Capitalism is an ideology.
Capitalists are ideologues.
Capitalists believe every (freeborn) person owns themselves and in some schools of thought their children and slaves, but not other (freeborn) persons.
A person/co-op can own a place/thing/slave if the current owner gives/sells it to them, or if they occupy/take an unowned place/thing/slave, or if they make a place/thing out of unowned places/things.
Once someone owns something they own it till they die or give/sell it, altho if they can’t prove they own it to other capitalist, other capitalists may take it.
Regulation of the market?
Would contract enforcement and legal adjudication and tort law be considered forms of regulation?
I don’t feel like anyone is really competent to have the solution, but here are some things I would remove. Corporate personhood. Gone. And the return of the potential threat of end a particular corporations charter. You commit enough crimes as an organization, you lose the charter. It is a set of priviledges. And as original conceived it was meant only to be permanent if you were a good little corporation. IOW the conservative position, let alone the liberal one, should be to go to the original intent which was: should we let you incorporate, but you pull a lot of shit, we will take away that priviledge.
Fiat banking. The whole BS that a bank when it loans out money now can invest more money is absurd. WE have given the banks too much money. There were problems earlier, but now there is so little connection between what is loaned and invested and what the bank actually has.
The government should print its own money. Why should a private corporation make money off of making money. Absurd.
I would tax the shit of money made from capital. IOW not through labor. I am sure there are fuzzy lines. But the idea was not that at some point you have an AI that plays with money for you and you earn more that people who actually do things, from street cleaners to CEOs.
Overhaul the campaign finance thing. If every candidate is beholden to Wall St., Wall street will create legislation that allows the rich to work less and create nothing. And the distance they have come in doing this is utterly unbelievable.
We do not have a democracy, we have an oligarchy.
Without campaign finance and the near elimnation of lobbying, we do nto have a democracy.
Oversight much be not revolving door or there is no oversight.
And there should be a commons. And conservatives should want a commons. It seems like privitizatoin of everything is a conservative position. But it shouldn’t be. It used to be there were thing - like the town forest, the water - that were commonly held. The neo-cons - a shorthand term - want nothing to be not on the market, even our fucking bodies and the air in the end. They have gone after water and tried to patent the fucking neem tree. They want every single thing on the market. That is a radical anti-conservative position. They used the gulf wars to privitize many parts of the military. The intelligence services are very privitized now. They want ot be able to buy and sell everything. Liberals make little grunts of objections to this, but in fact conservatives are on better ground because it is a radical shift in the way of viewing the world. It is radical reform.
Capitalism: A free market.
Socialism: The people regulate the means of production, distribution and exchange but not the products themselves.
Syndicalism: The unionization of the means of production.
Communism: The people regulate the means of production and the products themselves.
Corporatism: Capitalists regulate the means of production (and the products themselves).
FDR said his greatest accomplishment was saving capitalism. Meaning he didn’t have to resort to state ownership and prices controls, et al. His solution was to tax the capitalists on their profits and redistribute and do public works projects. Lots of zoos, dams, parks, libraries, etc were built with the “stolen money”. Then Eisenhower followed with the interstate system. Everything worked beautifully until JFK decided to cut taxes and then Reagan, who I’d sooner consider a traitor than a president.
I don’t know what you’re on about there.
Yes, we need to support Trump driving the economy into the ground so we can elect his antithesis who will clean up the mess just as FDR did.
That’s actually very astute of you to see that. Yes, tort is regulation, but only after the crime. The european model is to regulate everything so that tort won’t be required. One regulatory mechanism is backend and one frontend.
Europe says no lead in paint and the US says whatever damages results, you can be compensated for, and that is the deterrent meant to prevent shenanigans. So Pharma rushes drugs to market, then invariably gets a classaction lawsuit, but $100 million fine is nothing to them, so the deterrent doesn’t work.
I can’t imagine a capitalist would advocate for any regulation, either criminal or tort. A capitalist would say the freemarket will decide the fate of immoral or criminal business practices by voting with wallets. I’m pretty sure that would be Friedman’s response on the issue.
