Comment by imglorp
3 years ago
Their customers are happy. And that means Congress is kept happy. You are not their customer and Congress doesn't care if you are happy.
3 years ago
Their customers are happy. And that means Congress is kept happy. You are not their customer and Congress doesn't care if you are happy.
This is what crony capitalism looks like.
Can you elaborate? Who is crony to whom here? Everyone in the exchange gives the information willingly... people here talk a lot about salary sharing, so here you go, your employer is doing salary sharing with other employers. Someone else facilitates it and makes money. What's wrong with that?
I know why I am going to freeze my data, I don't want employers to know my past salaries - but that's anti-capitalist, I am removing information from the market to give myself an edge in negotiations, and to propagate inequality. Equifax don't have to do it on "capitalist" principles, but they allow me to do that... the only crony thing is the opt-out form I guess ;)
I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it.
I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.
It is, however, still contributing to the inequality in the world. I had a lot of experience from the Danish public sector digitalisation before joining my current company, and I have a second job as an external examiner for CS students, so it is fair to say that I’m likely in the top 10% of paid developers in my region. If you invest with us, you can make 10 million Danish kroner into 20 million Danish kroner in 5-10 years, and while you do so by fighting climate change, I make around 1 million Danish kroner in savings over 10 years, as one of the better paid non top-level managers in my country.
As you’ve probably guessed I’m Danish, and we’re probably famous for our take on society in that all our political parties are basically a different colour of social democrats, and we have been like this since what is essentially the dawn of modern Denmark, so equality is a big part of our society, as in, if a private company builds an apartment complex in the most attractive part of our city, they are required by law to make at least 10% of those apartment available for rent to the “common people” at the cities disposal. That’s how much we care about equality, and the best example of capitalism we have is making rich people much richer by basically doing nothing.
Another thing we are famous for is community ownerships. The best example is that we have two major supermarket chains, one is owned by investors the other is owned by the people who shop there. Guess which one has been driving positive change forward, repeatedly been reinvesting in its own business and it’s employees and under covid sent 100% of its profits on things like clothes on to small clothing stores that were closed due to lockdown?
Now I’ve ranted for a while, and it may sound like I’m getting somewhere, but I’m actually not. Because the issue with co-operative ownership is that it makes it very hard to start something new. The big co-operative ownership organisations we have typically came to be by a lot of smaller organisations joining together after they were established. The solar farms we build are a good example of this in play. We’re going to build a couple of thousand of them over the next five years and while non-profits movements have certainly helped made it a profitable area, no one outside of private investors are going to build even close to this amount. So how do you change the world without capitalism?
The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.
I'm a foreigner with a Danish job and I very much like the country. It's refreshingly different. Money is still very important but I think infinitely less so compared to the states; it isn't what motivates people.
It's also interesting to note that Denmark has negative interest rates and anyone with more than 100k DKK is really quite punished for keeping it in the bank. I'm glad that your company provides a vehicle for the upper middle classes to use their wealth well. What's it called? And what's the name of the two supermarkets you mentioned (is one of them Føtex?)
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I think one should not forget that Denmark's society is mostly homogenous. When you have a vastly dominant, culturally homogenous group, it's relatively easy to trust and support one another.
In a highly diverse country like the US, where the average New Yorker or new immigrant will have a completely different culture and world view from the average Joe in Missouri, and that's just two examples out of many, it's very difficult to build a culture of mutual trust, especially in comparison to the level of support Scandinavian countries offer to their communities.
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I am convinced that the way to change the world (not necessarily towards some altruistic nirvana but at least to avoid a dysfunctional, environmentally and socially disastrous dystopia) is by raising our education / communication game towards more honesty and transparency when discussing socioeconomic challenges and less obfuscation inane, monkey chest beating like conflicts.
Already any discussion that centers around "capitalism" is deeply problematic as it invariably takes enormously complex sets of laws, conventions and behavioral attitudes that varies materially (both historically and regionally) and forces it into a binary yes/no universe. You can't solve complex problems with random hammer blows on each others heads.
All of the constituent components of what we term "market democracy" must be examined not as what they say on the label, but what happens in practice. Just as a simple and single example: when politicians routinely enter revolving-door appointments to serve private interests how can we even pretend this is a feature of "capitalism".
The true underlying behavior is cooperating private gangs marauding the commons. It doesn't matter if it happens in ultra-capitalist US or "communist" China.
> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.
That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?
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People who bash capitalism after the last century of expansion should just be considered negationists at this point.
Sure it is not perfect but it's infinitely better than any other economic model available.
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> I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.
Isn’t this also exactly what causes crony capitalism. How many of these semi-rich investors, have friends in politics making regulations that will benefit these.
The fact that this is a thing ensures that a percentage of our politicians pimping climate change are not doing so because they care about the environment but because they’re pimps exploiting those below them for their own profit.
Otherwise we’d welcome and fund even fossil fuel nuclear, and gas, technologies alongside the green technologies. The modern car IC engine, is proof that there are even gains to be made while still not being fully green.
But they need to make it super scary, so they can profit more. One day I hope we can see all the money they made in roundabout ways from these green companies (and big pharmaceutical with covid by the way)
It’s also what regular capitalism looks like.
Regular capitalism is when you decide between having your cake or eating it.
Crony capitalism occurs when people start to want to have their cake and eat it too.
Capitalism’s basis is that everyone is a servant. This means we’re all lower than the king, but we are also are kings ourselves. However crony capitalism occurs when a servant makes himself greater than his master, when the greatest king and master of all showed the way to prosperity was by becoming the greatest servant.
Our politicians character is proof that capitalism has failed, because they want to be kings, but they do not want to be servants.
Regular capitalism always becomes crony capitalism, and then probably neo-fuedalism.
Regular capitalism doesn't exist