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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Irrespective of flavor of socialism, just logically capitalism does not make any lick of sense unless you are among the capital class already who benefits from scraping the barrel of revenue to collect an amount as profit. The fact that there exists a profit margin and businesses cannot operate at cost is why manufacturing in China is used in the west vs western manufacturing, since businesses operating at cost can offer product at cost vs cost*profit_margin so these businesses are always more competitive than western counterparts who have to pay for someone else's profit margin down the entire supply chain.

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Sorry, what? You think Chinese manufacturing businesses aren't making a profit?

And there is no contradiction between socialism and making a profit. Any enterprise owned under any organization, directed by any structure, could make a profit. What you do with those profits becomes interesting, if they exist.

They make a profit at the end of the supply chain, but all their materials are sourced at cost since the state is running the company. US companies have to pay profit all down the supply chain, which is why there is such an advantage to being able to vertically integrate your supply chain in the US. In China, is essentially all vertically integrated already.

I'll take the vast improvement of living standards under capitalism over those found in socialist countries.

Are you arguing that the rapid decline in poverty in China due to capitalism is a bad thing?

I'd like to add that there are different flavours of both capitalism and socialism. The kind of disaster capitalism practiced in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries in the 90s certainly didn't lead to an improvement of living standards for quite a long time, if even. China also presents a case of state capitalism where companies are strictly controlled by the government as evidenced by the recent set of regulations published a few weeks ago and many companies are owned by the children of party members.

I'd argue that what we see in terms of living standards in ostensibly socialist countries is much more due to corruption of office, which happens here too, vs the way that profit is shared among a business. Three of my city councilmembers have been indicted by the FBI for corruption in the last three years. Luckily in the U.S. the levers of power are pulled by more people dispersed across a larger bureaucracy, so corruption of office can only affect so many things, vs somewhere like PRNK or KSA where there is absolute rule.

There are plenty of businesses that run on a more socialist model even within capitalist countries. They are owner operated and share profit amongst the cooperative, are often successful and have motivated employees who work longer tenures than your average employee at a company where they don't see any share of the profit for their hard work.

> scraping the barrel of revenue

I believe the idea behind capitalism is exchanging value for value (private property and the ability to exchange it).

Someone sitting back and skimming a tax off the top of others property, without providing value, doesn’t seem to be compatible with the philosophy.

What is a whale shareholder playing tennis off of their dividends and doing no 'work' toward their investment beyond looking at their quarterly statement if not someone skimming off the collective pot of profit generated by labor for their own personal hedonism? We have a lot of dragons in society who are celebrated for their difficult job of sitting comfortably on their pile of gold. Not sure why.

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