Kapitalism
Kapitalism
205 comments
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In a classic example you have a village with 2 bakeries, one of the bakers came up with a machine to kneed the bread, so he can make more bread and sell it cheaper. This is sort of the story people tell to show how great capitalism is.
But we have reached a point where that one bakery now owns a chain of bakers, adds ingredients to the bread to make it more addictive, skips on actual ingredients needed for bread and replaces them with sawdust, made donations to the current political party so any competition has to jump through hoops to get a bakery license, etc.
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And then uses his immense wealth and contacts to make frivolous lawsuits against smaller bakers trying to make their own machine, knowing full well they will not win in court but will financially ruin the smaller baker and tie them up in litigation for years, then forcing them to an unfair arbitration where they make a shit offer to buy out the competition
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Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
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Agreed. I feel as though capitalism is a good option for things which can have elastic demand. Luxury items, entertainment, etc can all benefit from a competitive market because I have the luxury of not needing to buy them. On the other hand, I do absolutely need food, housing, and healthcare in order to live. Applying supply and demand principles when demand must be inelastic only leads to people getting hurt.
My dream system would be one in which, as a baseline, all human requirements for survival are provided no matter the situation, and where currency is only used for luxuries.
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Exactly, this is why strong laws are needed. In the end we (the people) all benefit. Maybe a small example but when the EU started to push for usbc as the only standard, it made things lot better. If you are older and still have a drawer with 15 chargers all with different plugs, voltages and amps you known what I mean. Back in the day before cheap chargers from aliexpress, just replacing a simple charger from the manufacturer could be a pretty expensive thing.
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And don't forget how one bakery could pay their employees only the bare minimum, cut corners where they can and use the profit to undercut the 'good' bakery until the 'good' bakery goes bankrupt and the 'bad' bakery can simply be a local monopoly and raise prices as they like.
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Raise prises and if legally possible even lower wages, hey we are the only bakery in town so it's getting paid peanuts or have no job at al.
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Even in the best case s scenario - bakeries compete making uniform quality products without involving political shenanigans - the price of bread is independent of the cost of production.
What you're looking for as a business is the "clearing price", which is the price at which your (sales * price) generates the maximum revenue.
New capital that lowers per unit cost does not change the price. It raises profit margins. Only when multiple vendors in competition have access to this capital does the clearing price fall.
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Capitalists say the free market is king then they go and make laws to stifle and restrict it so they can make monopolies and gouge everyone out of their hard-earned income.
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Buy everything up so your choice doesnt really latter because the money ends up in theirs either way. And put hurdles in the way so no one could try to get any funny ideas and make their own thing
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Capitalism is an egotistic not an idealistic movement. Capitalists don't become capitalists because they think it benefits everyone, but because they think it benefits them. That's why someone like Elon Musk is only against government subsidies if he's not the recipient.
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They are not Capitalists. In fact capitalism is a great idea, it just we don't have it.
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Other way around. They're capitalists but don't support the free market. So they want the factory to be privately owned and run for profit, but they still want the government to interfere with patent-infringing sales.
And I'd argue that capitalism is an inherently bad idea, even in theory. Nobody deserves free rent just for owning something, like land or natural resources. Property manager is a job, landlord is not.
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Properly regulated capitalism isn't strictly horrible. The biggest issue we have is that first bit, unfortunately.
-Me, a dirty socialist
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Maybe it's Crony capitalism instead?
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Someone gets it.
Lets instead do this:
Every citizen, irrespective of their nationality, skincolor, gender has the right to:
- living quarters
- work
- maximum of 7 hours of work
- free healthcare
- paid vacation
- equal pay and treatment for women
- freedom of religion and speech
This is directly taken from a 1936 constitution. Today one could improve on it but we're so much worse, everywhere.
Now guess which one.
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Uh... This is coming from the folks who said "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" during a famine so... uh... yeah, that's not the flex you think it is.
Edit: And in case anyone is wondering, this gets worse with context.
