Is it because they’re learning what socialism actually is?
The stage is finally late enough that the cracks are apparent to even Republicans huh? Took long enough.
Ouroboros is starting to get around to the back of its own head, and people can no longer avoid seeing where things are heading.
If Republicans are losing faith in capitalism, it is only because they want monarchic feudalism or a theocracy.
I suspect many wanted a kleptocracy but hoped to share in the plunder.
Yup. They’re not about to turn around and embrace anything progressive. Get ready folks…
Capitalism in the US worked if and when the system was kept in check by outside forces. Like when the US had to appear to be a civilized country during the Cold War.
After that, it became a free-for-all where each politician, Republicans most of all but Democrats not excluded, made sure that their guys could loot the till. And they all did.
Corruption and grift ensued, and regular folks were left holding the bag. Then they invented the scapegoat to blame it all on. Minorities, immigrants, or whatever the sad pick of the day happens to be.
Now they’re selling off what’s left of public goods, including the US’ international reputation, natural reserves and the government itself. The military has become a tool to fleece the markets.
That’s capitalism folks. If private greed is allowed to run amok, then this is what you get. Don’t act so surprised.
Eh, it works during the period it’s intended to work. When competition is high and not optimized. Optimization results in a need to convert to non-profit public utility status, which is where we fail.
MAGAs want a Theokleptocracy.
MAGA wants a babyfuckocracy.
Anyone with a functioning empathy system never did.
You have more in common with the poor than with the billionaires.
Holy shit. It wasn’t the fact that you’ve worked your entire life and can barely afford a home, food, and medical care…
Fucking idiots
yeah, because they worked none, and got everything from corruption.
Capitalism can work fine when subject to the pressures that keep things reasonable.
The pressures were removed. The system broke.
Republicans now believe capitalism is the problem, completely ignoring the fact that THEY FUCKING BROKE IT.
Capitalism isn’t perfect. It’s not even great. But it can work if you fucking let it.
Capitalism’s fundamental flaw is that it exploits and feeds people’s greed. It requires an external system of regulation to ensure that the vast majority of people aren’t left with so little that murdering the people responsible for their suffering doesn’t seem like a better option than continuing in the system.
One could envision a system that uses mutually aligned incentives to ensure that when you succeed, we all do better, and when I succeed, we all do better. What does that system look like? It looks like a flattened hierarchy, where it is practically impossible for one person to accumulate enough wealth to influence national politics. I think it likely looks like state that guarantees healthcare, education, food, privacy, housing, and a job if you want it. Why does it look like that, because all of those things are neccesary to a happy, fulfilled, and productive life. If you have more people optimally outputting, your economy has strength and resiliency. With a modicome of smart public investment, you can fiscally guarentee that in perpetuity. In order to achieve it you need a government worth trusting, we don’t have one, but we can build one.
If nothing else, the modern era of capital accumulation demonstrates that there are so many more resources in the world than people to use them. What if we just let them? Since the war on Iran started the US has spent more than 1/3 of what the UN estimates it would cost to end world hunger (37B/97B).
I noticed you said " and a job if you want it" are you saying that people will have like a UBI in this scenario?
I’ve always wondered how you would actually be able to find people to do jobs if no one had to work like surely non of the nurses working 20+ hour shifts or sewage plant workers working with waste all day would continue to do that if they didn’t have to.
Would you have to make it to where people volunteered every so often or how would that work? And who would work the government that picked the volunteers to do it would there be some incentive for doing that?
I want a utopia I just wonder if its truly possible because of that.
UBI is meant to keep you from being homeless and starving, it’s not meant to let you not work.
The problem people have is that under capitalism? We made being employed SUCK ASS. Jobs could be safe, fun, fulfilling, and well compensated; but all the capitalists by nature decided to do little of any of that as possible; and to make me sure you’re locked in, your heathcare is tied to your job. If you want to get ahead, you have to give your money back by investing, and if you don’t lose it all you pay a huge tax on it that was meant for controlling rich people but also takes from the little guy as well.
You basically get nothing u til you retire, and now they’re coming for that too. They wanna eliminate social security and they wanna fuck up our 401k by tying it to AI which they are trying to use to take over computing entirely.
If you ask me the government should pay for all of it, for everyone. 3 trillion for Israel to kill brown people, and they can’t even fix fuckin sidewalks in my town. Get fucked.
