Do you support capitalism?

[Ashley Biden's Diary]

Capitalism has an expiration date for most humans because of automation, therefore no.

[Rules for me, but not for thee]

Hard no. Will never support it.
Capitalism is the main reason we suffer from environmental stress conditions and climate change now. In my belief you can't be pro-market liberal / pro-capitalist and pro-action against climate change. It simply doesn't work. If it would, action would already have been taken. Liberals in my country don't do anything for the environment & climate. The problem with capitalism is that it leads to overproduction and overconsumption while we need to focus on a sustainable society. Why should everyone have a car, if we can invest in public transport. Why should everyone have tons of books, if we have a library where you can basically rent it for free. That's the principle thought behind it.

Because people like owning things? Like a house or taking care of something that's theirs alone? If I had to work in some Marxist factory for just some bread lines and the "greater good of the society" - I'd definitely go insane or just jump off a cliff.

There is nothing wrong in that, but i'm starting to theorize that maybe such a system would hurt our standing and society too much on the long run. I mean: should we start to think in terms of only a few generations / a few centuries, at most 1000 years. Or should we start to think to create a long-term sustainable society. Even in the worst scenario's for the climate, we won't be affected as much (of course, actually we would.. but our world will still be way more liveable than for future generations, even when heatwaves / tropical cyclones and the consequences of global warming will affect us way more next century), but the people who are in "real sh**t" are the ones that will follow when we die, and the generations who will live at the end of 21st century, 22nd century and 23th century. They'll be confrontated with the effects of our waste society, in which we buy things and throw it away whenever it has no purpose anymore or whenever we don't like it anymore, and we all forget that everything brings a cost, that everything that had to be produced created waste and created CO² in order to be produced. This is the problem we currently face in our society. We definitely need to change our attitude if we ever want clean nice blue air back again, or if we want normal temperatures again, if we want to preserve ecosystems, if we want to save endangered animals. Do we want animals to live freely on our world, that all have a place next to us, or do we want a world where animals would only be able to survive in imprisonment (a zoo), because over the course of last millenia we've claimed all their space.

I had a discussion with a economic libertarian lately, and he said that the market will eventually adapt to it's demand. If people want "blue air", the market will make it available, he said. And i've said, so this is the miserable future we face. Eventually governments will have to pay for blue air through companies that will specialize in creating blue and clean air to breathe in.

Is that so bad? If it's President Skroob inhaling air from a Perri-air can, sure. But what if the innovators in the market invent a large electrostatic cleaner that removes all the smog? Or something even better?

Which is why I want free markets with a stable rules, like Hayek did...and to quote his persona from the rap a couple economists put together a few years ago: "Give us a chance so we can discover the most valuable ways to serve one another"

[HillGoose]

Capitalism has an expiration date for most humans because of automation, therefore no.

Ya? So all those child chimney sweeps in the 1800s who's jobs don't exist anymore just starved because there were no new jobs to replace child chimney sweeps? Lol no, new technologies created new jobs, better ones.

Automation makes work better. It doesn't "replace" anyone

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Capitalism has an expiration date for most humans because of automation, therefore no.

Ya? So all those child chimney sweeps in the 1800s who's jobs don't exist anymore just starved because there were no new jobs to replace child chimney sweeps? Lol no, new technologies created new jobs, better ones.

Automation makes work better. It doesn't "replace" anyone

[Tartarus Sauce]

It's not an ideal system, but so long as it is sufficiently regulated and its wealth redistributed to a certain degree, it's probably the best option we have until we reach a post-scarcity economy.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

It's not an ideal system, but so long as it is sufficiently regulated and its wealth redistributed to a certain degree, it's probably the best option we have until we reach a post-scarcity economy.

[Lourdes]

No. It's not only an inherently unfair, exploitative, and authoritarian socio-economic system, but it's unsustainable on a planet with finite resources, an incredibly fragile climate and ecosystem, and the tendency to exacerbate the worst aspects of humanity (greed).