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As opposed to the current time of surplus and abundance where it is if "you don't work you don't eat". Which is morally a lot worse considering there is more than enough food to feed everyone
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They also created the famine by decentralizing agriculture and planning, but at least that sort of people learned their lesson from it and didn't repeat the exact same blunder in China years later, right?
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during a famine
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I thought it was the nazis who said that, so I checked it with FuckDuckGo assist:
This phrase, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," originates from the New Testament, specifically 2 Thessalonians 3:10,
Also love that people try to make it morally acceptable because of reasons.
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And this was said about able-bodied parasites such as owners of the means of production, shareholders, landlords, and others living off society on non-labor income. At the same time, the population received old-age and disability pensions, maternity leave for women in labor and a huge number of social payments and compensations. Too bad most believe Goebbels propaganda and don't study history.
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And those were obviously 100% kept 🤡
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Luckily, the Soviet union treated homosexuals to a similar standard. /s
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Couldn't we just add equality for sexual orientation and gender expression to a new list of rights, along with the things already mentioned?
OP even said, "Today one could improve on it," implying that the referenced constitution isn't meant to be a comprehensive list for the modern day.
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The Soviet Union didn't particularly treat homosexuals any worse than most countries at the time. Sure, it should have done better, but there are limitations to ideology when lessentially your entire ideological base members die in the struggle against the Nazis due to being the first to volunteer.
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Stalin 1936 constitution. Holidays for "enemies of the people" were unpaid and in a quite cold climate of Siberia. They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food. And if you didn't like it, you get a free ride in a black car to the place of final rest.
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Holidays for "enemies of the people" were unpaid
Not true. The GULAG system, which is simply the prison system of the Soviet Union at the time, did pay inmates a wage while they worked there, this is common knowledge and you can check it up if you want to.
and in a quite cold climate of Siberia
Really? The Gulags were all in Siberia? How about you actually check what you're talking about instead of spreading misinformation? From the Gulag museum:
www.gulag.online/articles/mapa-taborovych-sprav-gulagu-a-pribehu-ze-stredni-evropy?locale=en
Wow, a ton of Gulags were actually to the west of the Urals, not in Siberia, who would have thought. If only this information was widely available and public...
They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food
Huh? Life expectancy in the Soviet Union rose exponentially, it was below 30 years of age before the Russian Revolution and 60 by the time Stalin died. The diet of the Soviet citizen was by the 60s healthier than that of a US citizen. The CIA itself says this BTW, check out on google "CIA USSR nutrition", you'll find a 1983 document claiming, and I quote, "American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of rood each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious". Almost as if centering food production around the needs of the population instead of around the profit of food producers, gives a better result...
Just admit it: you don't have any fucking idea what you're talking about. You're repeating talking points you've heard on Reddit or TV without actually checking anything.
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And there it is again. Dont you ever wonder why they had a constitution like this but treated their people like this. Do you have a window in your room? Can you check what happens to enemies of the state where you live? What happens again if you become disabled in our "civilized" societies?
have you ever wondered if you're being fed bullshit?
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The maximum hours you can work did not apply to everyone as my former boss has stories of working 12+ hours in the gulag he was sent to for reasons he does not know.
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Absolutely correct. Thats why I said one could improve on it.
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Go check those living quarters they had lol, and food queues, and how well the health care worked if you had nothing to bribe with. Those sweet shortages of everything.
You should talk to someone who actually lived in the "union" and stop slurping kremlin propaganda. But will you? I wouldn't bet on it.
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Even if i dont check and just believe what you wrote, it still beats the shit out of the situation a ton of us are in right now (also that was literally 34+ yrs ago. Life was different then AND the country was recovering from tons of shit). Not to speak of the countries that make our ill gotten comfort possible too. And just to clarify, present day russia is not communist or socialist. they're as capitalist as the western states are. They are no better and no worse in terms of inequality.
The important part, will you have a respectful discussion or do I have to block you?