I may be naive, but a life a idle leisure is not satisfying long term to many. Even the wealthiest people today are not content to idle their days away on private islands. They work and take on projects and set themselves goals. I think it is intrinsic in our nature (not all, but a vast majority) to want to build, create, and improve our lives and that of those around us. The pursuit of happiness is tied closely to the ability to enrich the lives we hold dear.
I think that part of the reason idle languish seems appealing is that we are worked too hard and our attention stretched too thin. Every choice under capitalism about how to spend our time has to weigh a vague life and death decision about how to feed and house ourselves in perpetuity. There is no expectation that the welfare safety net will catch us (in the US).
There is plenty of good work that needs to be done, and with free education (including vocational training) there is no shortage of skilled labor. With a surplus of labor we can shorten working hours. So why not have a jobs guarantee? If you are aimless but want to contribute to society, society can put the pathway to build what it needs in front of you and give the tools to achieve it. If in a couple years you decide thats not what you want to do, you can retrain or simply go do something else.
I don’t feel like writing much today, so I will just put a basic concept forward: I think that there should be a formalized system for job income, and citizens without a job, should get a fixed income. When a citizen holds a job, their universal income is replaced by the job’s income, with the exception of schooling.
The amount of money cannot be negotiated nor set by workers nor employers. Each job is rated by the effort, risk, and knowledge metrics required for the role, and applies to everyone throughout the entire nation. Leadership roles have workers vote for who should be leader every so often, along with setting or altering the payment rank of a leader.
Examples of Universal Ranked Income:
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Rank 0, gives $10,000. All citizens get this when without a job or not having retirement money.
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Rank S, gives $0 to $10k, in addition to citizen income. Students are paid for learning.
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Rank 1, $20k. Waiters, cashiers, desk workers,
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Rank 2, $40k. Middle management, (trained, insured) police, librarians.
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Rank 3, $60k. Lawn workers, crop pickers, safezone soldiers, warehouse workers, mailmen.
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Rank 4, $80k. Fire fighters, lumberjacks, doctors, battlezone soldiers.
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Rank 5, $100k. Astronauts, heads of research, surgeons.
Absolute caps on wealth and assets also apply, so that people cannot become millionaires. For a citizen, I am thinking something like $100k for wealth and assets apiece, totaling in $200k. Residential migrants who haven’t yet earned their automatic citizenship, have a cap of $100k total.
Universal Services give things like free healthcare, a free kei car, fuel, basic food, shelter, and so on. Money is used for buying luxury goods, services, bigger housing, and so on.
I have been thinking along similar lines, especially with respect to compensation rates. But I feel like hard caps run into a lot of issues especially over time. They entrench class divides unnecessarily. They should be adjusted to address local cost of living, inflation and probably some other things.
What if instead taxes on income (and assets) are based on a s-curve formula that keeps everyone’s hourly rate (or total wealth) within 3x or 5x of everyone else? You work more hours, you still get more money.
The asset limits are so low that no can own a house. Asset limit should be at least 7x the top wage earners annual salary.
All of this assumes that no one needs to privately save for retirement, because food, shelter, housing, healthcare are already guaranteed. But there should also probably be a social security equivalent based on number of hours worked over your lifetime, regardless of compensation rate. Just make sure its funded as an investment, rather than immediately paying out from what’s paid in.
One thing to note before proceeding, is that I assume the traditional American dollar would be dead, along with its inflation, if people are willing to allow these kinds of reforms to happen. As such, we wouldn’t see the same currency values for things.
However, on top of that, is that money is an optimization device. It is a fictional construct that we use to simplify our lives, so we aren’t trying to constantly figure out whether a giant chicken is worth four piglets at checkout. The values are based on what society can agree stuff is approximately worth…
…so I figure, assuming everyone within the nation operated within fixed wealth caps, the pricing of goods will adjust to what money people have. So things like houses will be priced to assume no individual has more than $100,000 to spare for a house, and the pricing will be lowered so that migrants can afford a home within their own $50k cap.
What I am asserting, is that wealth caps adjust inflation. Whether they do so in a helpful way is unknown, since we haven’t tried them.
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Anyhow, I have more writings on various things within the Universal Living ecosystem that I have been cobbling together. When it comes to retirement, I figure it goes like this:
Every day worked, you get 1 day’s worth of benefits. Employers pay the benefits, unless shuttered, in which case the government takes over. Benefits are accrued over a person’s career, and when given out, replace a person’ Universal Income when they are jobless.