This is the biggest thing that people don't realize.

Let's see how well Capitalism works in predominantly first-world countries if you take all the borderline slave labor in Asia, the environmental destruction in Africa, etc. for the gain of the Global north and and put it in those regions.

The biggest propaganda of Capitalism is that it's possible to earn gigantic sums of wealth in excess of the billions.

No one can earn hundreds of millions of dollars.

No one can earn billions of dollars.

The only way a single person can accumulate such a gigantic sum of money is by exploitation and taking away from others. People are only able to have so much because they are actively making sure that those below them have so little. And what's worse is that capitalism tricks people into viewing this positively. Whoever can find the most convenient way to exploit people and land, eploiting wealth is called "genius", etc.

Capitalism is at its core about abuse, about exploitation, etc.

It promotes the false idea that some are naturally going to have less and some are naturally going to have more, while implying that the more you have, the better you are, while silencing its victims with labels like "lazy", etc.

Capitalism is the worst system to have ever ravished and is currently destroying the world.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I no longer believe in it's infallibility, but yes, I am still a supporter of capitalism.

[dead0man]

It promotes the false idea that some are naturally going to have less and some are naturally going to have more,

how is this a false idea?  Some bears in the wild eat and live better than other bears in the wild...because nature gave them more.  Sometimes nature gave them a better environment, with more game and fewer humans and other rival predators.  Sometimes nature gave them faster legs or better eyes or a slightly darker coat that made them better.  Some living things are going to have it better than others.  This is fact.  It happens to ants, it happens to gophers and it happened to humans 250k years ago and it happens to humans today.  Does it suck if you're a lesser?  Of course, but being a lesser human is way better than being a lesser ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD....'cause those things just die.  Humans, the better of us at least, take care of each other, unlike any other species in the world.  Because we are special.  Maybe other animals would too if they could (and certainly some individual animals do), but right now, only humans shed tears for what happens to other humans that they never met, that don't look like them, that pray to another stupid fake thing in the sky and live 10000 miles away.  Hell, we shed tears because animals suffer. Sure, sometimes we do it while we stuff a chicken leg in our mouths....we're funking complicated!

You must be logged in to read this quote.

capitalism doesn't imply things at people and the vast majority of people don't think this way either.  Ask around.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

to be fair, some people are lazy.  I am them.  And if it's combined with proper liberty, as it must, nobody can be silenced.  That doesn't mean we have to listen to them either though, sometimes we're busy, ya know, at work


I'm not going to argue that there aren't "victims" or that we've perfected it, we haven't.  If you think Sweden or Denmark does capitalism better than we do it, I'm willing to listen and I'm sure other are too, but if you want to sell us that capitalism is the worst, you need to tell us what's better and I notice you and nobody else in this thread has....because they'd be laughed at by people smarter than them and humans hate that....generally, then there are people like HillGoose.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

My thoughts on capitalism don't really lend themselves to certainty; of course, that in itself puts me significantly to the left of almost everyone who lives around me, so I often "feel" opposed to capitalism even though I probably lean support on on absolute scale.

On the one hand, I find the argument that 'capitalism has created all our problems, and if it were abolished they would go away' to be annoyingly selective in its measurements. Yes, capitalism is wasteful, short-sighted, and exploitative; so is every alternative to capitalism that has ever been attempted in the real world. Pre-industrial farming practices were incredibly wasteful and responsible for massive environmental destruction long before industrial capitalism ever existed. There's a reason the early European explorers thought they had discovered Paradise when they arrived in the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; despite what some elements of the left (emphasis on "some") would have you believe, the world prior to 1800 was not some wonderful place where people lived in harmony and shared everything in common. It is an established fact that the standard of living for all people has increased in the last 200 years; frequency of child mortality and absolute poverty are at all-time lows, and the average middle-class individual in the West is by the measures that matter better off than a king who lived 500 years ago.