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I did my 7h of work, I'm retiring now.
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though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we'd have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator.......
which happens anyway, but uh, i guess it'd happen more?
honestly idk, let's do a test run of a year without any copyright laws and see if anything changes like at all
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though usually stupid and fucky copyright laws have one advantage - if someone bigger than you steals your idea you can take them to court. without copyright laws we’d have giant corporations just taking shit and using their platform to sell stolen ideas without a single cent going to the original creator…
It's very difficult for some small independent creator to take a big corporation successfully to court. Imagine going up against The Mouse or someone similar with a lawyer paid for by your legal insurance. You might as well just not do it at all.
The same thing is even worse with patents. I made a few things that I could patent. But for that I'd have to cough up a few thousands per year, roughly 100k over the life-time of the patent, and in turn I only get the right to sue someone violating my patent. I don't even get the guarantee that my patent is valid.
Patents are designed exactly so that big corporations can use them excessively to suppress smaller competitors while they are too expensive and too uncertain for small inventors to use them.
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I think the strength of your intellectual property protection should be inversely proportional to the size of your organization.
A character I design myself or an invention I patent myself should be firmly protected so I can't be bullied out of the market as easily, but a big company should get only fleeting protection.
That's just my take.
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The Game Boy alone proves this whole capitalist rhetoric wrong. It was the most successful hand held game system for two reasons, it was cheaper than the rest and it went through batteries slower, otherwise it was objectively the worst handheld game system on the market at the time. Look at the food you are able to eat, the clothes you are able to wear, and the place you are able to live and try to tell me the driving force on those decisions was quality. Capitalism is not concerned with improving anything, that is not the goal of the system.
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The goal is to get the highest score.
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Copyright and inheritance can’t exist in a capitalist society
Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth and the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession. Over saturation of a given market is fixed by the invisible hand where people just move onto something that gives more hours
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the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession
Workers aren't capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.
Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .
Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it's used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).
A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.
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Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth
Then true capitalism will never exist. At best, it's a Platonic Ideal.
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A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they're obviously grilled?
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Copyright used to have a hard limit in years. Inheritance used to pack a substantial tax.
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The whole IP debate is just pure nonsense. It still relies on the cartesian mind/body dichotomy and an idealism of some sort where "the ideas" exist in their own immaterial cognitive realm. And they think that I can steal these imaginary immaterial entities and they will be gone for good. Yeah...
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Oh, so uouve never gone on a spirit journey, cutting your way through dense pneuma with an enchanted cgainsaw to get ideas?
I bet thats why you're poor, and i thought of ’bank but on computer', 'music but on computer' and 'books but computer', so get 50% of all thevworlds resources.
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It's about incentivising people to share their ideas by ensuring they'll be rewarded for it. Without IP laws it's beneficial to keep new ideas a secret so you can profit off of them. It's a social contract that promises creators compensation for creating. Everyone benefits from the system the problem has been its exploitation due to weakening public institutions.
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But wait, I arranged atoms in this order before you did! Now you're not allowed to arrange atoms in this order unless you pay me!!
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I feel like so many people don't understand the purpose of IP law.
So someone arranges some atoms for the first time, let's say they make a vaccine. Now the creator of that vaccine might be financially motivated to sell it for profit. If no IP law existed then the only way to ensure that they'd be able to profit from their arrangement of atoms is by keeping the way they managed to create it a secret. IP law is a social contract that says "hey, if you share this massively beneficial idea with the rest of society we'll make sure that you can make a profit off of it." In this way IP law incentivises creators to share their creations with society in a way that everyone benefits from.
The problem is with public institutions being eroded away by corporate interests not with the concept of IP law.
Also for anyone coming out with the "creators aren't profit motivated" bs. Yes they absolutely are. No it is not because of greed. Material success for people who have made contributions is the most valuable encouragement.
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oooops I think my brain did it by itself. Wait who is my brain?
