See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing.
thats the thing though, economically this is rational. If you’re arguing for some sort of ethical rationality, that would be irrelevant to socialism. Granted rationality of resource usage could also apply to capitalism, it’s just redundant, because the market already operates that way.
People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively
i guess birth certificates aren’t real? The government is already perfectly capable of tracking who is alive and who is dead, we already deal with it for voting lol. It wouldn’t be hard to do it in any other context. People might forge documents i guess. But you don’t need to forcibly through people off a tower or gas them or anything either, you could just abolish social security for example.
anyway, this is all entirely relevant since my point was that the definition of rationality is entirely arbitrary and probably not applicable to a large scale society/economy to begin with. Again this is just sort of a fundamental rule under capitalism.
You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.
yeah, in terms of work, but work isn’t the only thing you do, you have leisure as well. Capitalism is specifically designed to regulate goods and services in an economy at scale, very very efficiently, and it does that very very well. Once you get outside of that is where you get into things like social security and government assistance, as well as publicly owned things. The trick here is to focus on having a reasonable work life balance, as well as good working conditions, this allows for effective leisure under a capitalist economy.
Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take.
that may be the case, but my fundamental problem is that i don’t see how socialism is relevant here, you can do this in any society. Through socialist legislation if you really wanted, or just public services more broadly.
This is getting to my whole point about “socialism just turns into capitalism/communism if you go far enough” because eventually you’ve just reorganized capitalism, and put it into a box labelled socialism, or communism. Depends on the flavor.
in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things.
so actually, no. In capitalism we do not define freedom, capitalism is strictly adherent to monetary mechanisms. This idea of freedom and liberty comes from the US federal government, as well as it’s subsequent state governments. These are two unrelated concepts.
We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy.
yes, it’s not the job of capitalism to define this, it’s the job of the government, and it’s constituents to decide what is best. Again things like social security, the ACA. ETC…
big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted
i don’t necessarily disagree with you here, again there are things like regulations for this purpose. Anti trust laws exist to break these things up, there are numerous laws surrounding the rights of workers to protect against this sort of ruthless competition. Arguably there should probably be more, learning from standard oil would be a great start.
But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives.
technically this isn’t accurate, it’s the automobile and it’s creation that led to suburbs, and roads, and the highway system, ICE engines were initially just created as a way to turn a burnable substance (gas/diesel) into power without having to use steam, which is rather inconvenient in some cases. And it did work, however eventually people figured out you could use them in place of horses, and then people eventually figured out that, hey cars are pretty cool, but then big auto realized, wait, we need a market to buy these things. So in turn it ended up incentivizing and creating a car centric culture, which was arguably boosted by the US government enabling it through legislation and what not.
and to be clear, white flight was more market subversion than anything, not that racism wasn’t involved, but the markets stood to make lots of money by engaging in it. so it did. This isn’t necessarily a problem with capitalism, more so a societal problem.
fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now
leaded gas was banned a long time ago, so not quite, but i understand that this is hyperbole lol.
you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth.
well that’s the thing though, it was marketable, and it worked. It’s less marketable now, and people are pushing for mid density housing, zoning reform, and multi family units, all of these things promote the goals that you mention here. Under capitalism and democracy all we have to do is push for legislation that matches up with these goals, and we’ll get it. And it’s working. It’s not incredibly fast, but nothing is, that’s life. But as a result that means that the economy won’t at the very least completely shut down, which is the benefit.
My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever.
this is a valid concern but this is also one of the greatest things about capitalism as well. If 75% of the market wants something, it will eventually get that thing. It’s inevitable. In our case, lets say more high density housing, if people (not me) want more high density housing, than they can get it, it just needs to be pushed for. There are certainly legislative problems with it, but cities do exist, and they are real as evidenced by going outside, so to some capacity this must be possible, we know other countries have done similar things, so we can easily point to them as an example of why this legislation would be beneficial, and it’s clearly in our interest in terms of the market, as it incentivizes an entirely new market segment, which creates a lot more money flow.
My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says. If you need an example look at reddit now, although it’s not quite the same, it’s a mess over there. Half the posts on that website are AI, and the other half are just, bad. That’s why we moved to lemmy lmao. Anyway, i personally, do not want to live in high density housing, i don’t want to live in suburbia, i want to live in the middle of the woods far away from everyone. Capitalism and american democracy affords me that option if i so choose. And it also affords you to go live in a city, or to go build mid density housing. That’s one of the beautiful things about it.