On the other hand, the same obsession with efficiency and short-term gains that made that progress possible is also arguably capitalism's greatest weakness, to the point where we are destroying our environment and sowing the seeds for the very circumstances Marx predicted would cause the fall of capitalist society for the sake of profits now. We are rapidly approaching the advent of self-programming computers, for instance; and when that happens, it's hard to see how the economy that results won't be magnificently unsustainable for the vast majority of humanity. It's not that we can't address these problems, because of course we can, if we want to. But the people with the power to make those decisions are seemingly convinced that this would require accepting losses now in exchange for larger gains in the future (when they will be dead and, ergo, unable to enjoy them). It's not hard to see why VW decided to cheat emissions tests rather than manufacture genuinely efficient cars; the latter might make more sense when you look at the big picture, might even be more profitable in the end, but if their company goes belly-up before they can taste the rewards, none of that's going to help them.

So I don't know. I'm not convinced that the rosy futures imagined by the prophets of socialism/other alternatives to capitalism are actually possible, but sooner or later we are either going to have to embrace some check to human avarice or accept that things are going to get much, much worse.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

HST expressed many of my thoughts perhaps more articulately than I would have.

[Lourdes]

It promotes the false idea that some are naturally going to have less and some are naturally going to have more,

how is this a false idea?  Some bears in the wild eat and live better than other bears in the wild...because nature gave them more.  Sometimes nature gave them a better environment, with more game and fewer humans and other rival predators.  Sometimes nature gave them faster legs or better eyes or a slightly darker coat that made them better.  Some living things are going to have it better than others.  This is fact.  It happens to ants, it happens to gophers and it happened to humans 250k years ago and it happens to humans today.  Does it suck if you're a lesser?  Of course, but being a lesser human is way better than being a lesser ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD....'cause those things just die.  Humans, the better of us at least, take care of each other, unlike any other species in the world.  Because we are special.  Maybe other animals would too if they could (and certainly some individual animals do), but right now, only humans shed tears for what happens to other humans that they never met, that don't look like them, that pray to another stupid fake thing in the sky and live 10000 miles away.  Hell, we shed tears because animals suffer. Sure, sometimes we do it while we stuff a chicken leg in our mouths....we're funking complicated!

How are people who inherit millions of dollars working hard to get that? Isn't that, by definition, unearned wealth? Why is the idea of giving poor people healthcare, shelter or even education seen as a gross display of unearned wealth and gluttony, when there are multimillionaires that can receive more than you or I can earn in several lifetimes simply by being born?

When there exist billionaires that can basically buy entire countries because of unearned wealth, it seems bizarre to not want to punch up, but instead punch down at people who want things as basic as not dying because of chest pain or the right to not have to sleep on dirt. Surely the latter is especially insidious in countries like America where there exist more houses that homeless people and yet homelessness is still an issue.

[dead0man]

Yeah, that stuff might suck, but what do you suggest we do that would keep everyone's quality of life pushing forward at the same pace it's been going since liberal democracies w/ free(ish) markets took over?  The human civilization, as it is now, will never be equal or fair for everyone.  There are different ideas as to how to keep it the least sucky for the least of us, some do it better than others.  The idea that this shouldn't be the focus of civilization instead of general advancement sounds cold, and maybe it is.  It's still, in the opinion of most people the best option.

Thank Og.

It's like a classroom learning at the rate of the slowest student.  It might be the most fair, but it's not a good idea.

[thumb21]

Capitalism isn't a monolith. I have many issues with the current economic system, but capitalism is a broad term. You can have capitalism with more spending, better programs and better regulation - so my answer is yes.

[RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm]

It's not an ideal system, but so long as it is sufficiently regulated and its wealth redistributed to a certain degree, it's probably the best option we have until we reach a post-scarcity economy.

I think that it needs a bit more regulation than it has now, but overall, I support the idea of capitalism in most cases.