But what I'm sure you are aware of this line of thinking. What is the argument against it?
That is the argument against it. If you had elected good officials they would have created regulations against this already. Fact is that we can't elect good officials in the current system. Either it is because people would rather have more goods instead of caring about nature, or the system is corrupt and politicians use their power to enrich themselves rather than doing what people wants. Either case those politicians wont be fixing the problems you care about.
Sure, then we could elect politicians that are bad in different ways, but then this becomes a discussion against socialism, which is not what I'm intending here. I'm only talking about socialism hypothetically. My point is that we can't ignore capitalism's shortcomings. We have to understand what having profit as a main motivator leads to, so we can deal with it.
You are diagnosing the symptom and not the cause. Politicians selling their power to the highest bidder is a symptom of politicians being corrupt and using their power to enrich themselves. Removing the private sector would give these corrupt cronies a lot more power to enrich themselves, that woudln't solve anything at all. Instead of having people with money and people with military power, you now have the same people having both power over industry and power over military, do you really think these people would now start caring about the environment over how much those factories are producing? No, these politicians still enrich themselves, they run these factories to make themselves as wealthy as possible and now there isn't even a government to stop them since they are the government.
Modern capitalism is based on the separation between capital and state. We call it corruption when capital is used to buy political power, or when political power is used to buy capital power. Communism is the merging of capital power and political power and giving this to the same ruling class, it is the ultimate form of what we in the west calls corruption.
And empirically, the bottom 70% of the US population on the wealth scale has absolutely zero influence on public policy. The policies of the US overwhelmingly align with the interests of US corporations. I'd contend they'd be much less dominating otherwise.
No. The corruption is one of many symptoms of the problem, which is the fact that the electoral system is poorly designed for responsiveness and accountability, since it is structured so as to reinforce duopoly which incentivizes lesser-of-two-weasels voting.
Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting "surpluses" that in fact did not exist and leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with estimates ranging between 15 and 55 million deaths, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest famine in human history.
The Four Pests campaign (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài), was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as smash sparrows campaign (Chinese: 打麻雀运动; pinyin: Dǎ Máquè Yùndòng) or eliminate sparrows campaign (Chinese: 消灭麻雀运动; pinyin: Xiāomiè Máquè Yùndòng), which resulted in severe ecological imbalance, being one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs.
I find it bafflingly common to encounter the conflation of authoritarianism with collectivism.
Do you know any collectivist society above 1 million people that was not authoritarian?
Even China learned from the mistakes of collectivist ideas and moved towards socialist market economy which lead to the greatest uplifting of people from the extreme poverty in the whole history of human species.
Probably because, as Jeff Hammerbacher said, "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
Oh absolutely, it's very clear HN hates that. Redditification is an ever-present threat, as I learned when I turned on showdead and finally saw, in almost every comment section, the root-level graveyards of "Very cool!" etc.
But that's an entirely different memeplex. HN hates that, but it also hates the idea that there's enormous monetary incentive to ignore existential problems caused by modern capitalism. One of the ways that displeasure might be shown is whataboutism regarding genuine if unhelpful "histrionics".
The same point could have been made without that garbage, and would have been better for it.
I've discussed this with libertarians and the best argument I've heard is that the incentive to manage negative externalities comes from private ownership. If the factory down the road is polluting the river that runs by your house, you sue them.