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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

6 pointswahnfrieden8 comments

Capitalism has no moral component, full stop. That's why attempts to graft one on inevitably come off as childish apologia. (Looking at you Rand)

Capitalism is simply what you get when you “allow” people to own property. The question of whether private property should be prohibited certainly has moral implications.

It has moral implications, but does not consider then in any way within the system.

There's also nothing natural or inevitable about it, and it doesn't necessarily arise from owning property. There was plenty of private property around long before it was invented. As a matter of simple historical fact it took many years of effort and deliberate refinement to come in to bring.

It’s the most natural type of economy there is. The only required ingredients are private property and arguably also contracts (ie the concept of two or more people agreeing to something). It arises entirely naturally, without any form of intervention. In fact, if you want to prevent capitalism from naturally occurring, then you need to perform radical interventions to make that happen. The recorded history of capitalism goes as far back as the recorded history of humanity. Some of the earliest pieces of recorded history in existence are cuneiform tablets documenting the accounts of private businesses.

Accounting does not imply Capitalism, nor does ownership of property generally. Capitalism is the private ownership of productive capacity and the use of it for private profit. That's a peculiar and recent invention.

I know supporters like to believe that it's as natural as the sun rising. But if you look at sheet amount of social displacement, violence and legislation that was required to make it a stable system, you'll see that's definitely not true.

> Capitalism is the private ownership of productive capacity and the use of it for private profit. That's a peculiar and recent invention.

As someone who's been using the property-based definition, I do think this one is more accurate. However, that would imply cavemen agreeing to scratch each others back would be practicing Capitalism (which I think they are).

More generally, that suggests that once two agents have the capacity for peaceful exchange of productive capacity, then Capitalism can occur. Capitalism is impossible in the world of reptiles, since they can't communicate or even internally model an exchange. Any service they provide to others, like defending their eggs, has to be hard-coded (i.e., forced upon them by nature).

The pure capitalists will argue that the alternatives to it are varying degrees of the use of force, to compel agents to either provide or not provide productive capacity beyond their internal desire. Whether that's necessary for a stable system is a different topic, but may be a function of the capacity we have to act as rational agents and how much we're still dominated by hard-coded instructions.

That particular definition of capitalism is a recent innovation, because that’s the socialist definition of capitalism. However, even using this particular definition, they still had capitalism in Mesopotamia. They had privately owned productive capacity, which was operated on a for profit basis. As evidenced by the accounting artefacts they left behind documenting these practices.

It needs no moral justification. It is an economic system. And with all its flaws it is the best one we have by a long shot.

Speak to someone from the Soviet Union if you’re unsure of this.

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