The Rich and Powerful Who Abuse the System: the contempt topic

[polishgenius]

The Saudi investments in foreign sports/culture/anything else are only tangenially related to capitalism and could be considered (I don't know enough to speak on this with certainty, but I've seen convincing arguments) a direct and pretty desperate attempt to save the country. Essentially Saudi Arabia is surrounded by hostile powers, and they know that once the world is no longer dependent on oil, which will happen, they won't have the leverage over the superpowers that affords them the protection they currently do. So they're doing everything they can to buy cultural capital in an effort to make invading or overthrowing them in however many decades time that comes to pass still an undesirable thing to do in the eyes of the world. 

[Zorral]

Funny how there is no data provided by Saudi for 

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.NAHC?locations=SA

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/saudi-arabia-riyadh-poverty-inequality

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/12/23/vision-2030-and-poverty-in-saudi-arabia

[Kalbear]

55 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I am not at all a supporter of capitalism. I certainly don't think it can or should function without balances on it, like many in this topic. I just don't think it developing the way it has is the only possible way it could have developed. 

Again, capitalism's very basis - Adam Smith's thesis - was based around the firm. Corporations of various flavors and colors have existed in all sorts of forms for centuries now, possibly longer depending on what you want to count them as, but make no mistake - an entity that exists to generate wealth (instead of just a single person) is a fundamental basis point of capitalism. 

[Kalbear]

23 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

The Saudi investments in foreign sports/culture/anything else are only tangenially related to capitalism and could be considered (I don't know enough to speak on this with certainty, but I've seen convincing arguments) a direct and pretty desperate attempt to save the country. Essentially Saudi Arabia is surrounded by hostile powers, and they know that once the world is no longer dependent on oil, which will happen, they won't have the leverage over the superpowers that affords them the protection they currently do. So they're doing everything they can to buy cultural capital in an effort to make invading or overthrowing them in however many decades time that comes to pass still an undesirable thing to do in the eyes of the world. 

The Saudi investments are made possible almost entirely by capitalism, and explicitly are a great example about how capitalism and the goals of a growth system necessitate exploitation of the environment to as much as possible. The playbook of 'destroy things, make others pay for it and use the money to go to the next thing to destroy' is a pretty capitalistic pattern. 

It's also a good example of how wealth is not just other people being rich. The wealthy have their own priorities.

[Ran]

6 minutes ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

The Saudi investments are made possible almost entirely by capitalism,

Ditto the evil Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. Norskjävlar...

[Kalbear]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

Ditto the evil Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. Norskjävlar...

Thanks! I appreciate the backup here. So aside from the money coming from practices that are directly harming the environment the other big takeaway from that is that...that's not what they were doing before, was it? Point of fact per their news feed they only started doing this since 2020. 

And even better, this is a good example of how that wealth is more ethically used by a state or other accountable entity instead of just some random dudes. The bank is 100% owned by the state, right? And presumably it is at least somewhat accountable to their government. Though I'll note that not investing in those causes still leaves them with investments in a whole host of other shitty corporations like Nestle. 

If Norway's government wanted to, tomorrow, invest that in flying to Mars they could. Or...they could invest it entirely in China. Or they could just decide to buy media companies and broadcast far-right propaganda. That's not great, but at least it's held in more check by the state. Still, I'm not sure that saying how a country using the funds it made on the market by getting fossil fuels - to invest in other companies is quite the proof that capitalism doesn't cause harm.

[Ran]

18 minutes ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

The bank is 100% owned by the state, right?

As is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Since we now know that states or other accountable entities are better than random people, I guess they're both okay after all.

18 minutes ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

to invest in other companies is quite the proof that capitalism doesn't cause harm

All economic systems cause harms, and so far I've seen no evidence that capitalism is uniquely harmful compared to any other substantial economic system that can actually sustain modern society.

As far as I can see, every single person in the thread appears to actually admit that capitalism is all right when correctly regulated. We are all capitalist dirigists together.

 

Edited September 18, 2023 by Ran

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

As is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Since we now know that states or other accountable entities are better than random people, I guess they're both okay after all.

Except I didn't say that they're both okay, they're just better. More accurately I should have said that the state should be democratically accountable. But both have problems! Both are not 'okay'! Norway is less bad, but you're still talking about a system that is run on generating wealth by destroying the environment. 

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

All economic systems cause harms, and so far I've seen no evidence that capitalism is uniquely harmful compared to any other substantial economic system that can actually sustain modern society.

I would probably want citations on what other economic systems you're comparing. I do appreciate the incredibly small narrowing of the comparison to substantial and modern society; you've almost guaranteed that your only options are capitalism and planned economies since that's as far as I can tell the only two economic systems that have been tried during modern times at any level.

