Political Memes

It's an incredible system for moving all the money to the top 0.001%

People have a natural desire to pursue their own interests. Capitalism takes advantage of this and thereby fuels the most dynamic economies in the world. Even China’s success only took off once they started allowing entrepreneurial enterprises some breathing room.

When you’re stuck in a collective system where everyone gets the same regardless of what they do, you get a bunch of unmotivated people who don’t do much. Why should they?

This is the age old debate. Pure communism sounds like a paradise: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. So fair! So inclusive! But in practice it is a nightmare and lead la to famine every time.

In this thread we have a bunch of Americans who complain that capitalism is robbing them blind for the benefit of billionaires, but those same Americans doing all the whining are still wealthier than than 90% of the globe for 90% of history. The fact that someone is obscenely rich doesn’t take away from the fact that you are fed and housed and employed. And those things can’t just be taken for granted. Learn history. A lot of people have suffered without them.

Capitalism has ugly excesses, but they aren’t as ugly as the deprivations that communism has caused. Taking a tiger is dangerous, but I’d rather tame a tiger than try to get a dead corpse to plow the fields. In the same way, I think our best bet is to tame capitalism, even if it is dangerous Nd difficult. At least there’s something to work with. I mean really, look at the main problem that people have with capitalism: that it’s OBSCENE WEALTH isn’t shared equally. That does suck, but at least there is obscene wealth for us to fight over.

Capitalists love to conflate things like free market economies and capitalism.

There is only one good hack that free market capitalism figured out. If you make it profitable for people to satisfy others needs you can create a system where needs get satisfied and without explicit planning.

That’s the good bit about free markets. You want a hamburger, well if enough people want it then there will be a profit motive for someone to supply it.

There that’s literally it. That’s the good thing. It causes people to not sit idle but to go find ways to make profit and in the best most ideal version the ways they find to do that are a net benefit to society at large, people get hamburgers.

It doesn’t do anything to control for the psychopaths who would rather gather another bag of money they can never hope to spend by exploiting people. It doesn’t supply things that have low demand (like cures for rare diseases). It doesn’t have any short circuit for the profit motive in case it makes us do something stupid like destroy the ecosystem.

I wish we could look at it objectively. If you make it so people have to do things to make profit to survive they won’t sit idle. That’s the upside. The downside is pretty down though and one can acknowledge the upside and still think “yea this system still kinda blows, it’s predicated on people not being allowed to exist unless they are generating profit”