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Comment by fundabulousrIII | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy has never worked because the thinkers submit to 'higher authority': in this case $$.

The only real revolution is when the thinkers stop taking orders. That is only practicable when every political|business system fails. There was a time when IT was merit guided and based..it took a long time for the idiots to catch up but they are here now and dictating.

Every thing I deal with this these days is idiot oriented.

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The $$ is absolutely the higher authority. The question is whether the hierarchy is optimizing for that, or for something else. I think the difficulty for me in reading your comment is that your claim superficially is that $$ takes over and that is bad. But $$ in the organization should be something like profits or productivity. I think your claim might be that higher paid people, idiots, who are supposed to be looking out for $$ force the lower-paid thinkers to submit or quit, and the higher paid people are not really looking out for $$ (as I propose to define it).

There's nothing wrong with that, capitalism would even things out, a company that is sexist will make less money than one that isn't. This is because the available talent for a company is more limited if you exclude women.

That's not an inherent property of capitalism.

Capitalism rewarded the slave trade for generations.

The invisible hand is really human preferences. That's what will determine whether a company is punished for sexism or rewarded.

Humans stopped Apartheid. Not the abstract concept of capitalism.

To the contrary, non-slaves produce more value than slaves, therefore slavery is not only unethical, but also un-capitalistic.

Capitalism explains many things, certainly people stopped Apartheid, but it can very well be both, slavery and segregation are unproductive, and therefore anti-capitalistic.

> ... non-slaves produce more value than slaves,

Probably not to the slave owners, or anyone involved in the slave trade. They had little incentive to change.

Claiming that capitalism somehow spurs these things is the wrong way around. It can certainly benefit, but it's not the driver.

To the slave owner yes, but their entire productivity is lower, it's better to have a businessmen rather than someone who can just pick cotton and do basic chores.

I think capitalism has a hand to play, to ignore it is naive. I think there was not one driver that ended slavery, but many things working together.

I'm not 100% sure but, I think you might be referring to utilitarianism, not capitalism.

Certainly it is a utilitarian argument, but in the capitalistic sense a business (plantation) that uses slaves is less efficient in terms of net productivity of the slave than if the slaves were free and instead workers competing to improve the business.

Note: I'm not saying there is no moral reason slavery is wrong, just that in addition it is contrary to the nature of capitalism.

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