And again, market forces are the driver, if mid density housing is just better than suburbia, suburbia will all but die out. Which is probably a good thing, not that it would stop it from being built, but it would be a very small portion of the market at that point. People go where the market allows them, some people go where they want to. Generally the market follows broad trends, and people reciprocate.
Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense,
healthcare is probably going to be an example of government expenditure, if we were to break it out on a state by state basis, we may be able to achieve the best of both worlds. transit is fundamentally harder but i think simply building mid density sprawl would solve it, energy infra is a weird one, but i would argue it already makes sense. Allowing more flexibility in production would help though. Food infra is generally pretty rough, i think we should move towards more farmers market type setups, as well as decentralized farming, allow people to plant gardens for food, maybe even incentivize them to do so, allow them to share that produce with neighbors etc…
i think all of these goals can be accomplished under capitalism, and i think they can accomplished under american democracy. It’s possible we know it’s possible it’s been demonstrated to be possible. We just need to stop voting for people like trump, and start voting for people like kamala, and we need to start working towards preventing people from voting for people like trump, and getting them to vote for people like kamala. it’s the only real solution here. Socialism is certainly an interesting thought experiment, but i think given the tools, and the ability (which we pretty much already have) we can very well do this.
The hard part is going to be killing the republican rhetoric, but i’m convinced it’s possible. Somehow.
I’m gonna try not to go line by line here because I think it would end up swelling the comment sizes to a ludicrous degree like when I was vent posting and also I just woke up so I don’t wanna do that, but I dunno. I am mostly convinced that markets are not actually good at allocating things because they assume rational actors, they externalize costs and thrust them upon the public and the government, because they replicate centrally planned monopolies anyways. I also don’t like them because we broadly don’t look a the core power structures that end up manifesting under markets, which are mainly authoritarian and thus obviously have information problems allocating resources, on top of information problems that arise as a result of competition between market actors. I would rather just organize the economy in a way that makes sense, even if it ignores the fundamental right, the fundamental good, the fundamental freedom, of private property and capital.
The broader point I was trying to make about rationality and ethics, is that capitalism and markets have a core conceit of what like, is good, fundamentally. This idea of “freedom” right. Maybe it’s cooked up by the americans, I dunno, not really my point, I’m just looking at the fundamental core values that differentiate each system. In socialism, I’m gonna be looking at like, the organization of power structures, whether or not they’re democratically organized, I’m gonna be looking at central planning vs, I guess the markets would be considered a decentralized form of planning, maybe, though you could also have like decentralized little anarchist communes running around or whatever. Socialism is a pretty broad tent. In capitalism, though, I’m gonna be looking at the ownership of private property, of capital, as a fundamental, core value that makes the system turn. The ownership of capital is thought of as a good, as a fundamental right, a fundamental freedom that people should be afforded. That’s what capitalism is.
Also, again, I’m not so sure you can just be like, “killing old people is economically rational” type of thing. That’s assuming a kind of core value to those economics that you’re using, economics, like rationality, like, we commonly assume a value when we use economics because we live in a sociopolitical context where the people who use economics are going to be using them for a very specific purpose, right, but ultimately “economics”, what we call economics, is just sort of the study of like, resources and how they’re used and shit. I dunno if I wanted to come up with a better definition I can, but ja. But we still have to come up with a core value that motivates the shit along, there, is what I’m saying.
That’s what I’m talking about. The fact that so often in capitalism, the values are assumed. Maybe it’s because we exist in a kind of post-history, end of history reality, where capitalism and neoliberalism won, or whatever, but we assume that whatever is good is whatever makes money, and we assume that whatever makes money is economically efficient. And then, if killing old people can make us money, we do that. But we don’t pay attention to the broader contexts under which all of this takes place, which shapes the incentive structure, it shapes whether or not a particular company can make money doing something or not. That’s my point, is that we don’t look at those core systems, their incentive structures, their organizational structures, we just say “leave it up to the market”, and then the market just sort of shakes out somewhat randomly but mostly towards little authoritarian fiefdoms and monopolies. And we do that because we assume that to chase after private property, and capital, and to be a capitalist, is a sort of core freedom, a core good, a core moral value, which is supposed to exist for everyone.