I think the capitalist wants the freedom to capitalize on anything and everything and the freemarket will determine how noble the business model is. This of course favors the most amoral/immoral people. Morality is not competitive, but is a weakness.
It’s probably not on the forefront of the left’s agenda.
There are anti-lead laws in the US. And as far as pharma, there are regulations about drug trials and theoretically the FDA would regulate this. So it’s not all after the fact. But either way we are dealing with regulations, courts, laws, enforcement of court decisions, regulating bodies, inspectors, etc.
Then you have something more like a totally chaotic feudalism. Because corporations love contracts. Not just with employees, but with suppliers, with intellectual rights, with property rights. Contracts, property law, intellectual rights…(there’s probably more, but that’s enough to make the point) these are enormous areas of regulation. A highly regulated economy does not need as many lawyers. The government decides. A free market capitalist society requires a shitload of laws, vast numbers of lawyers, a court system powerful enough so that Bill Gates can fuck over Apple if they steal something from him. That means the government needs a serious fucking police force and courts with powerful regulatory tools. Or Apple will laugh at them
or
Bill Gates will have his own army…
Hence I say something like feudalism. Or perhaps better something like ongoing constant tribal warfare.
People take the phrase free markets at face value. The most powerful advocates of free markets are always pushing for legislation about markets and contracts. And Disney will fuck you up the ass and quote all sorts of regulations if you do something with MIckey even though Disney himself is dead.
Free markets advocates don’t want goverments to limit corporations IN GENERAL. But they demand a vast amount of rules and regulations - around rights and contracts, to keep their power over individuals and over each other. You violate their vast array of rules and regulation, the ones corporations want, and theywill happily use the governments they paid for to slam those regulations home, if they can’t do it themselves.
I mean, I agree with you. I just don’t even want to grant this idea that corporations don’t want regulations. Their functioning depends on them and in fact creates vast swathes of regulations communist countries don’t need so much because there is no separation between state and industry and thus there is a central arbiter.
This is not me arguing for communism which I dislike in the extreme for all sorts of reasons.
I am just trying to eliminate the ‘free’ from the free marketers.
Letting the market decide period would be an armed struggle all the time.
Steve jobs shows up with his elite mercenaries and takes over Microsoft. I mean, why not. What, you want to limit is his freedom? He could and he did.
Oh, they say, no, no violence. First, give me a break, but then second. But that is not the only limit the corporations demand. They regulate the songs you sing, what marks you can put on pants you make yourself to sell. They evict based on contracts. And, well, you get the point. And I went into this in another thread also…
Unfortunately it seems to be transpersons and microaggression, what a monster Trump is.
You know, in a mainstream newspaper where I am it went through the history of the wall with Mexico. Obama and the Clintons extended the wall, defending the idea of the wall. Trump is just the one who wants to have a complete wall now. But they make vocal defenses of wall building between the US and Mexico. But with Trump it is seen as psychosis and evil.
Not meaning I want the wall…but seriously. It’s like everyone is a football hooligan now.
Karpel youre on point with the distinction between lawyers and bureaucrats.
In a regulated economy no citizen has any rights or incentives. In an unregulated economy the law is an actual thing to which citizenry can appeal.
It’s rather interesting that when I give three massive examples of regulated economies then the response is “yeah but they don’t count because there are also marginal and less relevant sort-of-examples”.
Undeniable evidence says that regulated economies destroy both human life and the environment. But that does not, predictably, lead to any consensus. People just have their consensus that it just isn’t so. Because they’ll fucking believe what their little belly tells them to.
Regulation of trade and living situations occurs spontaneously between sane beings. That’s the only form of consensus that is sane. But precisely this is disallowed by a priori regulating.
“Oh we humans of group C have decided humans in general are evil so we will regulate them” (Hitler)
Or: “Humans will figure it out if a few don’t manage to monopolise and regulate the rest.” (American constitution)
It was just an example. I know the US has regulations. The US has a tendency to regulate by tort while Europe has a tendency to regulate via the iron fist.
