Comment by robertlagrant
3 years ago
Capitalism generally happens successfully in societies with laws.
The difference with socialism is the state both defines the laws and decides how to allocate resources, which tends to result in a lot of poverty.
3 years ago
Capitalism generally happens successfully in societies with laws.
The difference with socialism is the state both defines the laws and decides how to allocate resources, which tends to result in a lot of poverty.
And in certain capitalist societies, the capital decides the laws and allocation of resources.
At least in theory, in a democratic society, government should be elected by the people. Unfortunately there never was a democratic, socialist country, so it's hard to make statements based on observation with these matters.
Government might be elected but that's a really weak, confusing signal to decide all the spending a market currently decides.
Imagine lumping millions of spending decisions into a binary choice, alongside policy positions and everything else a government represents.
There were many democratic socialist countries, unfortunately socialism devolves into tyranny in less than one election period. For example Czechoslovakia voted for communism freely by its own volition in 1946, and the communists started killing people the same year. It's not an individual's fault - many new unknown people started ruthlessly competing for absolute power as soon as it became available. Similar process happened in the entire Eastern Bloc.
This is more or less what Brazil is doing, but they voted for a (luckily incompetent) proto-dictator to prevent the danger of "communism" (as in "voting for a center-left party" communism).
Democracy only works well with a well informed electorate. This is why we need to fight the diffusion of propaganda disguised as news.
If killing people is your bar for descending into tyranny then capitalism is guilty of the same thing. The whiskey rebellion happened in the US shortly after it’s formation and that was over paying taxes to the capitalist state. You also had the various government slaughters of workers striking whenever they tried to get a better deal from their employers
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Government isn't an outside entity. Government is the people--except in a capitalist country where government is owned by corporations.
> Government is the people--except in a capitalist country where government is owned by corporations.
In what country is this true? Was everyone in Soviet Russia the government? Why did they order the killing of themselves if so?
By your logic, corporations are people too
That is indeed what the US Supreme Court agrees with you. Except of course corporations don't go to jail for committing crime.
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Depends on your definition of success.If one is Thinking of the long-term viability of the human race then capitalism can only be seen as a disaster if you look at it from a ecological perspective.
Capitalism doesn't happen without state and it is defined by the state, so it's a failure of state regulation, not capitalism itself. States must set different regulation and/or incentives. It's perfectly possible to have 100% ecological capitalism.
Capitalism is the engine behind the pay-to-play nature of the political processes and the supporting propaganda that triggers those failures.
You cant separate capitalism from, for example, the decades of amplified Koch propaganda attacking environmental regulatory prudence and buying up politicians. The Kochs respond to incentives just like everybody else.
>It's perfectly possible to have 100% ecological capitalism.
Only with a shallow and one dimensional view of what capitalism really is and how a state actually functions.
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