Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on.

I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.

Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?

edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)

What is capitalism if not a particular way of making decisions?

That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.

I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.

Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.

Or like a bunch of neurons doing their thing.

Capitalism is arrived at through two primary ways

One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history.

The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism.

I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.

Except that a person born has rights granted to them about land and property mostly decided on capital. Very few farmers can refuse to sell the a megacorp. If you think this has no impact, find some un-used land that you have not inherited or purchased using capital and see how long you can grow food on it before someone objects. They might say it is a park, or a front yard, or a military training ground, but realistically, all those concepts of ownership were originally tied to capital and without substantial capital, you are a serf. A lesser. There is no commonhold for you to use. There are no unclaimed natural resources.

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