Capitalism isn’t that far from feudalism really.
Yup, freedom isn’t free.
I definitely see what you mean, but I’m not sure a regulation allowing them a “get out of jail free” pass counts as a regulation. I think “law” and “regulation” are different. If I’m playing monopoly and propose a new regulation that all players give their money to me, I don’t think it will be seen as a regulation lol. A regulation would be like a max amount of money any player could have and any excess goes in the pot.
Regulators/governors usually slow engines down and not speed them up.
Marx envisioned communism as WAY in the future when technology enabled abundance to such degree that no government was necessary. It’s not anarchy, but lack of necessity for law… you know, like wearing a helmet in your living room is silly. Communism wasn’t meant to be forced or dictated… and when it is, it’s not leftwing, but rightwing authoritariansim. Leftwing authoritarianism is an oxymoron.
Slavery is full consolidation of power (zero dispersal)
Feudalism is slightly less consolidation
Capitalism is slightly less
Socialism is slightly less
Communism is zero consolidation (full dispersal).
Yes me too.
Yes, I don’t know why some people can’t see that. Free market means king of the hill.
I know what you mean. The left is looking to demonize Trump however they can and I think that undermines their goal. It seems transparent to me, but idk, maybe they can’t see it.
What evidence?
The USDA regulates food and because of that, people die?
The EPA regulates where waste is dumped and that destroys the environment?
Using money as capital is using money as a means toward making more money.
This is in contrast to using money to buy consumables and other essentials.
Investing capital (Capitalism) is buying the means of production: those who privately own business property control things, just like any -ism that describes an economic model: it’s the prefix that specifies where the power lies.
As such, private property is a necessary foundation to the economic model, which requires protection backed by force when private property laws are breached.
But very little else is actually implied by the term, though commonly all sorts of associations are assumed to go with it. There can be a state, that state can have all kinds of degrees of power, or there can be no state. There can be a free market, there can be a regulated market.
Can one really have capitalism without a state? Who enforced property rights and contract conditions? Who regulates the limits of the use of force between individuals and organizations? Who sees to it that investments, which are a kind of contract, earn the money they are supposed to? I am sure there are some other facets of capitalism that need independent regulation. I suppose you could have something like guilds, but they would be a defacto state.
Well when you privatise force you get things like gangs, mafia, kangaroo courts, vigilantism, no? Basically whatever you see in shitty countries or areas where governmental law and order has little to no sway - people still manage to find ways to protect property without a state, and in doing so enable the possibility of privately owning means of production. Sure it doesn’t look much like the Capitalism we have in the West and it would have severe trouble getting anywhere near as advanced or as out of control as it has done here, but part of my point was that it can still be Capitalism at its definitional core.
Personally I think it’s important to simplify these concepts down to their essence, because you can get much more specific and then build up with qualifiers like “free market Minarchist state Capitalism” to be absolutely clear what you mean when you use these terms that have colloquially deformed into such a mess that we can’t really use them with any useful degree of meaning, which just ends up in arguments over endless equivocation fallacies.
