They say that like it’s a bad thing.
Maybe capitalism needs to suck it up and pull itself up by its bootstraps instead of needing subsidized fossil fuels. /s
↑ This, but without the /s.
In particular, we need to protect the free market by creating a carbon tax to compensate for fossil fuels’ negative externalities and level the playing field for “greener” competitors.
Not taxing carbon is anti-capitalist protectionism.
That or have the state stop giving money to corpos that definitely don’t need it, or by breaking up monopolies just so fair competition can be a thing.
Seriously, thinking that America’s system is capitalist is just as stupid as thinking it’s the land of the free
What murica has is what happens when you take the breaks off and let crap run to its logical extreme (and with rampant corruption where the cars breaks used to be)
Regulatory capture.
Revolving doors.
Political dark money.
Monopolies that manage to be technically not monopolies some frakkin how.
Rackets that never get charged as such.
Planned obsolescence.
Anticompetetive and anti consumer practices all over and the erosion of rights - you effectivly don’t own what you buy and can’t resell it anymore.
Trade agreements to export this insanity to other countries.
Granting corporations the ability to sue NATIONS over “lost profits” in response to resonable regulation!
Instead of “harnessing greed” its run rampant and unchecked to the point its destroying our environment at an insane pace. And its spreading beyond america. It has been for years most people just haven’t realized it yet. (Ed: by “it”, I mean this corrupt thing that America thinks of as capitalism, is overtaming what you may think of as calitalism)
The cancer has metastisized, and we’ll need to reinvent a strongly regulated similar system that rejects the clear broken parts in order to excise it - capitalism as is, is lost. It’s not sustainable.
I realize I’m talking in a very pro socialist/pro communist space but what I’m saying doesn’t mean I think capitalism was always terrible. But any good times it had are soon coming to an end.
You don’t need to end capitalism to help the climate.
Just properly regulate it. It’s a tool just like every other economic system, and shouldn’t be hoisted to a higher pedestal. Every system that fails fails because regulation falls off the wayside and leads into corruption. Capitalism’s only strength is it took longer to get there because all the power was spread out for awhile.
That’s a pretty shallow take on historic economics.
Capitalism had a role to serve as the transition out of feudal economics.
Now it’s time to do better.
Better as in what though?
We’ve used every economic system by itself, and the only really successful version is a combination of them with proper regulation. What else do you do?
Well there was a guy with a funny beard who wrote about what happens when capitalism produces more goods and services than could ever be reasonably consumed by the populace of the world. He wrote about how there were basically 2 coutcomes. Either the the rising supply just keeps pushing prices down until the only issue comes down to a logistics and distribution problem and money functionally becomes pointless and state power doesnt have any heirarchy to enforce. Or the people with money and power enforce artificial scarcity, through tactics like letting crops die in the fields, or only release so many diamonds into the market and promiting it as a good thing, to protect their wealth and power.
Well communism has been tried and it didn’t work. It was trounced by the capitalist world which, nevertheless, adopted some socialist ideas, especially in Europe.
So no, it’s not time to do better. Communism isn’t the next step after capitalism. It clearly isn’t remotely capable of competing with capitalism in the long term. No matter how many thousands of pages of theoretical wishful thinking people have written about it, if it doesn’t work in the real world it doesn’t work. It always ends up in authoritarian, repressive regimes that are economic backwaters. To the extent that they desire secular growth they have to open up markets like China did, and simply become authoritarian and somewhat economically free.
The biggest issue is that this is a doomer self defeating argument. If you don’t believe something is possible, then it isn’t. Even if total communism is an unreachable goal, why not try to move closer to it? Liberalism is a walking contradiction, with economic liberalism being almost incompatible with social liberalism. That hasn’t stopped it from having drastic positive and negative effects on human history from people trying to live by it.
Furthermore, the idea that communism is a dead end reinforces the toxic view that anyone attempting to strive closer towards it is a threat that must be eliminated. Anti-communist sentiment has led to and enabled some of the worst atrocities of all time. The best part is that many of the people accused of being communists merely wanted liberation.
The fact is, if communism was wiped from existence and Karl Marx erased from history, the same ideas would evolve out of Christianity, or liberalism, or any ideology that isn’t a fucking death cult. This is because Marx did not make a unique and unprecedented observation, he just put the pieces together first. Egalitarianism and sharing is as important to human success as territorialism and self interest.
Finally, Marx did believe communism would come out of industrialized societies with enough resources to go around. That is not the state that the Soviet Union or China were in when they declared themselves communist. Making absolute statements about the end state of all attempts at something is setting yourself up for failure far more than trying a new way to make something theoretically possible happen.
regulation falls off the wayside and leads into corruption
And vice versa! Corruption leads to lack of regulation. It’s a shit circular dance that I feel like we’re doomed to repeat regardless of the economic system we pick.
Corruption nearly always leads to more regulation but targeted against competitors.
Capitalism works well when there is plenty of potential for growth, but when there are non-monetary reasons (such as the literal end of ecosystems favorable to human life) that require adjustments or even degrowth, it quickly devolves into feudalism - and the problem is that we do not have the means to quickly stop CO2 emissions without tightening our belts in energy consumption, which in turn requires some degree of degrowth.
You don’t need to end capitalism to help the climate. Just properly regulate it.
Except that politicians (i.e. those that would be doing the regulating) all have a price, and for oil barons no price is too high; and bribing is still magnitudes cheaper than stopping the destruction of the environment.
It’s a tool just like every other economic system, and shouldn’t be hoisted to a higher pedestal.
If it’s not objectively better nor special, why not try something more equitable that doesn’t siphon 99% of all resources to the aristocracy elite and leaves everyone else fighting for the crumbs?
Why keep using a system that prescribes that the hungry should starve if they can’t afford food even though we already produce more than enough to feed the whole planet?
Is there a lemmy equivalent to /r/SelfAwareWolves? Because this fits.
Ah, it exists: !selfawarewolves@lemmy.ml
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !selfawarewolves@lemmy.ml
selfawarewolves material