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Say that someone has $2,000,000 in retirement…
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They receive $100,000 annually. In effect, the retirement is structured like job income.
By doing it this way, people can have plenty of money to work with, and strange distortions like millionares can’t exist.
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Accountability, to prevent corporate malfeasance such as killing a company to remove liabilities like retiree benefits, is the biggest issue. I figure that people who hold or held leadership roles should suffer a personal penalty when a company goes under while it still has obligations.
This can potentially work, because under Universal Services, no one can die of starvation, a lack of shelter, and so on. So we can totally penalize abusers by removing all of their luxury money. So an executive who earned a $200,000 penalty, will have all of their job and Universal Income totally consumed by it, working towards paying it all off.
Not kind, but as proven by the executives of our day, we shouldn’t hold back.
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While I do have writing on taxes, I am out of energy for much explanation at this moment. I will be very brief: The taxation of individuals isn’t about paying the government, but rather to encourage individuals to participate in society. The taxes are earmarked by a person to go towards things they value - for example, fixing potholes along a street they use regularly. It is basically crowdfunding, designed to engage people into thinking about their community and cultural interests. That is more important than the money itself.
Corporate taxation is where government gets the bulk of their money. By incentivizing government, we can make them heavily observe corporations for corruption, and using assorted measures to ensure government gets its due. The federal and state governments can assign a rotation of book-keepers for companies, so that the government can track the holdings of a company and ensure that taxes are reliably collected.
…That is it for now. I got some Palworld to play.
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The problem is the capitalists become the government officials that should be the check.
This is true in other systems too btw, the only real check has ever been the power of the people to stand up and reset the corruption.
It’s a cycle that’s incredibly old, we’re just at the elite looting stage before the revolution.
Whether we end up with capitalism again or something doesn’t matter, what we really need is something new that encourages civic participation to hold elites accountable. I have no idea what this is, but I know blaming capitalism alone is only a convenient scapegoat, it’s not a true root cause.
Americans have fucked over the planet with their idiocy.
Drown like the rats you are.
The problem with socialism is the high taxes needed to pay for socialistic programs. The key is to adopt some socialistic programs but not so much that taxes are too high.
The problem with capitalism is the high prices needed to pay for shareholder profits and executive bonuses. The key is to adopt some capitalistic programs but not so much that prices increase while quality of goods and services decrease in perpetuity.
Oh, and also end inherited wealth, because it’s antithetical to an egalitarian society.
No, competition prevents high prices. If a company increase prices to increase profits but a competitor doesn’t, it will result in a loss of business. Competition increases quality because a company selling poor quality products will lose business to one providing good quality.
What’s wrong with giving wealth to one’s children?
In competitive markets that’s how it worked. What we have now are mega corporations who build monopolies by buying out the competition or sending them broke by brute force. Then once the corporation has a stranglehold they are free to cheapen their products and services and/or jack up prices knowing they have no competition. That’s why formerly quality brands are constantly becoming poor quality trash.
Inherited wealth leads to spoiled, privileged idiots who have grown up thinking they earned their lives through talent and hard work, when in reality they’ve just been failing upwards while the family money and connections have been covering their asses.
In late stage capitalism, those idiots have amassed enough wealth and power to make them a genuine threat to all of us. If you can’t see that happening already then I have to assume you’re one of the many people who are just beyond help.
Monopolies are not the result of laissez-faire but the government. The government has the responsibility to stop monopolies.
Inherited wealth could lead to spoiled children, but parents should certainly have the right to give their possessions to their children.
I’d rather pay half my income in tax to ensure everyone, including my family, the basic dignity and survival of food, housing, education and medical care.
Much of that money would be wasted on inefficient government programs.
That would be on the electorate voting for that. In a socialist democratic government, the electorate has the power to recall officials anytime with a vote, for unsatisfactory performance and wastefulness. Any fraud, waste and abuse (which currently was estimated at around $135 billion dollars, out of a total budget of $7.1 trillion dollars), accounts for 1.9% of the national budget.
The top two in vulnerability to waste are Medicare and Medicaid, of which a significant portion is payments made to fraudulent payees. The DoD is right up there too, in terms of waste.
It’s VERY hyperbolic to say government programs are incredibly wasteful. 1.9% waste out of the national budget is pretty impressive. Still, there is room for improvement, but if citizens don’t have access to direct democratic process, versus a corrupt Republican capitalist system, change is an uphill battle.
