capitalism doesn't propose a solution. There are no alternatives.

but people think there are. people think of things like income inequity as a flaw. it's not a bug, it's a feature. You want income allocated to those who show themselves fit to efficiently use resources to produce more things that people want. If someone is 1000 times more productive than me there is some kind of problem if they aren't making 1000 times as much money.

Going with the other issue: unemployment at least has some legs to stand on as it has been suggested that there just aren't enough low skilled jobs for all of the low skilled people to do since most low skill work has been either automated or increased in efficiency to the point where 1 person can do something 1000 used to do.

Of course there are alternatives to capitalism. Or, more accurately, there will be something that will succeed it, sometime in the future.

If history has taught anyone anything, it should be that civilizations are not static. I very seriously doubt that democracy and capitalism will be the predominant foundations of society 1,000 years in the future.

When will the "next big thing" come? I have no idea, nor does anyone else. But to say that there are no alternatives to capitalism, and to imply that there never will be, is shortsighted.

who said anything about democracy? If democracy was an efficient form of governing a large complex system you would have seen corporations adopt it and become more competitive.

like I said before, the alternative to a free exchange of goods is a forced exchange of goods. I don't see how to improve on this. capitalism isn't a system in the same way socialism is. It's just what naturally happens when violence is made less profitable than free exchange.

Every political and economic system of every kind involves both free and forced exchange of goods. For example, in a system of property rights, if a person is considered to violate someone else's property rights then they will be punished, possibly through forced appropriation of their goods.

Capitalism vs. socialism is not an example of free exchange vs. force, but of two different standards of when force is appropriate.

right, but centrally planned economies don't naturally occur in the same way that free exchange does. It is contrary to reason that if I make something and my neighbor makes something and we decide to trade that a third party must be involved by law who will take a percentage of the value of the exchange. You can make the argument that by providing the legal framework that makes non-violent exchange possible (police, contract law) as well as the infrastructure that facilitated our exchange (roads) that the third party deserves a small piece.

This would be a devastating argument. If I had a choice in the matter. In a free market system of courts and transportation I would pay a fee for use. This is fair. But to tithe a percentage of my productivity regardless of how much or little I make use of said system seems fraudulent.

What does it mean for a human-constructed system to be 'natural'? In most tribes of the world, the income of one person is not considered the property of that person, but is divided according to customs about the distribution of wealth in that society. Tribal communities are about as close to 'natural' behaviour as you can get, so what is unnatural about it?

I also don't understand the term 'contrary to reason'. How can a set of conventions be rational or irrational? They can be beneficial, harmful, fair, unfair, moral, immoral etc, but how can they be contrary to reason?

Also: taxation is as much a part of capitalism as it is a part of socialism, especially taxation for expenditure on police and law.

The problem here isn't capitalism so much as scarcity. I personally really, really hope that we don't still exclusively practice capitalism once scarcity is eliminated. But those immortal corporations won't like it.

Scarcity is impossible to eliminate. Even if you got rid of all of the costs of production, there would still be limits on human creativity and time. Even if you made infinite ai, so that creativity was unlimited, and made humans immortal, so that time was unlimited, people would still be forced to make choices between alternatives. And those choices can either be voluntary or coerced. Which way would you like to spend your infinite life? It's not communism if you aren't forced to share. It's capitalism.

Capitalism really is a bad term anyway. Marx invented it so he could use it for his straw-man arguments. But really it should be called free markets, or freedom, or opportunity, or the American Dream or something.

I mean practical scarcity of energy, which would drive us towards a reputational economy. See Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com