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I have nothing against capitalism: what we seem to have nowadays is Corruptism.

Corruptism is the collecting of wealth no matter who or what.
Need another dollar? Bribe a politician to make the laws favour corporations over people.
Need ANOTHER dollar? Cut wages and hours.
Need ANOTHER dollar? Layoffs.

It use to be that employers made, what, 400X what their employees made? Now an employee has to work 2-3 jobs just to live while the 'boss' feeds the pork to make ONE MORE DOLLAR!

A little more kindness would see us in a better world.
I'd like to see politicians start thinking of the people who voted for them.

Lets get back to basic Capitalism: Corruptism is not working.

 

Reply to: Re:absurd

    (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 21 2018, @02:34AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 21 2018, @02:34AM (#777065)

    This is exactly what capitalism looks like. It starts as you suggest in the good old days, and the current situation is the logical progression.

    There's a certain sort of person who just says shit. How did we ever get to a relatively uncorrupt system in the first place, if such corruption is the "logical progression" (where is your "logic" BTW)?

    What's missing here is that various governments in the US handle a far larger portion of the economy than they did when corruption wasn't such a big deal. It's this enormous captive flow of tax money that has resulted in the present state of corruption.

    Mutualism/anarchism (which I'm not sure is what Mr. Vim is preaching) and socialism are two alternatives that remove the means of production from private ownership. The means of production can be controlled by owner-operator-shareholders (where an individual is all three at once in relation to the means of production) from what it sounds like, or they can be controlled by the proletariat at large by democratic means.

    Notice that capitalism already provides the necessary infrastructure for these other systems to exist. But here, you imply that these other systems aren't competitive with capitalism. That's a huge warning sign. If you can only win by knee-capping the opposition, then just maybe you shouldn't be winning.

    Private ownership of the means of production (capitalism) simply cannot lead to a stable system. It experiences decay into fascism and neocolonial military aggression.

    Why is a "stable system" supposed to be valuable? You're doing it wrong. A stable system is a fragile system. The world isn't staying put for us in terms of disasters, those mean, ole capitalists, technology development, and other competing cultures and beliefs, therefore any systems that ignore this reality are going to fail hard precisely when they're most needed - in times of great change when the society is under great stress. Given that an AC starts blathering about "bourgeois revolutions" (which has long been a feature of these wish fulfillment fantasies in the past), it's not clear you and your ilk actually want a stable system anyway.

    For example, a common place where stability is advocated is in stock markets and the like. A couple years back there was a lot of hate here for high frequency trading (HFT). I'm sure if people could roust themselves, they would be back at it. But the whole thing lost gas because it turns out that HFT is not a big deal, contrary to the narrative. There has been no major disruptions of our world from the practice and all the loony proposals (that would have the side effect of crippling the value of these markets) turned out unnecessary. In the meantime we now have markets that can respond to changing conditions in milliseconds. How cool is that?! With instability comes the ability to quickly respond to change.

    Finally, why are these alternatives supposed to be more immune to corruption? It hasn't worked that way in practice. Labor unions in particular are a notorious hive of corruption and I can think of several examples from completely different backgrounds to show that (for example, the union ties to organized crime in the US, the servile labor unions of Japan which are merely extensions of the corporate bodies, or the labor unions of North Korea which are tools of the state and yet another way to control everyone).

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