The government is wasteful because it has no competition. Consequently, workers might be overpaid or more than necessary. In contrast, private companies compete with other companies, so they have to be efficient. Of course, government programs are necessary, just be careful that they are truly needed.
We live in the age of AI. Government workers that do menial tasks can be replaced. The governments primary job in a socialist society is to ensure everyone has basic needs met. Various levels of nationalization can exist run by workers. With technology, government programs can run leaner and more efficient than ever, and ensuring that the maximum amount of dollars reach beneficiaries with little to no waste, and much lower overhead cost.
Without competition, the government might not attempt to use AI. Private companies try AI when they think it will give a competitive edge. Workers might own a company but can’t run it. Stockholders own part of a company but don’t run it.
There is no need for competition in a socialist society. You’re trying to view this through a capitalist lens. Socialism isn’t capitalism. People still need and demand goods in a socialist system, and production is driven by this demand. The difference is there is no bourgeois or elite class profiting from the surplus value of goods or services workers produce.
High taxes are fine if it means that I don’t need a savings account to live. No need to save for retirement if my basic needs are met. Need being the operative word, it is important to still have the option at least until we can move to a post-scarcity gift economy, but I doubt we’d be ready for that in the next 250 years.
The problem with high taxes is that people have little money to spend.
I have that same problem now, because my healthcare costs so much and I’m young and healthy! If only there was a cheaper way to pay for that like every other developed nation in the world does.
No, your payments subsidize those who are unhealthy such as the elderly, otherwise their payments would skyrocket.
Sure, but why does American healthcare cost 2-5x what it does in other countries, esp. When our care is ranked 9th against them?
My point is it doesn’t matter if what I’m paying is a “tax” or premium, I still have to pay it. Why put a profiteer between people and access to medical care? How does that benefit society?
Profits motivate medical companies to compete. If there is just one medical company owned by the government, there will certainly be waste. The workers will probably be overpaid and more than needed.
I got an idea, if we stop spending 1.1T per year on the military we can put most of that money towards America and your taxes don’t even need to change
Military spending provides jobs and is necessary to protect against threats. When Germany invaded France in 1940, the Luftwaffe not only outnumbered the RAF and French air forces but the German fighter, the ME 109 outclassed the British and French fighters.
Capitalism is fine.
Unchecked wealth that controls the government, doesn’t pay taxes, and bribes public officials to pick winners and losers is not.
Anyone who thinks that the US is a shining example of “capitalism” is a fucking imbecile.
The US is literally THE example of capitalism. It’s just a shit system that leads to bad outcomes.
I mean if you look at say the history of capitalism, the U.S. doesn’t show up in any of the development of it really. I don’t see how it could possibly be THE example of capitalism when the countries that brought it to the U.S. still exist.
All this defense of capitalism and you still ended up on the Tesseract list?
That guy must really suck ass at making a block list lol
I didn’t defend capitalism at all, you just have reading comprehension issues apparently
Those countries, to a one, have significantly restructured their governments or have been dissolved and reformed to a system that at least gives lip service to being controllable by the masses. They didnt do it out of benevolence, but because there would have been riots and revolution otherwise. The US is a good modern example of capitalism because it was born after capitalism had already been developed and was privledged enough to gain an upper hand, through investment of existing powers and colonial extractivism (also a key feature of capitalism).
As an example, 1838-The People’s Charter was drawn up for the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA) by William Lovett and Francis Place. The Charter had six demands: • All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage) • Voting should take place by secret ballot • Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years • Constituencies should be of equal size • Members of Parliament should be paid • The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished
Second example, The French Revolution
What are you even trying to say. For one thing, the French Revolution can be argued was France saying, “Let’s capitalism harder!”
Everything you mentioned in the first chunk has nothing to do with capitalism either.
“Lip service to be Controlled by the masses” is exactly what the U.S. has been the entire time.
It doesn’t matter if we voted in new representatives monthly, yearly, every decade. The one main thing that makes a society capitalistic is private ownership of the means of production. So unless France, England, the U.S. or etc voted to ban private ownership of those means (which hasn’t happened) they have come no closer to getting rid of capitalism.
The context was that the previous economic mode was feudalism, in which the wealth was centralized under nobles and monarchs. The governments that supported those economic systems were deemed too oppressive by their people and forced to change. But the economic mode when it changed to capitalism didn’t differ that much in the long term. The wealth was redistributed initially to some extent with the changing of the government, but then reconcentrated into the hands of the few and then individuals were able to scale its extractive means globally.
