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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

The thing about capitalism, and our dismal history with capitalism-at-large, the "assume the other party is a shitbag" idea is so fundamentally ingrained in our cultural

What's that got to do with Capitalism? Correct me if I'm making a straw man, but the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism. Isn't creating a crap-ton of government bureaucracy, rules and regulations to tell people exactly how to live and interact with each other institutionalizing the idea that people are shitbags and shouldn't be allowed the freedom to behave freely?

I liked your original HN post and tend to be similarly disappointed in the lack of giving some people like Musk his due for trying to do the right thing... not to mention the nit-picking posts that assume that Musk and his people are too mentally deficient to properly allow use of their patents.

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Honestly, what does regulation have to do with capitalism - where did this meme start and how can I kill it? Capital markets are a tool for allocating resources. They're pretty good at it in that they tend to work better than e.g. palace economies and mostly everything else humans have tried. But there is absolutely nothing to the way that capital markets work that suggests regulation somehow breaks it or whatever other brain-damaged Koch-inspired bullshit they're selling on Fox News nowadays.

It's like looking at a hammer lying on a table, stating 'that is for pounding nails', then leaving the room and expecting the hammer to pound nails for you.

> But there is absolutely nothing to the way that capital markets work that suggests regulation somehow breaks it

I don't think anyone is claiming that regulation necessarily breaks capitalism. It just tends to. Most regulations have very obvious innovation-stifling or friction-causing side effects that are deleterious to the free market.

The American government does this, but it mostly does it on behalf of the same folks trumpeting, to the masses, the virtues of capitalism as an ideology and end in itself. Anarcho-capitalism, really, or nearly so, although the ruling class itself is certainly not anarcho-capitalist of course. The ruling class has a clear interest in subverting free markets to keep the established players in power and any rivals out, and right now in America they are pretty much getting everything they could possibly want.

But contract enforcement, private property, impartial justice systems, and yes even intellectual property, copyright, and wealth redistribution, all contribute to more effective capital markets, and they are all borne of government regulation and laws. That the American government happens to be so thoroughly corrupt that it can't do a single thing right, doesn't change that.

You know, I don't think that you and I are in that much disagreement on some of the basics.

I think we'd both agree that Capitalism can be good. Government serves a purpose in maintaining the framework of items you listed. We also agree that the corrupt ruling class combination of the Government and Capitalists (along with way too much of the media these days, I'd add) is a disaster.

Where I'd imagine that we differ is that I think that the pendulum has swung way too far in the direction of the State. With a debt that is now bigger than our GDP and the last hundred years of mostly one-way growth of government and its agencies, the Government is a huge black hole for money that encourages, institutionalizes, and legalizes ever-increasing degrees of corruption.

The best way forward that I see is to cut back the size and scope of Government. Get it back to doing the basics that it was commissioned to do (The Constitution) and not much else unless there's enough impetus for those functions that would drive Constitutional Amendments. If the incentive to sway law-making power would be reduced, much of the cronyism that exists today would disappear. The ruling class would be significantly diminished.

Sure, Wal Mart might have more economic power, but its lobbying and legislative power would be drastically reduced. At the end of the day, I have a choice to shop at Wal Mart or to not shop at Wal Mart. I don't have a choice regarding paying taxes to feed the behemoth of a Government that does not provide expected reasonable value for those taxes... not to mention the negatives of crippling public education, moving to a lowest-common-denominator-but-still-expensive healthcare system, etc.

>Where I'd imagine that we differ is that I think that the pendulum has swung way too far in the direction of the State. With a debt that is now bigger than our GDP and the last hundred years of mostly one-way growth of government and its agencies, the Government is a huge black hole for money that encourages, institutionalizes, and legalizes ever-increasing degrees of corruption.

Also, I don't think there really is a pendulum. As though you can swing back and forth between "too much government" and "not enough government", and then, by finding some balance between the two, get back an equitable, productive, and stable economic and political system.

I don't think the ruling class is so dependent on the government to survive as you believe. In many ways it's the other way around. You can talk about reducing the scope of government all you want, but it will only ever be talk since you have no way to achieve it because you have absolutely no power over your government. None at all. And in fact, for the ruling class, the more people agitate about reducing the scope of government (or, on the other side, reducing the influence of big banks) the better, because it means they aren't paying attention to the power brokers in Washington, nor the capitalists Wall Street actually serves.

