The amazing thing is that the pursuit of personal enrichment, when regulated in moderation, tends to create a system that is in the public’s benefit. So we allow companies that are self interested because that, at scale, actually supports the public benefit more than requiring all companies to do specific things mandated as for the public benefit.
Tends is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
The model of "Let's have the worst people do whatever they want, for the most selfish possible reasons, and hope for the best" has also produced a horrific amount of suffering. Crazy amounts of socialized externalized losses get hand-waved away.
Nope, it's also 27th in social mobility[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Yes, fully socialist countries seem to be doing even worse, but so many of the good parts of my employment contract came from the New Deal and its wild success shows in everything from the infrastructure to the demographic charts that are still defined by echoes of the baby boom! It's no wonder the businessmen got together and tried to coup FDR and have spent the last 50 years trying to wind back these policies. We don't need a Glorious Revolution but we do need another Roosevelt.
I sure hear a lot of faux-market fascists telling me how to live these days.
This is a profoundly unserious framing. Suffering is the default state of man, and our current system has done far more to eradicate said suffering than any other.
The historical alternative system was voluntarily abandoned by all of its impoverished practitioners in favor of the current system.
The current "alternative" to our system is just our system with high taxes.
Just take the L.
This seems like gaslighting. Of all the takes, "You were meant to suffer, so if I made you suffer and then I did stuff to reduce the suffering you should be grateful" is certainly one of them.
What an awful and depressing view to hold. I hope one day you find a small piece of happiness in your life.
Things used to be worse, and our default state is “suffering” so we should give up, stop here and lick the boots of the current, obviously flawed system? That doesn’t even make sense as an argument.
Capitalism is good at avoiding boondoggles but it's a sucker for asset pumps. We don't have to pay heavy taxes to support a gigantic network of high-speed trains to nowhere but we do have to pay monopoly rents on land, two-sided markets, Metcalfe-law networks, and so on.