Also, I must address this, right:
My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says.
So, collective hive mind, right, I dunno. Halfway, that sounds like democracy to me. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, again, divorced from the organizational structure, that I’ve put forward in my previous comment and I could put forward now, you probably know the arguments already, as to why higher density housing is a good idea, why it’s rational, why it’s logically sensible, especially when done at scale. If we give most people the “freedom”, to choose which housing they want to live in, then we kind of run into a prisoner’s dilemma where people of means believe that it’s in their best interest to turn themselves into antisocial suburbanoid hermits that can live apart from the “others” that live in the city, they can commute in and out, they can retain some level of status as a result of their lifestyle, and maybe because of this they can gain some level of luxury through living in suburbia, at least for the first 20 or 30 years before their house fucking crumbles into dust cause it was made of particleboard and sad dreams.
So, is their “freedom” to choose to live in suburbia, is that thought of as more democratic than the popular will might be, because it afforded that minority of people the power to live as they chose, right? Or is it actually less free, is it actually less democratic, because it imposed the will of that minority of people on the majority of people which would’ve rather lived without the issues that suburbia brings to them? i.e. racism, increased utilities costs, increased maintenance costs, financial and economic insolvency leading to crumbling infrastructure, pollution, massive ecological costs, I’ve said this shit already, you get the point. I would say that the former, obviously, forcing people to live either in high density housing, then having some proportion of people live in like, cabins in the woods where they do permaculture style farming, and then maybe having the rest of the people just live totally separate from your society maybe even if they so choose, right, I can argue why that makes more sense as a whole in material reality, why it logically makes more sense. But the question as to which one is good, which one affords more freedom, which one is morally correct, that’s an open question. I put my chips, so far as that exists, in the camp where we’re not doing massive amounts of ecological damage.
But, that’s the core sort of, distinction I’m trying to get at, here, which motivates the difference between capitalism and, not even socialism or communism necessarily, but just between capitalism and other systems. That core ideological divide, that belief in chasing capital as a right, that’s what I’m trying to get at.
thats the thing though, economically this is rational. If you’re arguing for some sort of ethical rationality, that would be irrelevant to socialism. Granted rationality of resource usage could also apply to capitalism, it’s just redundant, because the market already operates that way.
i guess birth certificates aren’t real? The government is already perfectly capable of tracking who is alive and who is dead, we already deal with it for voting lol. It wouldn’t be hard to do it in any other context. People might forge documents i guess. But you don’t need to forcibly through people off a tower or gas them or anything either, you could just abolish social security for example.
anyway, this is all entirely relevant since my point was that the definition of rationality is entirely arbitrary and probably not applicable to a large scale society/economy to begin with. Again this is just sort of a fundamental rule under capitalism.
yeah, in terms of work, but work isn’t the only thing you do, you have leisure as well. Capitalism is specifically designed to regulate goods and services in an economy at scale, very very efficiently, and it does that very very well. Once you get outside of that is where you get into things like social security and government assistance, as well as publicly owned things. The trick here is to focus on having a reasonable work life balance, as well as good working conditions, this allows for effective leisure under a capitalist economy.
that may be the case, but my fundamental problem is that i don’t see how socialism is relevant here, you can do this in any society. Through socialist legislation if you really wanted, or just public services more broadly.
This is getting to my whole point about “socialism just turns into capitalism/communism if you go far enough” because eventually you’ve just reorganized capitalism, and put it into a box labelled socialism, or communism. Depends on the flavor.
so actually, no. In capitalism we do not define freedom, capitalism is strictly adherent to monetary mechanisms. This idea of freedom and liberty comes from the US federal government, as well as it’s subsequent state governments. These are two unrelated concepts.
yes, it’s not the job of capitalism to define this, it’s the job of the government, and it’s constituents to decide what is best. Again things like social security, the ACA. ETC…
i don’t necessarily disagree with you here, again there are things like regulations for this purpose. Anti trust laws exist to break these things up, there are numerous laws surrounding the rights of workers to protect against this sort of ruthless competition. Arguably there should probably be more, learning from standard oil would be a great start.
