Somewhere between Feudalism and Karl Marx, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave. How much we don't have capitalism and are living, globally, under an oligopoly, replete with robber barons in tech clothes; one can only laugh at.
The amount of misery under "capitalism" says there's got to be a better way.
Meanwhile in my lifetime capitalism has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into solidly middle class lifestyles globally.
My wife is Chinese so I’ve seen first hand how economic liberalisation has transformed that country. The Chinese brand of capitalism is severely flawed, largely due to an almost nonexistent rule of law, but compared to what they had before its night and day. It’s a shame the CCP seems to be thoroughly mismanaging it at the moment.
The system doesn't have to be adopted by every business or citizen. For instance, 10% of unemployment benefits could be paid out as a demurrage currency with tax acceptance and you would see large scale welfare benefits with almost no burden on the general population. The only burden of this system is juggling two different currencies and an insignificant 5% annual fee on the issued demurrage money supply. If pay out 10% of unemployment benefits or 15 billion dollars it would only cost 750 million dollars in the liquidity fee and that is assuming the money doesn't immediately go back to the government for tax payments at which point the costs keep shrinking and shrinking.
The claim that it's capitalism that has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a common one, but it's our technology that's advanced. If we were still living under feudalism and the industrial revolution and the Internet happened, hundreds of millions of lives would still have transformed. Thanks to John Deere and Monsanto and the like, billions of lives have been raised up from subsistence farming to where we are today. There's the argument that we wouldn't have this technology without capitalism, and the length of the Egyptian and Roman empires without the Internet lend credence to this possibility, but it's also impossible to deny that we've never and can't test whether a system other than capitalism wouldn't also lift millions out of poverty, given the same advancements in technology.
It turns out that centralized, long-term planning is necessary for certain advancements. Eisenhower's US highway system, for example. Or the Manhattan project. Yes, the market is great for a large number of things. One of my most favorite is the food bank story, where they created their own internal market, with credits, and used that to more efficiently organize actors and allocate resources *.
I'm also just done pretending that USA's brand of capitalism is perfect, or that we have a free market in the first place in places where we don't (eg pharmaceuticals) but still try to run it in a capitalistic way, and then get surprised when someone like Martin Shkreli plays the game according to the rules, buys a company with a monopoly on a product, and then raises prices when that's just the rules we've set up for ourselves. Yes he went to jail, but that wasn't because he raised prices on Daraprim, but because he was also running a ponzi scheme and the attention made that finally catch up to him.
We're not going to get to a better system by upending what's been working well enough, but with smaller, more specific changes to the existing system to make it work better. Framing any changes to the system as a moral upheaval and equivalent to communism is the problem. We can have a better system. Yes, some of it involves sharing with others and caring for your fellow human. Some of those humans don't look like you and you may not like them. That's okay, you don't have to. There are people I don't like either. But what we have that works for some, also isn't working for others. When baby food is locked up because people are stealing it, if we assume it's mostly not being stolen and used for nefarious purposes, like cutting cocaine; if we assume people are stealing baby formula to feed babies, and that's criminal behavior according to the rules of our society; stepping back and looking at that from first principles, that all the rules of society and capitalism are for the benefit of humanity. If we really stop and think about that, something has gone wrong.
* https://theeconreview.com/2018/02/12/how-food-banks-used-mar....
The main factor there was economic liberalisation in south east Asia. Mainly China of course but not only. There was nothing inevitable about that, it was a political decision. The Soviet Union didn’t do it, North Korea didn’t do it, but China had Deng Xioping and he did do it. He or someone else could have easily gone a different way. My wife is Chinese and I’ve visited frequently in the last 20 years and seen the transformation for myself. My wife’s family there are among those who went from grinding poverty to a comfortable lifestyle owning several properties with 2 cars.
Owning properties privately, in China, before Deng that would have been unimaginable. My wife’s sister even owns shares. It’s capitalism gone mad.
It’s all about consolidating power and wealth as quickly as possible. Now we’re in an AI arms race. Sounds terrifying? It is.
America might tear itself apart if it doesn’t slow down a bit. Right now, there’s no one behind the wheel.
I’m sure premium private services will be a thing, but right now the sheer scale of the mass market seems to be a powerful democratising force. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I'm not quite sure why people think that a misery free world ought to be possible and/or the default.
You see it all begins very benign. A farmer has a bad harvest. He needs to bridge over this year until the next harvest. So he borrows money with interest. When the next harvest fails then he becomes unable to pay and is forced to sell his land and perversively, hired to work on his own land. He has functionally become a serf. All it takes is for this to spread to the rest of society and you end up with feudalism.
In other words, feudalism is what happens when proto capitalism is exaggerated to an extreme extent.
If you were to exaggerate modern capitalism I am not sure what would happen. Maybe hyperinflation, maybe world war 3, maybe a reform of the banking system, maybe mass starvation or maybe a revolution or maybe modern feudalism except serfs aren't allowed to own intellectual property or shares in companies.
So no, I don't think the problem is that we don't have capitalism. We clearly have more capitalism than we want or need. Robber barons are an intrinsic part of capitalism.
The answer is a market economy without capitalism. I don't even see why anyone would care about capital obsession in a free market anyway. That sounds inherently autocratic. At some point in the capital accumulation process one person owns the entire economy, how does that not make them a monarch eventually?
