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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

> Would it shock you that I generally think capital is misaligned to humanity?

You still prefer to get cheaper options yourself. I know this argument gets caricatured in the "yet you participate in society" meme, but the point is that this is the aggregate result of individual humans making decisions on where to allocate their resources. You can attack this using various ideological and religious frameworks, but if it's just some stoner college freshman's communism, I'm not interested (neither if it's the more potent version that dispossessed my ancestors in Eastern Europe).

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Also is your position really that nobody can point to problems or criticize anything without a fully fleshed political system to replace the USA with? I don’t support the excesses of the system of the USSR or 1950s-1980s China.

You can criticize things of course, like you can shake your fist at a cloud too when you'd rather want a sunny day, but the results may vary. You're asking people to refrain from using a cost-saving technology and instead spend more money on things that can be obtained easier with the tech. This means going against one's own rational interest. Such things usually happen willfully when the person believes in a religion like the Amish or Hasidic Jews. So having a fully fleshed political/ideological system on as similar level will be necessary here.

I don’t “prefer” to get cheaper options in any meaningful sense. There is no choice of mine involved in what products corporations serve. I have to buy the cheapest option because I have a poverty wage and have to survive.

The meaningful sense is when you open your wallet and buy one option when another option is there. Of course you have a budget and choose rationally, which is kinda like a forced choice. But you could always go and buy from the mom and pop shop and you could buy handmade clothes. Well, you don't have the money for it. Neither did people have it generations ago, they just wore worse clothes, went barefeet to school etc. You could still do that, walk barefoot until you can afford a handmade shoe and keep that for decades. It is in fact your preference not to do this, even if you want to claim that social pressure predetermines that you can't go around barefoot etc. At some point we disprove free will and agency entirely. Nobody in any historical era had more choice to express their preferences than consumers today.

I am not allowed to walk into my office without shoes. My shoes have had holes for 90% of my life. I assure you I own fewer things than you are imagining.

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