No, the competitive nature of capitalism definitely incentivizes people to do very shitty things to each other for personal gain. Or have you not heard of the Gilded Age? Or our current climate crisis? Or strike breaking? Or the incredible wealth inequality we are seeing today?
[edit] The Irish Potato Famine? The Bengal Famine? Belgium in the Congo? Sweatshop labour? Coups in South America for the benefit of fruit companies? Wars in the Middle East for the sake of oil? Clear-cutting of the Amazon? Any of this ringing a bell?
Can you prove capitalism is the source of any of those problems vs just plain human greed?
If we want to attribute every negative event to it, well what about the positive events? Did it cause the light bulb to be invented, the telegraph, the computer, the printing press, satellites, etc, or was it just the economic system at the time?
Capitalism doesn’t make people greedy, lots of people just are.
Beyond that, you can beat on capitalism all you want but until someone comes up with a viable alternative, it’s what we’ve got.
Literally the point of capitalism is to utilize greed and enlightened self-interest to (supposedly) drive innovation and expand production. Greed is central to the whole ideology. “Greed is good”. You are making a false distinction. How can you support an economic system you don’t even understand?
Capitalism could be amazing if the psychos of society didn’t constantly rise to the top then again the same could be said for communism and just about every other system we’ve tried.
Doesn’t communism do the same? In fact why the fuck do the crazy psychos rise to the top seemingly everywhere? Is this one of those “nice guys finish last” kinda deals or some phenomenon I’ve never heard of?
It’s because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.
It doesn’t much matter whether it’s controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn’t even matter that much if they’re smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it’s pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.
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Capitalism is fine as long as people aren’t complete scumbags about it. Rare, I know. It’s a human morality proposition.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism incentivizes people to be scumbags.
So does any other economic model.
That is an absolutely meaningless statement.
As is capitalism incentivizing people to be scumbags, as trendy as that perspective is.
No, the competitive nature of capitalism definitely incentivizes people to do very shitty things to each other for personal gain. Or have you not heard of the Gilded Age? Or our current climate crisis? Or strike breaking? Or the incredible wealth inequality we are seeing today?
[edit] The Irish Potato Famine? The Bengal Famine? Belgium in the Congo? Sweatshop labour? Coups in South America for the benefit of fruit companies? Wars in the Middle East for the sake of oil? Clear-cutting of the Amazon? Any of this ringing a bell?
Can you prove capitalism is the source of any of those problems vs just plain human greed?
If we want to attribute every negative event to it, well what about the positive events? Did it cause the light bulb to be invented, the telegraph, the computer, the printing press, satellites, etc, or was it just the economic system at the time?
Capitalism doesn’t make people greedy, lots of people just are.
Beyond that, you can beat on capitalism all you want but until someone comes up with a viable alternative, it’s what we’ve got.
Literally the point of capitalism is to utilize greed and enlightened self-interest to (supposedly) drive innovation and expand production. Greed is central to the whole ideology. “Greed is good”. You are making a false distinction. How can you support an economic system you don’t even understand?
Capitalism could be amazing if the psychos of society didn’t constantly rise to the top then again the same could be said for communism and just about every other system we’ve tried.
That’s because Capitalism rewards exploitative psychos, essentially by design
Doesn’t communism do the same? In fact why the fuck do the crazy psychos rise to the top seemingly everywhere? Is this one of those “nice guys finish last” kinda deals or some phenomenon I’ve never heard of?
It’s because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.
It doesn’t much matter whether it’s controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn’t even matter that much if they’re smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it’s pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.