I also like how force is highlighted when you reduce these concepts, when Capitalism is so often sold as a system free of force. Its foundation of private property is literally forcing others to abide by your terms and conditions when it comes to your property - ergo the more you have, the more power you have and the more finite the resources you control, the less power others have relative to you. This is where “voluntary” trading is revealed to be weighted more in favour of whomever has the most Capital because they control that which offers the most and can hold out for a better deal for themselves, which the less powerful party must then resort to “consenting” to. The person in charge of the means of producing the most valuable things values what they have less than the person who doesn’t own them because they have them on tap, yet the owner does value the larger amount of money than it costs to run their means of production, which the non-owning parties must sacrifice due to valuing more what they need but don’t control - thus the owner has even more share to invest in more capital and it’s easy to see how they whole thing spirals into gross inequality (as long as the capitalist’s investments keep up with what’s valuable). The in-built control mechanism - market competition - actually degrades in its effectiveness the more the system rewards the winners because they gain increasingly more power to control the market, pricing out competition or buying them out. We see today the most reliably important resources entirely owned by the same company even if it maintains the brands it bought or made up to create the illusion that there is no monopoly. It’s actually more stable a system in its infancy, or in poorer, more scarce and volatile economic climates, because the winners aren’t able to win for long enough before power shifts to others. This is why, of course, Capitalism is highly praised for bringing undeveloped nations out of poverty where “perfect competition” can actually be approximated. We see the economic invasion of the system trying to take over as much of the globe as possible, lessening poverty in the poorest areas whilst not coincidentally increasing the opporunity for Capitalists to profit from even more people. The whole goal is to escape perfect competition and to tend towards monopoly, which is the whole issue that capitalist proponents have with the state. At this point, government has to prop up these monopolies whenever their obese size causes them to faulter, because the ripple effects of such massive organisations no longer being able to run costs everyone way more. The whole Ponzi scheme essentially ends up holding society to ransom and government have to back more right wing governments where they don’t yet exist so that the feeding can continue, and complete collapse can be staved off for just a little longer.
This is why, beyond a certain point, Capitalism gets sick from eating itself and dies as soon as it stops growing.
The appeal is to those who lack theory of mind and/or care for the future, which luckily enough for Capitalists proliferates in conditions of poverty and social degeneration that it pushes civilisations back into after it so generously lifted them out to begin with. So as soon as its inherent disease starts showing in its latter stages, bad nutrition and upbringing and nostaligia to conserve past glory is so well cultivated that it’s extremely difficult to communicate that it needs to stop.
I’d rather be in this version that stuck in the impoverished conditions where it works, but I’m just waiting for enough people to cotton on to what happens when Capitalism starts working “too well”.
I’m interested in what happens when private property in the workplace becomes meaningless due to renewable energies and automation. Like anything of value that can be shared on the internet, securing private property can become more costly than the property is worth. This is another way in which Capitalism drives its own undoing, and I just hope I don’t get too much older before it finishes the job.
Think “wild west capitalism”. You find some gold or trap some beavers and try to capitalize on it through trade. But to truly capitalize, one needs slaves or employees who will compound his capital. So instead of finding his own gold to trade, he forces others to find it for him for pennies on the dollar… then pats himself on the back for providing a service to the community.
A state is really not required. What’s required is a desperate population that’s exploitable. Seems like a state is more likely to get in the way of the exploitation. If I were a real psychopathic capitalist with no regard for suffering whatsoever, I wouldn’t want a state bugging me. I mean, the mafia may have bought the cops, but I don’t think they really desired the existence of cops. Ideally, the mafia would eventually become the state if there were no state.
Capitalism includes private property rights, contracts, wage labor and much more that all depend on oversight and enforcement. That is a state. You can’t call something private property if there is no oversight to consider it person X’s property. Without a state it’s just tribal or families using power. Ownership is non-existent in that. You just have the power to hold and or use something until you do not.
Exactly and many states, like city states, were basically run by mobs:nobles. If you have no state, then you have ongoing skirmishes and wars. There are no property rights, there are no contracts that you can appeal to anyone about - you might have agreements, but not contracts.
I mean, I agree with a lot of what you are saying but I don’t know any examples of stateless capitalisms.
I’m actually inclined to call that socialism because most advocates of liberty would not require nor desire a state to protect their property and the state-protection of property would be for the good of society which is socialism.
I’m a property owner and I have guns and I’m in a state that doesn’t mind if I use them in defense of my property, but I have to sleep sometime and would rather society protect my property for me, and they do a pretty good job other than the littering. It’s for the greater good of society that the Hatfields and McCoys aren’t having nightly shootouts. And I pay my property taxes so the state has an invested interest in protecting a valuable and reliable tenant.
The early wild west is the only example I can think of. There were small towns and whoever shot the guy who owned the town was the new owner.
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