Comment by lukas099
3 days ago
I think it's unfortunate that the term "capitalism" has been captured by the left to mean the bad kind of capitalism, where regulation is only used as a moat for the established players. Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections. But the term itself is poisoned, at least in U.S. politics, to where social democrat/liberal capitalists like Bernie call themselves socialists instead.
But the term itself was created and captured by the left from the beginning; Proudhon first used it; Marx popularized it; so in the history of terminologies it always had the meaning that we associate with it.
I like the term "market economy" or "commercial society" more, because it does capture more of what's happening on the market and the society.
I didn't know that, thanks.
> Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections.
Shouldn't we refer to the system by what it leads to in a majority of cases? Like Stafford Beer and the cybernetician's useful heuristic:
POSIWID - the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.
I mean, the Nordic model is not predominant by any means, right? So why would we use the term capitalism to refer to that, or think capitalism generally leads to that?
The thing we have in most places certainly seems to be dominated by monopoly players, with laws and regulation tending in most cases to protect that entrenched power and leaving the rest of the people mollycoddled and/or mistreated.
Aside from that, I think your line of reasoning is factually backwards. The rights and protections that people won over the last few hundred years were ripped from the hands of the powerful forces of capital every time, and never given gladly. History shows clearly that these advances were won in spite of capitalism, not because of it - ironically, by the same "left" you seem to be deriding.
This famous "capitalism as least bad system" argument, more broadly, of course, presumes we by definition can't do better in any possible future. This is taken for sophisticated wisdom nowadays, but is arguably just the standard modern cynical excuse not to even begin to think.
"The Dawn of Everything" by Davids Graeber and Wengrow does an amazing job of showing this notion that humans are stuck in their economic systems to be a tired modern fantasy at best, driven by our lack of imagination and political sophistication when compared to our forebears.