technically this isn’t accurate, it’s the automobile and it’s creation that led to suburbs, and roads, and the highway system, ICE engines were initially just created as a way to turn a burnable substance (gas/diesel) into power without having to use steam, which is rather inconvenient in some cases. And it did work, however eventually people figured out you could use them in place of horses, and then people eventually figured out that, hey cars are pretty cool, but then big auto realized, wait, we need a market to buy these things. So in turn it ended up incentivizing and creating a car centric culture, which was arguably boosted by the US government enabling it through legislation and what not.
and to be clear, white flight was more market subversion than anything, not that racism wasn’t involved, but the markets stood to make lots of money by engaging in it. so it did. This isn’t necessarily a problem with capitalism, more so a societal problem.
leaded gas was banned a long time ago, so not quite, but i understand that this is hyperbole lol.
well that’s the thing though, it was marketable, and it worked. It’s less marketable now, and people are pushing for mid density housing, zoning reform, and multi family units, all of these things promote the goals that you mention here. Under capitalism and democracy all we have to do is push for legislation that matches up with these goals, and we’ll get it. And it’s working. It’s not incredibly fast, but nothing is, that’s life. But as a result that means that the economy won’t at the very least completely shut down, which is the benefit.
this is a valid concern but this is also one of the greatest things about capitalism as well. If 75% of the market wants something, it will eventually get that thing. It’s inevitable. In our case, lets say more high density housing, if people (not me) want more high density housing, than they can get it, it just needs to be pushed for. There are certainly legislative problems with it, but cities do exist, and they are real as evidenced by going outside, so to some capacity this must be possible, we know other countries have done similar things, so we can easily point to them as an example of why this legislation would be beneficial, and it’s clearly in our interest in terms of the market, as it incentivizes an entirely new market segment, which creates a lot more money flow.
My primary concern for something like socialism is that we would remove some fundamental level of freedom. Only building high density housing because it’s what the collective hive mind says. If you need an example look at reddit now, although it’s not quite the same, it’s a mess over there. Half the posts on that website are AI, and the other half are just, bad. That’s why we moved to lemmy lmao. Anyway, i personally, do not want to live in high density housing, i don’t want to live in suburbia, i want to live in the middle of the woods far away from everyone. Capitalism and american democracy affords me that option if i so choose. And it also affords you to go live in a city, or to go build mid density housing. That’s one of the beautiful things about it.
And again, market forces are the driver, if mid density housing is just better than suburbia, suburbia will all but die out. Which is probably a good thing, not that it would stop it from being built, but it would be a very small portion of the market at that point. People go where the market allows them, some people go where they want to. Generally the market follows broad trends, and people reciprocate.
healthcare is probably going to be an example of government expenditure, if we were to break it out on a state by state basis, we may be able to achieve the best of both worlds. transit is fundamentally harder but i think simply building mid density sprawl would solve it, energy infra is a weird one, but i would argue it already makes sense. Allowing more flexibility in production would help though. Food infra is generally pretty rough, i think we should move towards more farmers market type setups, as well as decentralized farming, allow people to plant gardens for food, maybe even incentivize them to do so, allow them to share that produce with neighbors etc…
1/2 (world limit)
i think all of these goals can be accomplished under capitalism, and i think they can accomplished under american democracy. It’s possible we know it’s possible it’s been demonstrated to be possible. We just need to stop voting for people like trump, and start voting for people like kamala, and we need to start working towards preventing people from voting for people like trump, and getting them to vote for people like kamala. it’s the only real solution here. Socialism is certainly an interesting thought experiment, but i think given the tools, and the ability (which we pretty much already have) we can very well do this.
The hard part is going to be killing the republican rhetoric, but i’m convinced it’s possible. Somehow.
I’m gonna try not to go line by line here because I think it would end up swelling the comment sizes to a ludicrous degree like when I was vent posting and also I just woke up so I don’t wanna do that, but I dunno. I am mostly convinced that markets are not actually good at allocating things because they assume rational actors, they externalize costs and thrust them upon the public and the government, because they replicate centrally planned monopolies anyways. I also don’t like them because we broadly don’t look a the core power structures that end up manifesting under markets, which are mainly authoritarian and thus obviously have information problems allocating resources, on top of information problems that arise as a result of competition between market actors. I would rather just organize the economy in a way that makes sense, even if it ignores the fundamental right, the fundamental good, the fundamental freedom, of private property and capital.
