Comment by rapsey
3 days ago
Gaping wound that lifted billions out of powerty and produced the greatest standard of living in human history.
3 days ago
Gaping wound that lifted billions out of powerty and produced the greatest standard of living in human history.
Sure, but you can't ignore the negative sides like environmental destruction and wealth and power concentration. Just because we haven't yet invented a system that produces a good standard of living without these negative side effects doesn't mean it can't be done. But we aren't even trying, because the ones benefiting from this system the most, and have the most power, have no incentive to do so.
Those are all results of political corruption, not capitalism. It is the government's job to set the ground rules for the economy.
Political corruption is a consequence of capitalism. Taking over the political system provides a huge competitive advantage, so any entity rich enough to influence it has an incentive to do so in an competition based economy that incentivizes growth.
3 replies →
Capitalism is a good economic engine. Now put that engine in a car without steering wheel nor brakes and feed the engine with the thickest and ever-thickening pipe from the gas tank you can imagine, and you get something like USA.
But most of the world doesn't work like that. Countries like China and Russia have dictators that steer the car. Mexico have gangs and mafia. European countries have parliamentary democracies and "commie journalists" that do their job and reign political and corporate corruption--sometimes over-eagerly--and unions. In many of those places, wealth equals material well-being but not overt political power. In fact, wealth often employs stealth to avoid becoming a target.
USA is not trying to change things because people are numbed down[^1]. Legally speaking, there is nothing preventing that country from having a socialist party win control of the government with popular support and enact sweeping legislation to overcome economic inequality somewhat. Not socialist, but that degree of unthinkable was done by Roosevelt before and with the bare minimum of popular support.
[^1]: And, I'm not saying that's a small problem. It is not, and the capitalism of instant gratification entertainment is entirely responsible for this outcome. But the culprit is not capitalism at large. IMO, the peculiarities of American culture are, to a large extent, a historic accident.
You can't really separate wealth and power, they're pretty much the same thing. The process that is going on in the US is also happening in Europe, just at a slower pace. Media is consolidating in the hands of the wealthy, unions are being attacked and are slowly losing their power, etc. You can temporarily reverse the process by having someone steer the car into some other direction for a while, but wealth/power concentration is an unavoidable part of free market capitalism, so the problem will never go away completely. Eventually capital accumulates again, and will corrupt the institutions meant to control it.
A smart dictator is probably harder to corrupt, but they die and then if you get unlucky with the next dictator the car will crash and burn.
Actually, the system that produced the greatest standard of living increase in human history is whatever Communist China's been doing for the last century.
Not century.
Mao and communism brought famine and death to millions.
The move from that to "capitilism with Chinese characteristics" is what has brought about the greatest standard of living increase in human history.
What they're doing now is a mix of socialism, capitilism and CPP dominance. I'm not an American, but I understand FDR wielded socialism too, and that really catapulted the US towards its golden era.
Chinese do capitalism better than anyone else. Chinese companies ruthlessly compete within China to destroy their competition. Their firms barely have profits because everyone is competing so hard against others. Whereas US/EU is full of rent seeking monopolies that used regulatory capture to destroy competition.
1 reply →
Almost like they made a great leap forward during that century.
Capitalism.
...and they use money so it's capitalism.