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Calls to tax the superrich grow as economic inequality surges
(www.aljazeera.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Trickle down never worked, this is end game capitalism, something else needs to be added to this mix to fix this mess.
Capitalism naturally ends up in this position. That's why it's so hard to "fix" -- to those at the top, nothing is wrong.
Exactly, capitalism is economic perpetual motion, you can't have exponential growth in a finite system.
I might be wrong, but I think you mean infinite growth in a finite system.
You can have exponential growth in a finite system can't you? As exponential is just that it gets faster and faster compared to linearly increasing variables.
I guess at some point growth has to stop being exponential in a finite system, but the same can be argued for linear growth I think.
Yeah I agree. It's still called exponential growth, even if it's temporary.
True, should be more like exponential growth in perpetuity or something but you get the idea.
Yes. Simple math.
And yet you already got a downvote for it.
Exactly. Capitalism is, ultimately, a variant of the Pirate Game, which has some spectacularly unintuitive results.
It's not regulated properly, that's the problem
But those regulations are constantly labeled as "anticapitalist" -- because they are.
Why is it so wrong to poke at the inner workings of capitalism? Why must it be infallible?
Because the people benefiting from its brokenness aren't ready to stop salting the earth for numbers.
...I think you may have misread my comment.
I'm saying it's broken and asking why it should be accepted as infallible.
I thought they were just agreeing with you, FWIW
You're right - but I can see how the tone was interpreted as oppositional, I could have worded it differently to direct that more clearly. No harm afaik, lol.
Capitalism really is trading goods for currency, and allowing lending and investment. What's going on though, with unchecked companies and laughable fines, ruins the whole thing. In its current state, capitalism will be our undoing, but with proper laws, regulations and oversight, it could work.
The problem is, corps have grown too powerful already and can blackmail governments. It's like other models that could work in theory, but never benefit the people in the end. Communism tends to lead to tyranny, for example.
People are just really shit at designing and running big societies.
Capitalism isn't trading good for/with currency though. Socialist and Communist societies would still use currency as it is a lot easier than bartering everything. And in Socialists society, you can still have lending and investments.
Capitalism is the means of production and trade owned by private entities (be it a person or a corporation) to make profits.
You are right though, inevitably, capitalism leads to consolidation and monopolies which we see today.
This "barter" economy as a primary means of exchange never existed. It's a myth and a lie created by capitalists (actually by one Adam Smith) trying to rationalize the adoption of coinage and currency in ancient civilization.
In fact barter economies tend to arise predominantly in capitalism during periods of economic instability. Ie: after natural disasters, in war torn countries, etc.
The proper term you are looking for is "gift economy" and it is how the world worked before capitalism. I want something from you so you gift it to me with the implicit understanding that if in the future the roles are reversed I give something to you of relatively equal perceived value.
It was actually pretty rare that gifts were paid back in full in one transaction and often larger gifts were paid back through a series of transactions.
TIL that during the 16th to 19th centuries the aristocrats benefited from a "gift economy" because no one who ever says this knows what Mercantilism was.
Capitalism, Socialism and Communism are only how the means of production/trade is owned. Wage labor can still exist.
In capitalism, the means of production and trade are owned by private entities. Worker trade their labour for a set wage. All the profit goes to the owner/shareholder.
In socialism, the worker owns the means of production and trade. If a coop is more profitable than the next one, the worker of the first coop get more money. The profits are distributed amongst the workers that produced the goods. The workers own the coop/company.
In communism, the state owns the mean of production. The profits of the coop/company goes back to the state and are then redistributed in the society.
Socialism can still have investment, but the returns necessarily be money. A certain good is needed. The worker pool their money to build a factory and make a successful product. The workers then get a return on their investment (they make more money than they initially had).
That's commerce. Commerce predates capitalism, by a lot.
