this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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At it's core, capitalism is system of resource distribution. It's in contrast to other resource distribution systems, such as how indigenous people and early human tribes are often thought of as using various system of resource distribution that are collective in nature, where everyone shares all resources and people take only what's needed (though this was far from the only resource distribution system used by those peoples), and it came about primarily in contrast to feudal systems of resource distribution, where powerful kings and lords would collect resources from the broader public and then spend them however they wanted.
Let's say you have an anarchist / libertarian resource distribution system or lack thereof, where most people live in small individual plots of land, grow what they need, and in general don't share or distribute resources. That means that each individual family / plot can be strong, but as a collective they will struggle to move as one when they need to. If an invading army shows up and they need every single potential soldier to fight to their death or risk conquering and enslavement, they're going to have a hard time convincing everyone to do so. If they need some people to stop planting crops so that the soil can rotate, they're going to be unable to because that's the only land and resources those people have. These systems fundamentally lead to game theory coordination problems, and inefficiencies because resources aren't shared.
In contrast, feudalism is a centralized system where one person controls everything (it's more distributed in actuality, but that's the basic structure it takes). This creates the opportunity for efficiency, and to move quickly, but also creates massive opportunities for human fallibility to waste and ruin everything.
Capitalism on the other hand promises to be a distributed, decentralized resource distribution system. Everyone just has to behave according to their own self interest, and resources will flow to where they're needed. If I make a better product than you, that should prove out that I'm better at making products, and should thus get more resources so that people who are better at making products make more than those who are worse.
Does it work out that way in practice? No, not always, this is an incredibly simplified model system, but the core idea behind capitalism, is basically the same core idea that's behind lemmy and the fediverse. Decentralized, distributed systems. They're hard to design, and they require everyone agreeing on standards, but they are more flexible and don't have the fallibility of central authorities.
How does the tendency to monopolize fit into this? A monopolized market doesn't seem very decentralized.
No, and I would argue that most people who are actually small-c conservative capitalists don't actually like businesses growing to the point of monopoly, and especially conglomerizing and crossing industries.
It is why every country has some form of anti-competition regulation, because capitalism is not a perfect system and can run amok if the appropriate guard rails aren't in place.
That's where government guard rails come in. In the US we used to break or disallow monopolies. We have thrown that fight in the trash over the past several decades.
This chart should scare the living shit out of us.
That's the issue here though. Capitalism tends to monopolize. Its mechanics reward monopolies, sind monopolies have much better negotiation powers and economies of scale. Government guardrails are a patch applied from the outside, because unchecked capitalism is broken.
In fact, feudalism is what happens if you let capitalism run unchecked, and it's exactly how feudalism came into existence.
Money begets power, power begets money.
Sorry, that's just not correct. Capitalism and feudalism are the same thing. If you let capitalism run unchecked, you get feudalism. A company town is essentially a feudalistic construct, if there's no government around to keep capitalism in check.
Nope, these systems lead to the capital taking over. You will have one group of people who fare better than the others, so they will end up buying everyone's land and will hire them to work for them. Money is power and power makes money. So as soon as not everyone is perfectly equal in what value they can create, someone will make more, thus be able to hire more people and buy more and, which will make them more money and the loop continues.
This is flat-out wrong. Nothing in this paragraph is correct.
Read up on e.g. Standard Oil if you want to know why there's no need to make a better product or be more efficient to become a monopoly, and why once there's a monopoly, it's super easy for the monopolist to suppress any new competitors, no matter how much more efficient or better they are.
That is not what capitalism is or does. Capitalism is not an inherently distributed system. Capitalism is a system where the one who has the capital can use it to make more capital, thus massively advantaging someone who already has capital over someone who doesn't.
Money is power and power makes money.
The only reason a capitalist system doesn't instantly collapse into feudalism is if there's a strong opposition against it which operates outside of the capitalistic framework. Namely unions and democracy. That's the only way the many people without capital can counter-balance the few with all the capital.
Have you ever looked at wealth distribution charts, like ever? The US is well past a healthy capitalist society and pretty close to a feudalist one, or as we call them today, a fascist one.
I have just explained the viewpoint-independent logic behind capitalism.
You are stating problems with our current system, that is different from the underlying ideals and viewpoint-independent logic that people use to justify and advocate for capitalism.
You are no different than a capitalist pointing at Soviet Union bread lines and being flabbergasted that anyone could possibly support any form of socialism.
Oh no, another one of these "there are only anarcho-capitalism and socialism and nothing in between" types.
There is no viewpoint-independent logic behind capitalism because capitalism wasn't designed. It's a natural function of trade. As soon as you have the concepts of property and trade, you have capitalism. The ancient babylonians had capitalism, and so did the ancient egyptians.
What we call capitalist theory now is nothing but descriptivism coupled with a bit of putting up anti-caputalist guardrails to make sure capitalism doesn't completely run amok. And since the 70s, these guardrails have been left to rot or actively dismantled.
Again, if you do nothing, capitalism will emerge. If you continue to do nothing, monopolists will emerge. If you continue to do nothing, these monopolists will take over the government, and you get feudalism.
That's just the natural, mathematical precession.
Not at all what I said, I explicitly, and repeatedly, referenced the real world systems being more complex and nuanced than the model systems that show the basic pros and cons of the system type.
So in your mind only things that are intentionally designed by humans can have viewpoint-independent logic?
There are no naturally arising systems in nature that have viewpoint-independent logic?
And you think that modern trade and capitalism is completely and 100% just natural and would always occur no matter what and has no basis in the work of capitalist theorists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx?
So you're arguing that stable trade networks and relationships have never existed and are impossible to exist or maintain?