3d ago

What popular belief do you disagree with?

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People argue back and forth whether capitalism or socialism/communism is a superior system and they are all wrong. Those concepts are just tools. Saying one economic system applies to all situations is as silly as saying the only tool you need to build a house is a hammer.
- it's more about which one is better for more situations, no? it is much harder for different situations in the same area to dynamically decide which economic system is better.
  
  Not really. It's entirely possible to pick and choose. We chose a socialist model for fire department because the capitalist model proved disastrous. Many countries successfully did the same for healthcare, retirement, and all sorts of things. At the same time, capitalism is great when you want a million choices on TV to watch or a grocery store with a whole aisle of different types of cookies.
  To me, the difference is the impact of failures. If someone starts a company making a new type of cookie and it proves not to be profitable, it goes bankrupt. Unfortunate, but ultimately not a big deal. If someone has cancer and curing them isn't profitable, you can't just give up. That person's life is more important than profit.
  
  welfare capitalism is still capitalism as even firefighters are still subjugated by class and capital
  
  If the essentials of life are all shifted to "welfare capitalism" the power of class and capital to subjugate is greatly diminished. Add in mass union membership and it gets even better.
  
  let's use your example of firefighters. the obvious subjugation is the government, when looking at its budget, diverting funds away to pet policies and luxuries (not to mention Robert Moses–style redlining), which is how you have volunteer firefighters that cease all activities at night when you needed them to handle a 4AM electrical backyard fire where i grew up.
  the less obvious subjugation is capitalism itself. when the firefighters walk home under this "socialism", their problems of survival are not solved. they have to take their capital into the nearest grocer and be subject to the horrors of the market: the nearest walmart, the #1 shrink on communities today, replacing the mom-and-pop of memories and community gatherings with a well-oiled, prices machine that runs at a loss until it becomes the only shop (or only competing with similar price machines) in town, at which point it maximizes its profit margin and sells the same cheap items at a markup just enough to be purchasable under welfare assistance. firefighters, historically poorly compensated for their public service, are forced to limit themselves to walmart's stale options and other working class horrors. this sticks you with the difficult choice of either increasing regulation—risking further government discrimination and costs that burden firefighter funding—or maintaining the status quo. you've got every industry risking safety, health, and quality to do things cheaper, and the people relying on regulation and inspection that can never get through every nook and cranny to defend the consumer instead of eliminating the perverted incentive that is capitalism. the final alternative to combining firefighter socialism with capitalism here is to distribute food and other essentials instead of salary, which uh i don't think is a good idea if legends of government rations and their poor variety hold. maybe when the government is run by omniscient telepaths...
  i agree with your last sentence, though. i support syndicalism, which needs to go further—into governance—than just membership. i'll admit that you could call a syndicalist society capitalist which isn't something i've thought of before
- I think public conversations are made of simplistic ideas. Maybe because they're stronger. Easier to convey and digest.
  So people may think deep and complex but societies think shallow and simple. Something like that.
  One of the downsides of democracy no doubt.
  
  “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

158 comments