And ya know, if you want to argue about how great capitalism is compared to planned economies that's fine, but that ain't what I've been talking about at all. I will say this, however - a planned economy has one major factor that is pretty awesome compared to capitalism - it has at its core people actually planning it for goals for something other than pure wealth gain. This would be one of those intrinsic parts of capitalism that is uniquely harmful - capitalism has the goal of increasing wealth. It does not have a direct goal of increasing prosperity or life span or the success of a country or anything else. The end result is that unless those things have monetary value they are meaningless to a capitalist economy. Planned economies can at least have a plan that does not involve the wanton destruction of the world; capitalism cannot without directly imposing severe regulation. And as we've seen that regulation is opposed by capitalists every possible chance it can be.

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

As far as I can see, every single person in the thread appears to actually admit that capitalism is all right when correctly regulated. We are all capitalist dirigists together.

I'll be explicit, then - I don't think that capitalism is all right when correctly regulated. It's just less bad. It may also be the best we've got but that doesn't make it good or even all right. I may be resigned to having to keep it in existence because as it turns out changing a global economy to do something not in the best interests of the owners of the wealth is a bit difficult. 

Maybe that's a good way to say it, Ran - that the things that make capitalism tolerable are also always opposed by capitalists whenever they possibly can, and that in turn gives the wealthy more power to oppose more regulations in the future. That is a very unique thing about capitalism compared to other economic systems - that when everything is buyable and sellable the ones with the most money have the most power. 

[Zorral]

41 minutes ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

Maybe that's a good way to say it, Ran - that the things that make capitalism tolerable are also always opposed by capitalists whenever they possibly can, and that in turn gives the wealthy more power to oppose more regulations in the future. That is a very unique thing about capitalism compared to other economic systems - that when everything is buyable and sellable the ones with the most money have the most power. 

Well said.

and NO! not everyone here thinks capitalism is the most excellent, because it isn't ever regulated, not really, because PROFIT always ends up becoming the only value and measurement and goal.

Edited September 18, 2023 by Zorral

[Ran]

8 minutes ago, Zorral said:

because PROFIT always ends up becoming the only value and measurement and goal.

Nonsense. Growth and productivity are also valued goals!

[Larry of the Lawn]

34 minutes ago, Ran said:

Nonsense. Growth and productivity are also valued goals!

Which are also famously good for the environment.

[Kalbear]

This did put me down a rabbit hole of looking at post-capitalist economic models and alternatives. Especially weird was going down the hole of seeing the nonviolent proposals - where violence is defined effectively as coercion forced via a state or other agency - and how they want to deal with things. (Spoiler alert, it assumes a spherical human)

The most promising ones to me look like systems where virtually everything is state-owned and most businesses are run as effective democracies, with the ability for private businesses to be made but only to be sold to the state as an option. I thought that was especially interesting because it means that while corporations can, in theory, exist, in practice they would end up being pretty small. 

It does, of course, require a state (and therefore violence) but I'm not that concerned about that honestly.

[Conflicting Thought]

3 minutes ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

The most promising ones to me look like systems where virtually everything is state-owned and most businesses are run as effective democracies, with the ability for private businesses to be made but only to be sold to the state as an option. 

Socialism?

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Socialism?

Not quite. The workers don't actually own the factories in this model, they just run them. And there are some private enterprises allowed as well. More details on it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy#:~:text=Economic democracy (sometimes called a,includes workers%2C consumers%2C suppliers%2C. It still uses a form of market economy, but the other big principles of capitalism - private ownership of wealth and property and people working for others as the way they make a living - are not there.

[Rippounet]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I've written it every possible way I can, the very basic economic reasons why wealth is not zero sum,

I genuinely don't know what you mean. I don't believe you have explained the mechanism(s) by which an individual or a country becoming "wealthy" benefits other individuals or other countries, only given approximative examples where this is supposed to be the case. It's not the same thing.
The reason I don't want to press the issue further is because I have read analyses of these mechanisms, but I'd have prefered somebody else to formulate them to better evaluate these analyses - that are still a bit fresh to me, and tbh, deal with economic notions that are a bit challenging. In the spirit of fairness, here's some of the questions that are related to such questions, from JK Galbraith's Money:

Quote

Where does ecoonomic change originate ? Does it begin with those who are responsible for money – in this case with those who made loans and thus caused the supply of notes and deposits to increase ? (From this then comes the effect on prices and production, including the stimulating effect of rising prices on production and trade.) Or does change begin with the production ? Does it originate in business activity and prices with consequent effect on the demand for loans and thence on the supply of notes and deposits, which is to say the supply of money ? In short, does money influence the economy or does money respond to the economy ?

To be candid (probably too much for the internet), I find the question of causality can be difficult to grasp when analysing major socio-economic movements over decades or centuries. Our human brain loves causality, but the world doesn't quite work that way. Galbraith himself, when asking these questions, knew full well that they didn't have simple answers, but I do believe that you have to tackle them if you want to explain how wealth can be something else then zero-sum.

 

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

and the only answer you ever give back is 'something something.. the environment' which doesn't really say anything.