The sentiment that forced the governments to change then was cooled by a change in system, and reality, but now we can see even more clearly that the issue is the concentration of wealth (and through it, power).
Now that we are back to a reality of inequality above previous levels (and we can see the outsize influence of the wealthy on every facet of policy), it is obvious that capitalism at this stage subverts the stated goals of democracy.
(Edited for tone)
Idk how you live in this time and come to this conclusion. All of us are just the staff at Earth hotel while the richest of us do as they please, no matter how heinous. This is not a good system.
What conclusion are you saying I came to?
That the US is not the peak example of capitalism? Just because it didnt originate here does not mean that we cannot represent it.
We and every other capitalistic nation that came before and after us. We are fucked but anyone who thinks the U.S. is where capitalism started is a doof just chasing hating on a country they don’t like. Really it is passion above education. Restricts learning. The U.S. has run and become a plague of capitalism… But if the U.S. never existed and France/Spain lost, and the British empire kept everything… What part of capitalism do you think would be “so non existent that none other could be considered THE place of capitalism”
We didnt say that. We said it is the epitome of capitalism. That does not mean it started here. It means we represent it the best.
Unchecked wealth that controls the government, doesn’t pay taxes, and bribes public officials to pick winners and losers is not.
That is what Capitalism is… the relentless pursuit of profit inevitably goes to what you seem to think are isolated problems.
Every economist agree you “can’t just always build a better mouse trap”. Building a better mouse trap is a common trope to exemplify how capitalism leads to efficiency and innovation but at some point you get to the end of the line.
You build a better trap than me, I lose business… then I build an even better one and take it back = innovation
At some point there is simply no way to build a better mouse trap, anything we do, increases the price more than the benefit of the innovation so we start making it cheaper = efficiency
Finally we reach a point where no more efficiency and no more innovation can be attained… so we either enshitify it and/or bribe a cheap gov officials to push the market my way. Cheaper to donate $10k to some political whore than risking $100K in R&D to change some law in my favour
Of course, once this path is identified, it is best to jump straight to the bribing and skip all the risky innovation and painful efficiencies
Here you may think “Hold on Jhex, I am saying to get money out of politics so no bribing allowed”
Good, if we magically, truly get all money out of politics and somehow also compensate for all biases, then capitalism does not work either because once you and I get into our high innovation / high efficiency models, nobody can ever get in the market (there is no way for them to compete) and we cannot keep forever growth which is a basic requirement of Capitalism.
In the best of theoretical models, Capitalism still ends exactly where it is right now (although it may take longer?)… barely any innovation worth while, barely any efficiency that is not entirely about me making money and fucking anything else, with most of the money in the hands of the ones who were “hard working enough” to be born to an rich family
Capitalism is when an ownership class undercompensates labor and pockets the spoils. It’s theft. It is not “fine” in any way.
Thank you. I’ll never understand why people can’t be arsed to spend fifteen minutes learning what capitalism actually entails.
The US is a shining example of capitalism.
And that’s how we know capitalism is not fine
That is the enevitable end state of capitalism. It concentrates wealth upward and consolidates power in the hands of the few. You can tack on an external system of regulation, but eventually that power becomes so concentrated that those with power reshape those regulations to allow them to gain even more (and the ones at the top are greedy to a fault, its how they got there).
Anyone who thinks that the US is a shining example of “capitalism” is a fucking imbecile.
If the US economic system isn’t capitalism, what is it? Can you give an example of a currently existing national economy that is capitalism?
I don’t think it’s the capitalism part they were disputing, it was the shining example part.
So the US economy is capitalism, just a flawed version of it? If so, what would a “shining example” of capitalism be?
I wasn’t the one making the statement, just offering an interpretation. I think a good case could be made that the US IS a shining example of mature capitalism.
Social democracy (regulated capitalism, or “checked wealth”) will always lead back into the kind of corruption and “unchecked wealth” that the US has, since it leaves the opportunity to gain more power and control politics intact. The wealthy elite will simply buy politicians over time, corrupt the news media, and play the divide and conquer game (mainly by means of racism and sexism to distract from their own power), as history has shown time and again.
If you insist that strict capitalism has never failed because neither the USA nor any other Western nation has ever practiced pure unadulterated capitalism, then you necessarily have to accept that strict Marxism has never failed either, because neither the USSR nor any other communist nation has ever practiced pure unadulterated Marxism.
