Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

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Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?

Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater.

Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.

If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism.

(Whether capitalism ever works out in-practice is another argument entirely. My theory is that given any long-enough amount of time, a small group of actors will amass hugely disproportional wealth, and then start gaming/breaking the system for everyone else, as seems to be human nature.)

It gets really tiring (especially in modern tech culture) to say "I'm a capitalist" and then have people dogpile on you, asking why you want to pillage the environment and steal all the wealth, etc etc.

And then you have to explain, "I want none of that. I just don't want anyone telling you how to live your life, and to have as many opportunities as you can create for yourself."

I say all of this as someone who grew up exceedingly poor, in trailer parks eating peanut butter and crackers, with no higher education.

There are shitty people everywhere. Because some humans are murderers, does not mean all humans are murderers. Become some people are twisted, unethical capitalists, does not mean all capitalists are twisted and unethical.

At some stage of hyper-capitalism, when you hit "oligarch" levels, you've stopped representing capitalistic ideals because you have created a less-free market than when you entered.

> Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?

That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:

1.

I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.

This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.

Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.

2.

Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.

Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.

These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.

"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.

Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.

OR you can say "PART of Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part."

It's nice that capitalism has some really efficient features. But it also has some really horrible ones.

If we're talking about functioning efficient systems, you really have to show that the bad parts of capitalism do not form an obstacle against having a functioning, efficient system.

So far in history we have only seen that the good parts of capitalism can work really well.

Well, you can't very well spark a fire that burns down a whole city and then turn around and say you can't blame the sparks because they're not really dangerous, it's only a conflagration that's really dangerous. Capitalism is the system that enables the kind of people you call twisted and unethical to do their twisted and unethical things and "amass hugely disproportional wealth". And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong? Did Adam Smith say that capital should be equally distributed, or something similar?

> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong?

I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top".

Or at least I like to hope.

Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.

I do not agree with the behaviors of these hyper-capitalist, exploitative people.

But it would make me a massive hypocrite with double-standards to say "Well, actually now I think you have enough, you don't get to have any more money."

If you spend your life getting to this position (legally), it's not my right or place to take it from you.

And this philosophy of "Okay fine, but I don't necessarily condone/agree" is the difference between freedom and oppression.

I VERY FIRMLY believe nobody has the right to push their ideals on others.

This kind of thinking is how you get things like gay marriage being illegal, preventing women from having abortions, and all numbers of unsavory things.

Genuinely believing in liberty, individualism, and personal freedoms means standing by those ideals even when you don't agree with the way these freedoms are exercised by others.

Anything else is being nothing but a hypocrite.

> Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.

And this here is I believe the crux of the issue. As you say absolute liberty requires absolute capitalism. And absolute capitalism by design incentives a number of negative societal behaviors. And companies forced to compete with those that perform those negative behaviors have to chose to either adopt them as well or go out of business - pushing them to adopt those behaviors.

So the conclusion is absolute liberty causes negative behavior. The idealistic view is absolute liberty is the primary virtue of society. Or in my opinion the more accurate view, is that liberty like many other essential virtues must be balanced with other factors in society.

My interpretation of you perspective is that absolute liberty is essential, anything less is hypocrisy - and the way you manage those views is by downplaying the negative impacts of what capitalism incentivises.

And note, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong (I absolutely believe is the best approach for economic efficiency) simply that it, just like liberty cannot be absolute. It must be balanced with negative impacts on society.

> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves.

Just wanted to mention that this is such a US cultural idea. It's really not nearly as strong elsewhere (maybe some exceptions, I don't know everywhere in the world).

Because people equate capitalism with America, and "fuck everyone, get money" is literally required by law there. In 1919 Henry Ford was sued by minority share holders because he wanted to increase wages. "The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

If you want to claim that America reached "hyper-capitalism" and stopped representing capitalistic ideals 100 years ago, then sure what you are saying makes sense . But I think most people equates capitalism with america.

I will absolutely agree that America's economic system is nothing close to resembling capitalism.

I view capitalism the same way I view communism -- both are bleeding-heart idealism that never works out in practice.

But hey, at least on an individual/personal level you can pick that hill to die on, however futile it may be.

That's a poor reading of that Wikipedia page, it says pretty much the opposite of what you have written.

Anyway, there is an old quotation attributed to Horace (about 65 BC):

Be but great, With praise or infamy—leave that to Fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible with grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place;

That's an English translation from Alexander Pope, somewhere in the 1700s. Maybe he made it up.

Either way, you can't blame America.

Please explain how the wikipedia page says the opposite of what I wrote.

Here I will spell it out verbatim from the article:

- By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased.

- The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.

- The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments.

- The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.

The court ruled in favor of the minority share holders.

> Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?

Because, in their own words, that is what they're saying when discussing capitalism.

From a thread yesterday: "I owe nothing to a stranger".

> Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.

No, it's not.

Capitalism is one of many models of how the state can regulate commerce through the definition of the parameters and boundaries of property rights.

I think most of the replies to this are missing the point. Capitalism is the best we have come up with so far. There's less of a praise for capitalism but more of a fear from change. When systems like that shift to others, it can be very hard to predict which system it will shift to and if it'll be better. It's the fear that, yes if we do switch from capitalism to some other system, can we trust this new system will be better? Because it also has the potential to be ten times worse. People like to say capitalism is evil and it's causing all of these problems but what would a reasonable alternative be and what would be a reasonable way to obtain that alternative without making live much worse for everyone?

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