this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
272 points (93.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43956 readers
864 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I defend capitalism because it is the most equitable and productive economic system that has ever existed, lifting more people out of poverty than ever before.
Free markets create space for those who don’t fit in. As an autistic person, I appreciate a world where I can find a way to survive other than convincing a committee that I deserve to exist.
I don’t deserve billionaires per se, but I have nothing against their existence and I think that a billionaire under capitalism is more fair and more likely to have fairly and productively achieved their wealth than a billionaire under any other system.
And if you don’t think the other systems have billionaires, you’re blind.
Under a free market, one gets rich by providing value. Economic relations are mutually consensual. That’s the definition.
What is called “capitalism” these days is, generally speaking, the places where the free market has broken down. Slaves aren’t a free market scenario. Only having one available job isn’t a free market scenario. Big corporations controlling the government to prevent their competition from surviving or arising isn’t a free market scenario.
All the “worst aspects of capitalism” that people complain about are exactly the aspects of the world that most resemble capitalism’s alternatives like anarchy and centralized command economies.
We need more free market, not less. We need to let people buy a pack of cigarettes and then sell them for $2 a pop to make a profit, not kill them for doing this.
The anti-capitalist hate is the result of decades of anti-working class propaganda that has made generations of people dedicated to destroying the very thing that gives them hope and possibility in the world.
Biggest psy op in history, as Marx himself would be the first to recognize if he were alive and commenting today. I defend capitalism NOT because I want to fit in, but because it is the right thing to do.
Incorrect, Socialism gets that honor, the PRC is responsible. Read Socialism Developed China, Not Capitalism.
This is an absurd strawman of central planning.
Even more absurd. Individuals get wealthy by exploiting laborers. Economic relations are enforced by the system itself, not consent. The Laborers must work to not starve.
Yep, Capitalism defeats itself. You can't turn the clock back.
Correct, Capitalism socializes itself and paves the way for central planning.
An absurd comparison and a strange call to go back in time to less developed Capitalism.
Capitalism's decay.
Marx would be elated to be proven correct.
Talk about a hot take haha
Are you denying that the vast majority of people commenting on this are against capitalism?
That's not how in-read these comments.
People wouldn't be bitching if everything was good.
Look at boomers, shit worked out for them.
So they larp whatever regime whores on teevee say and then they go around spouting that shot as gospel.
I’m talking about all comments everywhere. Everyone commenting in all fora.
People bitch about capitalism everywhere all the time. It is the zeitgeist of our time that capitalism is bad.
… we’d be in a utopia. There are problems because it is inherent to the nature of reality that problems are going to exist.
Fewer economic problems exist under capitalism than in nature, or in any other economic system that’s been tried. Comparing our situation to a situation with no problems is fruitless.
A free market, ie situations where both parties must consent before economic cooperation happens, is the most productive arrangement of economic decision-making. It produces the least starvation, the least anxiety, the least disease, the least war, the least violation of people’s rights.
If wealth is accumulated due to merit, why does wealth tend to accumulate within families? Are these families somehow more meritorious than the rest of the population? Is it perhaps the multi-generational connections made in industry providing additional benefit to those families?
As for the free market, the FDA was formed because bakers in the free market realized that sawdust was cheaper than flour. The free market also requires perfect information to function correctly, but even if you have that how will it help if there is no better regulation. Once upon a time the only kind of match you could buy were made with white phosphorus, despite how dangerous it was to work with. It took regulation to switch to red phosphorus, even though the expense was only slightly higher.
lacking multi-generational connections is still a pretty rosy picture of disadvantage. Statistically "unmeritorious" parents are far more likely to have their child suffer from malnutrition due to lack of money and neglect due to the parents working 2 jobs or having substance abuse issues. If the country has private schools, they won't have access to them and due to living in a low-wealth area their public schools will have a disproportionately high amount of other neglected and abused kids which makes everything harder.
What's your take on this video?
'Is capitalism actually reducing poverty?' w/ Richard Wolff
https://youtu.be/Co4FES0ehyI