Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.
It's like saying desktop enshittification has been caused by Microsoft. This is true in our timeline, even though if Apple had owned the desktop for 30 years they also would have enshittified it.
Because, per the article, the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors the supposedly "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
Yeah, being born in rust belt of the former Eastern Bloc was a privilege like hell. You don't know what you are talking about. If you visit places like Chisinau, you'll get a glimpse of Ostrava cca 1994.
What are the long term effects of the systems that you push? Can you even model them?
Long term effects of Soviet-style Communism were ghastly. Dried lakes, poisoned rivers, mass graves, all in the name "of the people".
Non-market economies can only be sustained by constant violent repression and censorship, and the incentives in such systems where prices aren't serving as a signal are totally out of whack, resulting in extreme waste on one side and constant shortages on the other.
The absolutely worst thing that liberated African and Asian countries did was to introduce Marxist economies. Fortunately most of them already realized just how deep that hole goes. Economic liberalization in India alone will likely lift a billion people out of poverty in mere 20 years or so.
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
yeah well that's because the execution matters and turns out when you give people power to choose who gets what, they abuse it. go figure.
But surely there’s a more sane option than under regulated capitalism with a problematic wealth distribution and fucked up incentives that encourage short term profit at the expense of society, environment and all else?
your system should work with human nature or it will never work.
capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity. socialism falls under greed.
and no there's not a better solution, or at least it hasn't been found yet. if it was it'd still be a form of capitalism, not the other side of the spectrum.
but we disagree on the effects of the current system. capitalism has not been at the expense of society, the opposite in fact. we've had so much prosperity due to it.
same with the environment really. communist countries don't really have better air quality, worse in fact! US has the money from capitalism to develop clean tech.
Communism seeks to mitigate or avoid this human instinct, often failing.
Capitalism throws its hands in the air and says "ok, be greedy and selfish, ignore others and society, and if we're lucky, and it sometimes provides any societal benefit, that's purely incidental and secondary to you making money".
Agreed!
> capitalism exploits greed to generate prosperity.
Sadly without representation, that prosperity accumulates around the few that then don’t necessarily disperse it back into the economy but hoard it and lobby against taxes and workers’ rights etc.
From where I stand, both systems suck, just that regulated capitalism is more workable in the more socialist leaning nations from a human welfare perspective, like many of the ones in the EU. Ofc an economic powerhouse that does not make, not necessarily.
And then there’s corruption and various bureaucratic inefficiencies, which you’ll get to some degree in any system.
Communism is an erroneous idea. It starts from a correct premise, that humans who have accumulated much wealth are able to use it abusively for accumulating more and more wealth at the expense of the others, and this positive feedback cannot be stopped without some kind of regulation.
However, the solution proposed by communism is an illusion that cannot work with real humans. The communist solution is to confiscate everything valuable from all citizens and put it under the management of the state bureaucrats, who supposedly will administrate it efficiently and in such a manner as to produce maximum benefits for all citizens.
The reality is that of course the communist bureaucrats are composed of the same people who succeed to become politicians or managers everywhere, i.e. those for whom the priority is to satisfy their own interests and greed, and not the interests of the entire society.
Therefore in all socialist/communist countries, those who were supposed to manage resources in the name of the "entire society" behaved exactly like the owners of those resources, so they lived like US millionaires or even billionaires, while most of the population lived in poverty, because all what their parents or grand-parents had in the past had been confiscated and now they were at the mercy of their managers, who decided unilaterally what they should be allowed to work and what they should receive to be able to live.
The only solution that could work would be the exact opposite of communism. Instead of centralizing everything, the production of at least all the things strictly necessary for living should be as distributed as possible, done by numerous small local companies, not by a few huge global monopolies.
Instead of having 3 producers of memory chips for the entire Earth, there should be at least 3 or 4 in every country. Similarly for any other industrial product.
Unfortunately that is extremely unlikely to happen because during the last decades everything has evolved in the opposite direction.
To continue with the same example, when I was young a large fraction of the European countries were still able to make integrated circuits and computer memories, even many of the East-European countries. But then one-by-one most electronics or computing companies have been bought or closed, until none survived. An important role in the disappearance of the electronics industries in most countries had been that of USA, who used various means of pressure and blackmailing to prevent other countries to enact protectionist measures favoring their internal producers against US companies, i.e. exactly what now USA itself uses against China.