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I like the idea of little guys coming up with things being able to get a head start from the companies with massive budgets
HOWEVER. imo the big company should not be able to patent anything
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This meme shows a complete misunderstanding of patent law. A patent is a social contract that allows for a limited amount of protection for an invention being copied (usually 20 years) in exchange for it becoming public domain after that. This enables people to make a living inventing things. Are games played with the system, sure, does it work perfectly- no, but it’s better than the alternatives. (Source, am inventor)
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In that case literally every court also shows a complete misunderstabding of patent law
So...
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I understand what you are saying but i hope you never invent something that can solve a current day crisis.
We are already behind schedule to solve things like climate change. If someone invents breakthrough tech then we need that today and open so other minds can quickly iterate and improve. Not after 20 years of stalling on a bureaucratic advantage.
If it wasn’t for capitalism chaining survival to productivity there would be no reason for this system to exist and we can move on to teach that “all good ideas should be copied” And “the same ideas can emerge in multiple different minds”
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People work for material gain. By not entitling creators to the product of their labour you will discourage them from creating (and also be stealing from them). Patent law is exactly the kind of thing that protects the interests of working people but our current system is too weak to stand up to corporations.
What happens if the person who can solve climate change decides instead to trade stocks because saving the world doesn't put food on the table?
IP laws are not your enemy, corporations are.
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This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of patent practice. Patents exist not for inventors, but for companies. Destin, from Smarter Every Day, has a recent video trying to make a grill scrubber in which he talks with many people about how Amazon for example constantly avoids patent claims from small inventors.
Humanity progressed from hunter-gatherers to the industrial revolution without the need for a judge to determine whether I can arrange atoms in a given way or not without giving a canon to someone else who decided to arrange atoms like that before me.
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If it were a misunderstanding, why do we always see a spike in innovation once a patent expires? According to capitalist ideology, isn't competition the best that could happen, instead of having an unlimited monopoly for 20 years?
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I think their point was that in a way, patents are supposed to be more equitable because it allows the inventor to meet their basic needs by being the one to invent the patent.
There's also the argument that while innovation skyrockets after a parent opens up, there would be less incentive to invent new things if Walmart could just copy it for cheaper the day after you show how you make it.
Or people would be super secretive with instructions for how to make their products that innovations could die with their creators since they have no incentive to release it.
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Patents are a good idea in every form of society. People are motivated by material rewards. By ensuring a creator is entitled to their labour and that some scum fuck corporation isn't going to steal it, society incentivises innovation. The problem isn't patents, it's corporations abusing the system to serve their own interests because public institutions (such as the patent office) aren't strong enough to push back.
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Then patent law is better than intellectual property law, I think it's 50 years after the creator dies and there are loopholes for companies
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Technically IP law covers patents, trademarks, copyright, and designs (sometimes also called design patents). Patent protection is 20 years (plus a little bit extra under certain conditions. Trademarks is indefinite in theory. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) is 70 yrs after death or 50 yrs for certain works (e.g., music recordings). Designs, I'm not really sure.
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I'm not super familiar with patents themselves, but I used to work in genetics back when human genes were able to be patented, and Myriad Genetics used their patent of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to lock genetic testing for these common factors in breast cancer predisposition behind a massive paywall. Even after gene patents were no longer allowed, they refused to share their previous test results with researchers trying to develop a more comprehensive, accurate, and cost-effective test, slowing down medical research.
Research eventually progressed without Myriad Genetics' help, and within a few years after the genes stopped being patented, genetic testing for the BRCA genes and many more was down to an affordable price, even for people without insurance coverage. We now learn more and more about these genes quicker than ever, and can offer tests that cover many genes at once for a low price and with high accuracy, due to the sharing of test results between labs that never would have happened while genes were patented.
This may be an outlier in patent usage - though I doubt it - but it still shows that big companies can use patent laws more to bully fair competition than to offer a better product. Patents are a good idea for helping small businesses and individuals protect their right to make a new product without a big company swooping in, but there are still massive issues with the process that need to be fixed to keep those same big companies from using the process in reverse to keep small businesses from growing into the competition necessary for a healthy economy.
