To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.
This isn't true on a societal scale even though a few slaveholders built a bunch of grandiose mansions. Enslaved people were less economically productive than free people. It also locked economies into less productive, lower sectors like agriculture. The South resisted industrialization despite it being more profitable because it was incompatible with an economy built on minimally skilled slaves.
It was not profit that kept slavery alive well into the 19th century in the Americas and Muslim countries. It was something more sinister and evil.
[EDIT: Added after that one person upvoted this comment.]
Slavery was big in the south because there wasn't enough low-skill labor to feel threatened. The north didn't care for it as much because a higher percentage of labor was what we would call semi-skilled or skilled today. That labor was FREAKED OUT about the idea of slaves taking over their jobs and they were able to organize before being eaten by the capitalist leviathan.
I'm pretty sure there were more abolitionists in the north than the south, I don't think your average northerner cared about the plight of southern slaves other than the institution being a threat to their livelihood if it moved north.
If you were making the assertion moral concerns or ethical behaviour eventually influenced american capitalism, I disagree. The capitalist monster acts "moral" or "ethical" because at the current time, to do otherwise is invite political dissolution. I fear the shadowy cabal of capitalist masters will move to reinstate chattel slavery. We did not respond with outrage when red-lining disenfranchised large portions of the populous or when usury was slipped back in with high credit card APRs and payday lending. We are asleep.
I’ve never heard of mainstream economics serving people. Maybe Keynesianism did?
The hard part is that I'm not sure any other system really fixes this flaw. Sure, you can be less democratic and give fewer people what they want, but for some reason few people want to live in autocracies of any stripe.
And it's not always clear that there is a solution when the things people want are too diametrically opposed, either. I'm not sure many people would be happy with any of the solutions from "Three Worlds Collide" for example (a short story you can go read online if you don't get the reference).
it wasn't. Slave economies are exceptionally unprofitable and unproductive. To take the US as an example. Liquid wealth, i.e. capital, was vastly larger in the North than in the slave owning states, the industrial output of New York exceeded the entire Confederacy and it was that profitability, wealth and mechanized agricultural production that did them in.
Even Marx recognized this by the way, following feudalism capitalism was a progressive force, it was profit, productivity and surplus that enabled civil society, the north was more civil because it was rich and had unlocked modern forms of production. The problem of capitalism is not profit or lack of civil society.
History is not a Paradox game where there is rational top down control.
I could ask you about your spending habits and why you don't pump all your money into an S&P 500 ETF, but that's ignoring time and consumption preferences you have, as well as perceived opportunity cost. It's not a useful observation to make at an individual level.
(not snarky. I'm feeling pretty revolutionary after that last comment.)
If (in some hypothetical way) businesses were capped at e.g. 15 staff - innovation would be slower, but it would be:
- More sustainable
- More locally adapted
- The supply chain ecosystem as a whole would be more resilient
- Damaging decisions by a few huge businesses would not outweigh good decisions from the other 99% of businesses, as happens today.
What we really mean when we say “capitalism” is just people freely engaging in agreements together. In such a free society, people will hurt and trample on each other. The right move is to rely on the Republic to represent our interests and prevent that trampling from crossing red lines that we all decide on.
You don’t need to stop people from freely making agreements and transacting together; you just need to have a functioning system of laws. Whether or not we have one is an exercise left to the reader.
That is untrue.
Capitalism the private ownership of production. It's a set of behaviors and legal protections[state enforcement] that allow companies to be bought, sold, and owned. It's defined by a number of constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, and wage labor.
It is not synonymous with simple free association.
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
As Paul Virillo once quipped, "the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck." And we appear to have shot the ensign who was looking out for icebergs.
"They Live" was a documentary. "Idiocracy" is far too optimistic to be accurate. Reflexive modernity has made Ballard's "High Rise" into a love story.
"More poems, faster, cheaper!"
For a more recent example, listen to this podcast episode: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/vanguard
The west has not got rich at the expense of the global south. Both have gone up .
“Since 1860, federal taxation had increased sixfold, yet the tax burden was primarily borne by the poor. At the same time, corporate profits had increased tenfold, much of it untaxed. It cost rich Americans 8 to 10 percent of their earnings to finance the government, while the poor paid taxes equivalent to 75 to 80 percent of their savings.”
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Tax_Wars/kw-Q...
Endless endless endless corporate consolidation. All creative energies and impulses just get swept back up into the very large companies. There's a vital energy that's just missing from the market, a competition for labor that's empty, a competition for serving the world well/competing on value that's all just... gone.
There were many experiments; none seemed to be successful, unless you consider the current semi-capitalist China a social success.
And yet fascist leaders don't serve workers any better, they serve work. I suspect the descent into facism is not because of the workers' sentiment about democracy, but because of the forces that are severing the service too.
1. Everything is great. You either own a lot of capital or you think you will one day. You're fully in support of the current system;
2. There are problems but they can be fixed with a nicer, kinder capitalism, more regulation and so on. This essentially makes you a social democrat. This is still a pro-capitalist position, ultimately. You might also call yourself progressive; and
3. You believe that capitalism is fundamentally flawed and the problems of the current system, such as ever-widening wealth inequality, are an inveitable consequence of capitalism. This is the anti-capitalist position and makes you a leftist. You can't be a leftist and not be anti-capitalist.
Last century and going back to even the 2000s, tech companies and their founders were upstarts, rebels and often counter-cultural. That era is long gone. Some here might decry how often politics creeps into HN but all that's happened is that tech companies have gotten so large that they have become tools of the state. You can't be a rebel and a trillion dollar company. To maintain your status, you end up moving in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy.
My point is there is no making this system more humane without overthrowing the US government, essentially. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism and there is no true opposition to American imperialism in the mainstream US political system. Like, at all.
There will never be a just-a-little-exploitation capitalism coming from the bougies or their academic henchmen. They have to chase profit, that’s the game. A just-a-little-exploitation capitalism can only come from the working class fighting back. Then when that happens the bougies try to win their fair-share back and again and so we go back and forth, but only a few times not that many because of ecological breakdown.
The MSM has been pushing hard for establishment Rs and most Ds, and tech oligarchs were sinking money in D areas like Zuckerberg in WI in 2020. (A "maga" election, per the articles comment)
I agree that tech oligarchy shouldn't be influencing politics so much, but i dont think this makes Dems or anyone else 'fascist' necessarily.
That means this inherent inequality gives one group tremendous power over the other.
What we really need is a system that doesn't automatically promote psychopaths and sociopaths to the top, the more ruthless, the more money you make, despite the human cost. We need a system that doesn't value money/capital as much, but other outcomes.
And we especially don't need Billionaire Philanthropists. Pay the damn taxes. Yet, this is the site for the Temporary Embarrassed Billionaires, so I know how this will go over...