It’s important to remember we are doing it for glorious purpose:
From what the capitalists and their non-wealthy sycophants tell me, this is the only way, and we should stop complaining as they end the world to see who can get th highest ego score.
But you don’t understand, doing literally the bare minimum would mean 150 people only have 50,000,000x the average persons net worth instead of 100,000,000x!
And I’ll never be allowed to be in their club since they all work to make sure poors stay poors someday I might be one of them, so clearly I must defend this to the death of me and all my family and their children.
Climate Safe Pensions - Stand.earth
Climate Safe Pensions
With more than $46 Trillion in assets worldwide, pension funds are one of the largest institutional investors in fossil fuels.
Given the growing financial risk facing fossil fuel companies, it is no longer a responsible investment to put our hard earned pension dollars into an industry that is wreaking havoc on our planet and frontline communities. Nearly 30% of fossil fuel industry shares are held by pension funds – with as much financial power as pension funds hold, they could be a force to reckon with in the battle to address the climate crisis.
This isn’t even a recent comic, it is old. We know about this for so long already, it is depressing.
Most economist agree with externalities and wealth distribution. But people don’t like externalities and wealth distribution has nothing to do with capitalism and is to fo with politics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_propaganda
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://truthout.org/articles/pedagogy-for-profit-education-under-capitalism/
The capitalists own major media, the capitalists influence curriculum, as they’ve captured the state governments that set them, from K-Colleges of Economics to say “free market” capitalism is the only way kiddies. It indoctrinates millions of non-wealthy Americans to advocate against their own interests. Hi.
They use their power over government not only to deregulate their own industries for profit, but to defund social supports and then use their media to shriek “see how government doesn’t work?! Privatize everything!”
You can sing the praises of capitalism if you want, but capitalism not straight jacketed/draconianly regulated is a social blight that removes all humanity from society. A society shouldn’t be in service to an economy, an economy should be a lowly tool to distribute goods and services for the benefit of society.
Actually it was my economics classes in university that highlighted how bad things are and how corporations need to be highly regulated. Even the professor who attempted to show us we couldn’t regulate corporations and thus shouldn’t try used a simulation that made it apparent corporations would strip the land and ocean of everything if they could.
It definitely depends on the university you go to, there’s ideological differences in economic schools of thought. But the observed science is very simple and repeatedly proves demand driven programs at the bottom of an economy are far more powerful than supply driven programs at the top.
I will sing the praises of capitalism because I understand it in a way most people on this site do not. It has done more to improve the standard of living and bring people out of poverty than anything.
Yes there are poltical issues in our society, especially America which isn’t the world and isn’t the only capitalist country. But that is a political issue.
People just need to think more about politics and understand how the economy works more. That’s where the issues lie.
https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/centerpiece/fall2018/transcript_jodidi11-5-2018
It’s worth the read. I promise.
I read it. I’m really not sure what I’m meant to be talking from it. I think a lot of Marxists don’t understand what capitalism is.
“Its very structure, therefore, deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak.”
Capitalism is entirely based on the the free hand of the market not on votes. People effectively vote with money. If people want more pears instead of apples, then more pears are planted than apples. The free hand of the market works without votes and infact is a lot lot more efficient than voting on everything or on trying to control these choices from a central government. Its fundamentally why (among other reasons) capitalism is so much more efficient than anything else.
Something that seems horribly missed by certain people that don’t understand capitalism is externalities. Most economists want these corrections made to prices. They want ways to fix the tragedy of the commons, they don’t want factories everywhere polluting they want the best use of capital, land and labour.
People get to vote on the limit of business. They can choose to have green spaces around cities and there is absoultely nothing a business can do about it. All the wealth made from capitalism that wouldn’t exist without it is taxed by the government and the government can use that money to better effect. Lots of countries and cities have green spaces and high environmental protection. Capitalist want the government to pay for education and the government wants to pay for education because it gets more money back from taxes.
If I have missed something please let me know. But I’m getting tired of people on this site no understanding basic economics so I’m not sure how long this conversation will continue.
