Comment by cogman10
2 days ago
> This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
Oh no, it really doesn't.
Captialism is everyone working to maximize profit. It's the lack of foresight on social problems and pressures in capitalism that leads to exactly this problem.
> The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Right, because of the pressure of a capitalist society. People can be priced out of having children if necessities like food, housing, and clothing price them out of being able to take care of a child.
> Capitalism says nothing about free time.
Capitalism is about maximizing profit. A direct path towards that is paying employees the minimal amount and having them work the most hours to extract the maximum amount of value from them.
Before mass unionization, 60 or 80 hour workweeks were pretty common in the US. Even today, we see companies that use salaried employees as a way to make employees work longer hours.
If overtime wasn't so expensive, you could bet that McDonalds would have people working 12 hour shifts. Hospitals already do that to nurses.
> capitalism is everyone working to maximize profit
This is nonsense. Capitalism is about the private ownership of productive stuff, i.e. capital. That’s it. Profit is a corollary, and one that is bounded by preferences and tastes.
That completely ignores the coercive law of competition.
"Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets."
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
> completely ignores the coercive law of competition
Not a forcing function unless you’re levered. Competition can’t push your return on a productive asset below zero (by definition), just lower by increasing the value of said asset while reducing the cash flows from it.
2 replies →
Out-competing yields rewards for effort, that doesn't make it necessary. All that's necessary is maintaining. Many small businesses coast by for 30 years with no aspiration to do more.
Japan has had stagnant GDP growth for decades. Growth is not "necessary" as socialist like to project, it's just better. Productivity/innovation increases through growth have drastically improved our quality of life. Meanwhile socialists treat the world as zero-sum, as though everyone started out with a pile of cash which gets divvied up. Redistribution can be good, but you first need to generate the wealth.