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They dont understand big words (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
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[โ€“] 0 points 2 months ago (6 children)

And, even if I'm not an owner of capital, I think it's a better system than most of the systems that have come before it.

Capitalism is the result of well-intentioned people looking at feudalism / manorialism and saying "that system is really fucked, let's see if we can improve it". And, they did. All out capitalism is horrible, but mix in some socialism and it seems to work fairly well. All out socialism has been tried and inevitably fails.

But, if we're going to do capitalism, we should really do it the way that the people who originally proposed it intended. They knew that the main benefit of capitalism was that there was competition. Without competition, it inevitably becomes winner-take-all, which just basically reverts to feudalism. For competition to work the government has to actively break up big, powerful companies, and the government has to be significantly more influential / powerful than all the businesses or people that it regulates (otherwise they'll just corrupt or ignore the regulations).

A proper capitalist system wouldn't have billionaires, because billionaires are evidence that competition has failed.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Capitalism did not arise because it was invented, it grew out of mercantalists in feudalism planting roots and gaining machinery like the steam engine, which grew into capitalism. This is why political economists analyzed capitalism after it had arisen.

    The entire idea that capitalism was "designed" is confusing and incorrect. Capitalism is working exactly as it should, meaning it is working into its eventual demise, as a system that arose from the advancement in human production.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Capitalism required that serfs be allowed to leave the lands that they were tied to to take jobs in factories. Serfs didn't have the right to look for jobs elsewhere, the law required that they live and work there entire lives on the same patch of land on which they were born.

    Allowing serfs to go work in factories required laws to be changed. Getting those laws changed required making an argument to the people with the power to change those laws. The theory of "capitalism" was that argument.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 months ago

    You're looking at it too much from the superstructure, and not from the base, which is why those laws changed in the first place. It wasn't an argument that ended feudalism, it was the development of the steam engine and the growth of mercantilists. As these groups formed a budding capitalist class, they overpowered the old aristocracy.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Im not willing to just say capitalism is the best just because it had some good results. I think we can be more imaginative.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not saying it's the best either. But, it may be the best that we've tried so far among systems that have actually worked in a scale bigger than a few hundred individuals, or in a time span lasting at least a decade.

    We should definitely keep experimenting and trying to find a better system. In fact, we've already found a better system, and that's a mixed economy with capitalism for some things, and socialism for others. I think only a crazy person would want a capitalist fire department, capitalist food safety inspectors, purely capitalist education of children, etc. And, it's only the US that thinks that a capitalist health care system is possible. Virtually every other country thinks that's just crazy.

    We should also strive to have the best possible capitalist system, if it's what we're stuck with for now. Just because there may be a better system out there doesn't mean we should give up on trying to regulate privately owned companies and put all our efforts into just coming up with a new system, or overthrowing the system. Monopolies should be smashed, billionaires should be taxed out of existence, and the central government should be reinforced so that it is bigger, stronger and smarter than all the companies out there that it's regulating. Only then can we have the best possible version of capitalism (or at least the part of the mixed system that is capitalist).

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