The broader point I was trying to make about rationality and ethics, is that capitalism and markets have a core conceit of what like, is good, fundamentally. This idea of “freedom” right. Maybe it’s cooked up by the americans, I dunno, not really my point, I’m just looking at the fundamental core values that differentiate each system. In socialism, I’m gonna be looking at like, the organization of power structures, whether or not they’re democratically organized, I’m gonna be looking at central planning vs, I guess the markets would be considered a decentralized form of planning, maybe, though you could also have like decentralized little anarchist communes running around or whatever. Socialism is a pretty broad tent. In capitalism, though, I’m gonna be looking at the ownership of private property, of capital, as a fundamental, core value that makes the system turn. The ownership of capital is thought of as a good, as a fundamental right, a fundamental freedom that people should be afforded. That’s what capitalism is.
Also, again, I’m not so sure you can just be like, “killing old people is economically rational” type of thing. That’s assuming a kind of core value to those economics that you’re using, economics, like rationality, like, we commonly assume a value when we use economics because we live in a sociopolitical context where the people who use economics are going to be using them for a very specific purpose, right, but ultimately “economics”, what we call economics, is just sort of the study of like, resources and how they’re used and shit. I dunno if I wanted to come up with a better definition I can, but ja. But we still have to come up with a core value that motivates the shit along, there, is what I’m saying.
That’s what I’m talking about. The fact that so often in capitalism, the values are assumed. Maybe it’s because we exist in a kind of post-history, end of history reality, where capitalism and neoliberalism won, or whatever, but we assume that whatever is good is whatever makes money, and we assume that whatever makes money is economically efficient. And then, if killing old people can make us money, we do that. But we don’t pay attention to the broader contexts under which all of this takes place, which shapes the incentive structure, it shapes whether or not a particular company can make money doing something or not. That’s my point, is that we don’t look at those core systems, their incentive structures, their organizational structures, we just say “leave it up to the market”, and then the market just sort of shakes out somewhat randomly but mostly towards little authoritarian fiefdoms and monopolies. And we do that because we assume that to chase after private property, and capital, and to be a capitalist, is a sort of core freedom, a core good, a core moral value, which is supposed to exist for everyone.
Also, I must address this, right:
So, collective hive mind, right, I dunno. Halfway, that sounds like democracy to me. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, again, divorced from the organizational structure, that I’ve put forward in my previous comment and I could put forward now, you probably know the arguments already, as to why higher density housing is a good idea, why it’s rational, why it’s logically sensible, especially when done at scale. If we give most people the “freedom”, to choose which housing they want to live in, then we kind of run into a prisoner’s dilemma where people of means believe that it’s in their best interest to turn themselves into antisocial suburbanoid hermits that can live apart from the “others” that live in the city, they can commute in and out, they can retain some level of status as a result of their lifestyle, and maybe because of this they can gain some level of luxury through living in suburbia, at least for the first 20 or 30 years before their house fucking crumbles into dust cause it was made of particleboard and sad dreams.
So, is their “freedom” to choose to live in suburbia, is that thought of as more democratic than the popular will might be, because it afforded that minority of people the power to live as they chose, right? Or is it actually less free, is it actually less democratic, because it imposed the will of that minority of people on the majority of people which would’ve rather lived without the issues that suburbia brings to them? i.e. racism, increased utilities costs, increased maintenance costs, financial and economic insolvency leading to crumbling infrastructure, pollution, massive ecological costs, I’ve said this shit already, you get the point. I would say that the former, obviously, forcing people to live either in high density housing, then having some proportion of people live in like, cabins in the woods where they do permaculture style farming, and then maybe having the rest of the people just live totally separate from your society maybe even if they so choose, right, I can argue why that makes more sense as a whole in material reality, why it logically makes more sense. But the question as to which one is good, which one affords more freedom, which one is morally correct, that’s an open question. I put my chips, so far as that exists, in the camp where we’re not doing massive amounts of ecological damage.
But, that’s the core sort of, distinction I’m trying to get at, here, which motivates the difference between capitalism and, not even socialism or communism necessarily, but just between capitalism and other systems. That core ideological divide, that belief in chasing capital as a right, that’s what I’m trying to get at.