Capitalism also involves other things that go beyond basic commerce, such as systems of property law to incorporate quasi-sovereignty to capital ownership. That's more or less where we get the default model of businesses as de facto dictatorships ruled by the owner, vs. being democracies organized by stakeholders or participants. It's a big, deep subject that's unfortunately talked about in reductionist terms a lot. It's probably not helpful that a lot of early (and recent) scholarship on capitalism seems to frame itself as revelation of the nature of capital and markets, as if capital and markets are natural forces and not man-made things.
This last bit- treating capital and economics as if they were laws of nature (instead of being contrived by men)- does a lot of work to obfuscate fundamental systems of power, which in turn helps keep that power unaccountable. One major source of tension between capitalism and socialism has to do with whether the sovereignty of ownership ought to be democratized or subject to democratic accountabilities.
Some examples of being subject to democratic authority is basic labor protections, the 40 hour work week, safety regulations- if the voters impose on employers the requirement that employers provide a safe working environment, it's a counterweight to the general notion that owning the business makes one king of everything in that sphere- that is, it subordinates capital to the authority of the polity in which it operates.
Regulation and reform isn't anti-capitalist though.
"Real" anti-capitalism lies in the realisation that this system cannot be reformed, the status quo must be dismantled if we ever want to move past it and truly work towards values of freedom and equality.
You have been banned from c/Conservative.
Of course, unfortunately, replace the word "capitalism" with pretty much every at scale economic "system", and you get similar results: some group granted authority and power over the rest and "everythings fine" even when they are not.
You just described all major human societies over the ages. The issue is corruption and exploitation regardless of the core sociopolitical idealogy.
Trickle down didn't work in the 1980's or anytime after that.
Trickle down did work in the 1940's, 1950's, and most of the 1960's, it just wasn't called "trickle down" at that time.
The difference was a punitively high tax rate that nobody actually paid, because they found better ways to spend their excess revenue than simply giving it to Uncle Sam.
It turns out that when the richest among us are forced to spend instead of lend, the rest of us finally start to earn fair wages.
Well, that's not really "trickle down" as championed by Reagan, that's more "use it or lose it". He wanted to reduce those crazy high tax rates to give the rich the choice of whether to keep the money for later or to spend it now, with "trickle down" being the phrase to tell people that it's fine, it'll make it's way out to everyone else... eventually?
Could Universal Basic Income play a role in this?
Band aid solution. The system remains unchanged. The billionaires still make their profits off of the backs of you and me.
Well at least after AI and robots replace a good portion of the workforce, detaching happy, educated citizens from the societies money flow.
My guess is gouverment by powerful corporation and people unable to adapt dying in gutters, rather that universal income.
Well there was this guy called Karl Marx, who tried to suggest solutions to the problems of capitalism.
...but I hear he's not trending these days. Wrong kind of people liked his stuff.
Actually socialism is more popular now than ever. Enough that mainstream media constantly writes scare articles about how socialist the young generations are.
The media thinking they can threaten me with a good time...
That's what the media has always done. It's just that in this age it's the easiest it's ever been to see past red scare propaganda.
"Socialism" in the form of government regulations and healthcare is popular. Not so much Marxism or proleterian revolution
I think you're seriously underestimating what most young socialists believe. It is true that they don't believe in revolution, but many of them change when they grow older and they lose faith in the system. I'm confident that will keep happening.
I'm a millennial communist - though in any practical sense, I'm socialist. I've got very little faith in the system beyond it's ability to act on its self-interest, but (as much as I'd like to believe otherwise) I believe revolution isn't a sustainable way to bring about the change we want.
Revolution before we put in the groundwork to level wealth inequality will inevitably lead to power imbalance, and a likely collapse into autocracy. On the negative side, we see the likes of China and the USSR - massive death, famine, corruption, and a failure to deliver on the promise of worker enfranchisement. The most positive example I can think of is Cuba.
I want revolution to be a practical path forward - it brings the change we need quickly when we don't have the time to wait and incremental transition will be all but impossible at this point, but I'd need to be convinced it won't almost certainly lead to a worse state. What would be different about this revolution that would see it go right (or what examples am I missing?)
There was a "this day in history" tidbit a day or two because it was the anniversary of the last guillotine execution.
The last so far.