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Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Regulation is designed to save capitalism, but lack of regulation and a fair chance at success will destroy it. I'm afraid many people are so disheartened by capitalism in the US that they are willing to abandon it without thinking about a replacement.

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Lack of skin in the game is killing capitalism.

We've had 20-30 years of ever escalating bailouts. Heads: you win. Tails: the public looses.

"Capitalism", or rather the free market, works by moving from failure to failure. Without "Tails: you get taken to the woodshed", failure doesn't lead to learning and improvement. No amount of regulation will change that.

Quite the opposite: most modern regulation is so complex that lawyers can't get enough of it. Not to mention the revolving doors between regulators and their targets.

Same thing put differently: we already have socialism. It's just socialism for the rich.

"It is moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If it stops moving subsidize it."

More regulation is not always better. If there are too many regulations, only companies that can afford an army of lawyers survive. Too little regulation is also bad.

I think that it's less the quantity of the regulations that matters and more the quality of the regulations. Poorly designed regulations and create big problems even if they're really brief.

Prohibition, for example, gave rise to the mafia. Marijuana prohibition is another example of over-regulation, imo.

Its the best means of managing resource scarcity, unfortunately our best isn't very good for many people. In the very distant future when we can eliminate scarcity, we will be able to move away from capitalism.

That’s an almost psychotic level of unfounded optimism, all founded on being a relatively rare “winner” in the system you describe. That of course probably goes some way to explaining your equanimity with its indefinite continuation a the expense of billions of others.

I believe in the very distant future when we tap into the energy of the sun through something like a Dyson sphere then energy markets will eventually crash once the investment is recouped. With unlimited energy that opens the door for a lot potential like rearranging protons, neutrons, electrons to create any elements we want. From there gold markets etc... crash. It keeps going.

I don't believe we'll see this in my lifetime or even 200 or 300 hundred years, but I believe it could happen one day. And when that happens, capitalism will be rendered useless, and we'll go towards something more like communism or socialism.

As for today, show me something else that works better at managing resources than capitalism. It's shitty, I'll entertain hypotheticals and theories, but capitalism is the only thing thats worked so far. In the distant future I root for its demise.

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