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Comment by systematical | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism will reach its end one day, long after we are gone, but that will be because of its own technologic achievements and not because of 19th-century socialist philosophy. Capitalism will become so efficient at some point that in its quest for more and more efficiency, it will end resource scarcity. Once scarcity is eliminated, capitalism "withers" away.

That's my hope anyway. In the short-term, I'd like to see free markets begin erasing more borders and reducing the number of nations. Hopefully, the recent nationalist fad is just that and we can get to more EU style setups, more globalism, and more cooperation. A disgusting amount of resources is spent on the military. Capitalism has the ability to solve our problems. Borders are in the way.

Edit: Is it the socialists, anarchists, or capitalists downvoting me? Hard to say. My ideas definitely don't have many friends.

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Your main idea is Marxist. Marx said the same thing, that Capital would end itself, through the elimination of scaricity. Though I think he was wrong about that, things like UBI proves that it always finds a way to survive.

But anyway, you are both saying Marxist and pro-capitalist things, so I would guess you're just being downvoted by everyone.

Surely it was going to be the rise of class consciousness that overthrew Moloch? Though if we're all involved in the process ourselves, and only gain this consciousness through work, the end of Capitalism isn't so much a violent overthrowing from outside as much as a growing, positive realization of what was inside it anyway.

Maybe that's exactly what things like UBI point to: life as an adventure rather than a slave camp. The paranoid part of me then wants to find a bigger and more evil capital to criticise in the Marxian manner.

I used to believe free labor markets between countries was a good idea until I realized that it also comes with a free social welfare "market". Nobody wants to let people in their country starve to death in the streets, so they're going to financially support whatever immigrants come in, and if it's really free entry, that's going to be cripplingly expensive eventually because the world's unemployable will go to wherever the most generous welfare is. Another problem is cultural replacement which could replace the open country with a closed one that's perhaps worse than it started off as once enough similarly-minded immigrants live there to determine the outcome of elections. They're not the idealists who started the open boarders thing, they're just normal self-interested people so eventually they'll want to keep what they've got for themselves and stop letting people they don't like in. Bye-bye to all the progressive ideas of tolerating gays and multiculturalism too.

Cultural replacement is a bullshit concept. Not everyone is as selfish as you, some people just want to eat. The lie that people are inherently self-interested in a system that doesn’t directly incentivize self-interest is exactly the sort of thing you would want to spread if you were one of the people on top in such a system.

> Capitalism will become so efficient at some point that in its quest for more and more efficiency, it will end resource scarcity.

This is honestly one of the most absurd things I've ever heard. I gotta admit, I do envy your optimism.

It's already pretty true for many types of resources. Electronics, software, music, plastic parts. All sorts of things cost practically zero today compared to, say, 100 years ago when they required much more labor to produce or didn't even exist.

I recently bought a flat-screen TV for half the price of a McDonald's meal. That's as good as free.

I've never heard the term resource scarcity used to refer to something like software, music, or televisions.

Hilariously, software and music are inherently non-scarce. In fact, we do a massive amount of detriment to everyone by not allowing a piece of infinitely replicable media to be instantly available to everyone. And yet despite the fact we could benefit everyone at once we can’t seem to figure out a way to allow creators to live comfortably without inventing arcane and artificial IP laws?

Capitalism doesn't wither away, it imposes artificial scarcity to allow its uneven power dynamic to continue. At some point the cruelty itself becomes the point. I would argue we're already past the point where we have to deny resources to anyone, we could feed and shelter everyone if we had the will to do it.

Actually I think that right now, when we are facing the potential reality of AGI not many decades away, is when we have to collectively make the choice to become the society we truly want to become.

Humans aren't very good at managing things. Just take a look around your co-workers some time and you'll see mismanagement. We're really bad at managing! You could say, scarcity is a management issue. If systems are managed by inefficient beings, well then the system doesn't really matter be it socialism or capitalism. I'll take my chances with capitalism and hope the best managers naturally rise to the top.

Maybe AI can remove the mismanagers from the problem one day. Or maybe, even with our woeful mismanagement, if two hundred governments weren't pitted against one another and we had a single world government, there would be plenty to go around even with humans mismanaging everything.

We’re bad at managing because none of us want to be doing what we’re doing and all of us are thinking about how we can maximize our own benefit. But the truth is we don’t even have to do an amazing job of managing, we have to just want to route enough resources to everyone that they can survive. Technology will continue to increase with or without capitalism. In fact, the claim that capitalism is responsible for scientific or technological advancement is mostly false. It’s responsible for wide-scale mass industry, but scientists would exist and push forward the boundaries of knowledge with or without it.

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