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Would it not be cooler just to be able to live with having to toil and labor for the crumbs of your capitalist owner and you know invent things because you liked to? (Source, you are brainwashed)
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Patent laws are the reason why I'm reluctant to work on my idea for a mini-joystick (thumbstick) with force feedback, because even if I manage to get it through without violating any patents of the patent troll by the name of Immersion Technologies, I wouldn't want the technology to be locked to a single console manufacturer for a decade, then to be only available to certain manufacturers for yet another 5 years or so.
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Is no one going to talk about how a rune pickaxe is WAAY more expensive than a bronze pick?
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Not if you're using duplicate item cheats
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Patent protections should be severally limited if not out right done away with minus a few exceptions maybe.
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On related note, Luanti (formerly Minetest) is a platform for playing and developing block mining games a la Minecraft and Vintage story.
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Patents mean genocide.
They slow down adoption of innovation and raise prices to levels the market can afford. With the existential need to change and improve like 50% of all industrial processes, this results in too slow change. It never mattered if climate change is anthropogenic or not.
205 comments
The major premise of Capitalism is risk vs reward. We hit a tipping point though, where 99% of people do not have any capital to risk, and the people who do have the capital have enough to nullify any risk.
Tax the rich.
Sometimes I get mad about how we in practice have basic income for the rich. If you have a few million dollars, you can park it in zero or low risk investments (eg: high yield savings, bonds) and get free money. Then you can just fuck off and pursue your dreams. No risk. Lots of reward.
But if you're poor? Well you better take any job for any salary or you're just a parasite blah blah blah. All pain, some risk, little reward.
My ex gets an allowance from his grandparents every week. They also bought him a house.
He’d get a job for a couple years, fuck around and get fired. Only got through college because I did his homework.
He has a house, he has a fridge full of food, he can go to restaurants and order out and take weeks off for vacation.
I worked full time through college, often three jobs. I still have massive student loans. I work two part time jobs, because the career field I went into is collapsing, and I’m not welcome as a trans person anyway.
I have always worked; he has not. I sleep on a rug and stack of pillows; he can pick out whatever luxury furniture he wants.
Work is entirely disconnected from reward.
Rich people also get handed so many free things.
Put over $100,000 in the bank and they will throw free accounts, low interest credit cards, rewards, free safety deposit boxes, personal concierge services. And that’s just the start.
When do you think this tipping point was? Because as far as I can tell this was around the French revolution.
In modern economics, a massive change came about in the early 1970s. Productivity and profits decoupled from employee wages, and continued to rise while wages stayed flat. Fast forward 50 years, account for inflation and shifts in technology, and it's easy to see that employee wages HAVEN'T RISEN in meaningful amounts for 50 years. Meanwhile, companies are making more money than ever.
So, I'd say it was in the 70's.
Hmmm. Good question. I'm not an economist, but I'd say it was around the time Reganomics got started, maybe a little bit beforehand, since I think Reganomics was probably a consequence of the powerful having enough money to out-fund the general populace.
Capitalism, since its inception, has been 99% of people having no capital.
And it went pretty well, until they bought enough politicians to change it.
I'm down. I think every year, we ought to take the richest person in the country and redistribute 50% of their assets.
Not just having capital, but got a hostage situation where their failure would collapse the economy therefore they are not allowed to fail and must be bailed out by the government they paid (often for far less) for earlier.
I don't buy into the "too big to fail" idea for individuals.
I really think it only applies to banks, mainly because they hold the money of common people. Anyone else should be allowed to fail. Probably the greatest financial policy fuckup of my life was bailing everybody out in 2008 and not holding anyone accountable for their actions. That gets back to risk and reward breaking down. Those companies should have been allowed to fail. The money, workers and demand for services don't disappear, they shift to more stable competitors.