Sorry if I'm getting too red pill / blue pill. My point is this: like it or not there is already class war being fought in America (and most everywhere else for that matter, but it's getting pretty dire in the US right now). One side though, for the most part, isn't fighting. Which is good for the side currently winning, because that's only way they can win. And if you don't believe me you can just observe the results: most Americans agree the US government needs to fuck off and quit doing a lot of the stuff it does, and most people understand that having a few megabanks holding a large fraction of the assets of the world is a pretty fucking dumb idea. How close are we to achieving either of those goals, do you think? Do you reckon it's time to be smart about achieving those goals, rather than pontificating about The Way Things Ought To Be if everyone would just be nice and play by the rules?

the more people agitate about reducing the scope of government (or, on the other side, reducing the influence of big banks) the better

The problem isn't that people are agitating about the wrong issues. The problem is that voters are suckers. They believe the leaders of their political parties that tell them that they're going to reduce the size of government or restrict the power of banks. Then when Republicans and Democrats get together to both dramatically increase the size of government expenditures and bail out the banks that failed the hardest, who is held accountable? No one.

Do you reckon it's time to be smart about achieving those goals, rather than pontificating about The Way Things Ought To Be

Pot/Kettle? We're sitting here arguing about this stuff on HN. We're not accomplishing anything. Worse, you actually tried to diminish me as a person by throwing out that red meat of "Fox News and the Koch brothers" when factually I haven't found how you disagree at all with my original point. Let's face it, we're just entertaining ourselves by going back and forth on a Friday. :)

The Koch brothers remark was not meant to apply to you personally, but this is the third time you've mentioned it so I reckon you considered it a personal attack. It wasn't meant as one.

There are known problems of markets in the form of externalized costs. Global warming might be the greatest example of capitalism and markets being the worst thing humanity has every done in distributing resources....

How so? India and China are huge societies and have historically been much less capitalistic yet have been horrible polluters. More recently as they've embraced capitalism, their increase in pollution has more to do with their standards of living than with capitalism specifically. Yeah, they're polluting more, but then again they have a significantly reduced amount of starvation.

If anything, capitalism tends to spur the types of innovation that seems most likely to innovate us out of the possible problems of global warming.

Koch-inspired bullshit they're selling on Fox News nowadays

Please avoid these types of overtly political inflammatory arguments on HN.

Capital markets are a tool for allocating resources

In the modern sense, when someone on HN is advocating capitalism, they're talking about Free Market Capitalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Free-market_economy

Fundamentally, it's the freedom to trade with others based upon supply and demand without the government intervening to dictate what to provide, how to provide it, and at what price to provide it.

The only way to counter that market freedom is to create rules (laws and regulations) to restrict how actors in the market are allowed to conduct themselves.

Honestly, what does regulation have to do with capitalism

If you have another way besides laws and regulations that can force all actors in a market to not act according to their own free will, what is that thing called?

>Please avoid these types of overtly political inflammatory arguments on HN.

Don't tell me how to post.

>If you have another way besides laws and regulations that can force all actors in a market to not act according to their own free will, what is that thing called?

I think I'm not getting your point. Your false dichotomy there between "capitalism" and "remove negotiation from individual interactions" did set some alarm bells off in my head though. Specifically "this person is, at the very least, heavily flirting with anarcho-capitalism and it may develop into a serious relationship if it hasn't already". I'm not a fan of overbearing government bureaucracy either, I'm not a fan of a government that can't steward capital markets effectively, I'm not a fan of the brutal police state America has turned into, basically I'm not a fan of a lot of things. But that doesn't mean I think we should neuter government in the hopes that everything will turn out for the best. The problem with American government is not that it is too big - broadly there are areas where it does way too damn much, and there are areas where it fails through inaction - no the main problem with the American government is that it fails utterly to represent the will of the nation of people it governs. It's been hijacked.

But that doesn't mean I want to get rid of it. Well, perhaps I do this particular government, but not the idea of effective government. Believe it or not humans can do politics well - it is always nasty in a sense but you'd be surprised what can be accomplished via politics, provided a balance of power is kept. Sadly, balance of power doesn't exist in American government right now, nor American society really. Even more tragically, one of the most ubiquitous and sophisticated propaganda campaigns in human history - spanning decades across the public and private sectors - has left Americans mostly unable to fix their problem.

