this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Just to be clear, when you say "socialized capitalism" you mean capitalism, but with a welfare state?
The system currently burning the world to death with no particular sign of actually changing course.
Not endorsing the system, but I think a certain global superpower seems to have missed the memo on the welfare state part.
Tell me if I get off course but some bullet points:
Resources are not limitless.
Unrestrained capitalism always leads to consolidation of control over finite resources and exploitaton of other individuals.
Limiting opportunities for individual development is negative to the society.
Individuals in the society are a distribution of variable abilities.
So....
Governments role in a well regulated market would be:
Limit consolidation of resources by any individual providing equal access for responsible use.
Preserve resources by limiting and regulating their use.
Provide equal opportunity for all individuals to engage in the market.
Provide a support network for all individuals to allow them to take reasonable risks.
Pretty much my thinking, but it shouldn’t even be necessary to mandate “limit consolidation of resources”. We do need wealth to be attainable, as the driving factor of capitalism, however the other factors you list would have the limiting affect if they were implemented.
Also, one of the goals of such a government needs to be “for the benefit of its citizens”. Every choice of a well-run government to regulate capitalism needs to be “for the benefit of its citizens”, and most failures in actual governments are when they don’t follow this
The main problem I see with this approach is regulatory capture. If you allow individuals to consolidate resources even slightly then they begin to form 2 distinct classes, the owners and the workers, where one is economically advantaged. Even in a democratic society that economic advantage allows the owning class to exert greater influence and nudge things in their favor. This has a snowball effect until you end up where we are now, a bourgeois democratic government that functions exclusively for the owning class.
It’s all a matter of degree: it’s the excessive inequality that results in excessive advantage. I’m all for reducing the inequality gap (a lot) but there does need to be one for capitalism to work.
As a prime example with income taxes in the US, most people prefer it be progressive.
And that is precisely why capitalism should be abolished. Any gap will grow, the only way to stop it is to close it and hold it shut. Any amount of inequality is injustice.
And then the wealth incentive overcame the tax pressure and reversed it. The wealth incentive is perverse, there is no reason to preserve it.
what do you mean when you say "communism"?
you're describing bolshevik/bismarckian state 'socialism', a conservative compromise/trick/ratfucking that generally starts by executing all the communists, like the bolsheviks did. bismarck specifically talks about how he did this on purpose to keep actual communism from blooming out of these huge mutual aid projects that were happening.
the short version is: the workers own the means of production. individually or collectively. so the steel workers own the steel mill. the seamstress owns her serger. the plumber owns his wrench and snake. just that, and it all exists for the good of everybody, with everybody acknowledging that they can't do it on their own, or offering a lot of public entertainment by trying to.
there's a bunch of forks from there, and ways to make this function and eliminate the frictions, but that's all communism is. some proposals still even include markets (though im not a fan), some are regional, some federated in a bunch of different ways, some are centralized, some are radically decentralized, some are 'return to monkey', some require cutting edge technology for communication and collaboration (a cool example of that from the 70s is called cybersyn, which was, like, kick starting the star trek future in chile before everyone involved was hunted down and killed by CIA proxies, except two guys who were out of the country, one of whom was literally taping a debate about it for the CBC at the time, which got REALLY awkward for his conservative opponent)
What you described is socialism; a communist society would also be a stateless, classless, and moneyless society.
to be fair; I am generally angry, and can't prove im not a bot.
but I think looking at it in terms of 'government' and 'decay'. it may seem pedantic, but 'coordination' and 'adaptability' are much much better ways of thinking about it.