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0 pointsdragonwriter12y ago0 comments

No, I think the argument is that the greed and corruption of people who are not capitalists aren't as important to the outcome of capitalism, because capitalism is a system in which the economy is organized around the interests (including, inter alia, greed and corruption) of capitalists.

Which is why the socialist critics of the dominant economic system of the developed world of the early-mid 19th Century coined the name "capitalism" for the system they were criticizing.

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sp33212y ago· 2 in thread

This is bizarre. So, if an individual socialist person in a capitalist economy is corrupt, that's not as big a problem as a capitalist being corrupt?

dragonwriterOP12y ago

> So, if an individual socialist person in a capitalist economy is corrupt, that's not as big a problem as a capitalist being corrupt?

In GP, "capitalist" -- and I would have thought this was crystal clear from context -- was used in the sense of "member of the class deriving sustenance principally through ownership of capital" (e.g., as would be opposed to "labor") not in the sense of "proponent of the economic system known as capitalism" (e.g., as would be opposed to "socialist".)

sp33212y ago

That's the opposite of what I got from the context, sorry. In fact criley2 defined capitalism as a system of capital ownership. Anyway, criley2 seems to be calling all greedy people "capitalists", and using this definition to argue that other economic systems produce less corruption. That argument gets even less coherent, if you're claiming that guarding your capital is somehow more selfish than guarding your labor.

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