And no, I don't have another way to besides laws and regulations to force actors in a free market to behave according to their own free will. And, I don't think I need one - laws and regulations will do nicely.

I don't think I need one - laws and regulations will do nicely

Okay, then we agree that laws and regulations are the only tool we have to restrict free will and thus behavior of actors in the free market?

If you'll look back at my original post, all I was saying is that Capitalism (Free Market) is orthogonal to whether or not people are shitbags and if anything, you could say that the laws and regulations (the State) are put in place because the assumption is that people (and our society in the aggregate) need to be restricted from being shitbags. If anything, Capitalism is inversely related to the assumption that people are shitbags.

Well, perhaps I do this particular government

So basically you want to stay married to a woman even though she's horrible because somewhere out there is a different woman worth being married to? I'd rather be single for a bit and peruse govermenteharmony.com.

but not the idea of effective government

Once again, we're in agreement. Believe it or not, I would replace our government and culture with some Scandanavian country's tomorrow if I thought it could work. Sure, raise our taxes if there's markedly less corruption and the money is going to good use. But that isn't going to happen. Give more power to the State and they will just be validated that they've been on the right path for the past century.

one of the most ubiquitous and sophisticated propaganda campaigns in human history

Not sure which campaign that is, but I could guess based upon your comment about the Koch brothers. What do surveys like this say to you about who is spending the most on controlling the government and where they see the biggest bang for their bucks? Just look at the top 20 and explain to me why I should worry about minority contrarian voices in the messaging out there like the Koch brothers?

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

The Koch brothers are a red herring.

Much of the "invisible hand" idea about how free markets run, and more specifically how they run efficiently, relies on the axiom that people in the market will act rationally towards their own self-interest. As with the Tragedy of the Commons, a capitalist model (generally at least) assumes that people will act towards their own self-interest even when those actions work to the detriment of the group. People that fit that description are certainly selfish (if rightfully so) and in that sense may qualify as "shitbags."

There are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism that do not involve State-heavy mechanisms. For instance, in Communism, despite your assertion to the contrary, there is actually no state at all.

Can you name a historical example where such a system has been successfully implemented?

All cultures prior to the invention of the modern state. Basically all current "native" cultures, including but in no sense limited to: the Bemba, the Nuer, the Iroquois, Polynesians, Melanesians, etc. etc. etc. Almost all day to day interactions (familial, friendly, etc.).

And that's also honestly not relevant to the discussion at hand. OP stated "the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism" and asked if (s)he was making a straw man. I responded that (s)he was on many levels -- there are plenty of alternatives to Capitalism other than Communism, and Communism is also the opposite of a "state-heavy mechanism" given that it literally has no state.

> All cultures prior to the invention of the modern state. Basically all current "native" cultures, including but in no sense limited to: the Bemba, the Nuer, the Iroquois, Polynesians, Melanesians, etc. etc. etc. Almost all day to day interactions (familial, friendly, etc.).

Do those scale to populations of millions?

Just because Marx and Engels put that in their manifesto doesn't mean that any system that has the features of Communism would even theoretically be possible without force (a state).

I don't think "theoretically" is the right word to use here -- it is literally the theory of Communism that it is without a state.

Semantic quibbling aside, there are, as stated in my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7887756), plenty of decidedly non-"theoretical" cultures which have very Communist features and no entity which fits most conceptions of a state (certainly not your original stated concept of a state as something with a "crap-ton of government bureaucracy, rules and regulations to tell people exactly how to live")

Additionally, there is plenty of theory about how one would have a system that has the features of Communism without a state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism being the most direct and pure version. Frankly, asserting flippantly to the contrary makes your whole line of reasoning in these threads very hard to take seriously. There are piles upon piles of books, research, etc. about the intersection of the market and the state, and none of them really try to say, as you have, that without a state there must be private property. Indeed, most works in the space (including the original Locke, etc.) assert precisely the contrary -- that one of the main reasons the state exists is to enforce private property.

More broadly, of course, it really depends on how you define "state". Are all systems of non-interpersonal power a "state"? Is even organized interpersonal power a state? Is it even at all possible for there to be no state? etc.

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