Because explaining very basic things is extremely difficult, and if you haven't realized the meaning of climate change by yourself, it's highly unlikely you will be convinced by anyone, especially anyone on the internet, least of all me.

And what is there to explain? All material production has an environmental cost. That's it. It's the lesson we should all have learned by now thanks to climate change, and it makes a mockery of the idea that "economic development" is not a zero-sum game, because it shows how even countries that moved past early-stage capitalism and mitigated the effects of domestic inequality can only do so at the expense of developing or undeveloped nations.
We already knew that colonialism and imperialism had this effect, but we could believe that we were moving past them (at least in the West). Now we know that there was always a heavy cost to industrialism, and that the material "prosperity" that the West is so proud of is deeply flawed, and that other countries embarking on the same path likely ends with catastrophic effects.

Now, Ran seems to be at the other end of the spectrum on this one, so we need to balance this approach:

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Civilization is bad for the environment. Civilization pre-exists capitalism.

For that matter, agriculture? Agriculture manifestly worsened human living conditions for a good long while -- we can see it in the skeletal remains, where individuals were more malnourished and smaller, more riddled with disease, etc. -- and certainly wasn't great for the local environment in many cases. And yet, is agriculture a good? Of course it is! People may have been individually a bit worse off ... but agriculture allowed a lot more of them, it allowed them to concentrate, to form our first cities, our first civilizations, and all the good stuff (and the bad stuff, too) that ensued, such that we are communicating (and even exist) now.People have already provided plenty of evidence that no economic system is actually "good" for the environment, so why are we caring if capitalism is "bad"  for the environment?

It's a question of degree. Yes, human civilization will always have negative environmental impacts, especially if it's technologically-advanced. But an economic system that grants unlimited freedom (or close enough) to large-scale agents (corporations) will still make the environmental impacts far far worse, especially if it places too much value on non-essential production through consumerism.
In a nutshell, destroying the environment to feed people and destroying the environment to provide everyone with the latest iphone and a few lucky ones with private jets are very different beasts.
And this is not just a re-hash of the old debate between capitalism and marxism, because marxism made the exact same mistake in slightly different ways. We now know that mass production was always going to be problematic because it relied on an abundance of raw materials and energy sources (fossil fuels). Marxism (the intellectual approach, not the political one) had things to say about exploitation, but also made the mistake of defining prosperity through material production, so there's only so much it can tell us.
To come back to capitalism, its problem is the way in which it currently places value on destructive/dangerous activities, to such a point that, if we were to actually do something radical about climate change, it would be perceived as a loss of value and prosperity.
Now, as I said I don't have a magical go-to solution, but a good place to start would be to acknowledge that industrialization and mass production are so bad that regulation won't always be enough to make them sustainable. Attacking unregulated capitalism is supposed to be easy, because we know its adverse effects well, so attacking the most extreme profit-seeking schemes like finance or planned obsolescence is supposed to be more consensual than starting to deconstruct our notions of civilization. I also believe it's a good idea to start with moderate attacks on economic liberty - at least while we can.

All this being said, I do agree that on the current trajectory, debating the merits and evils of  "capitalism" may quickly seem fairly ridiculous, because it will be increasingly obvious to everyone that our predicament goes beyond that. But in the meantime, again, some of the worst consequences of capitalism should be low-hanging fruits, and dealing with them first would pave the way for more radical evolutions when necessary.

[Tywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Nonsense. Growth and productivity are also valued goals!

It all depends.

Growth for the sake of growth that's not distributed across the economic classes leads to a lot of problems.

Increasing productivity is a great thing, but it should lead to people having to work less while making more. If it doesn't you open up a Pandora's box that I fear will happen over the next few decades.

[Zorral]

30 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

open up a Pandora's box that I fear will happen over the next few decades.

It's definitely happening right this minute.  Right along with climate catastrophe.  Welcome to Europe's Dark Ages, 560's or so to at least the Charlemagne renaissance, as some call it.  Pandemics, climate change, warlordism -- it's been said by many historians the worst century in which to have lived in Europe was the 7th.

Anyone who thinks capitalism wlll fix this, well . . . .

Edited September 19, 2023 by Zorral

[Rippounet]

It seems almost impossible to face the catastrophes to come, not just because the socio-economic system is proving inadequate to do so, but because its inherent unfairness means the masses are unlikely to consent to individuals efforts to preserve it. As long as the people at the top will not lead by example, we will remain stuck in this slow slide toward a dystopian future.

[Tywin et al.]

9 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

It seems almost impossible to face the catastrophes to come, not just because the socio-economic system is proving inadequate to do so, but because its inherent unfairness means the masses are unlikely to consent to individuals efforts to preserve it. As long as the people at the top will not lead by example, we will remain stuck in this slow slide toward a dystopian future.

Don't let the average person off the hook. We're where we are in large part because everyday people simply don't give a fucking shit and/or won't do anything about it. Are elites using this to their advantage? Of course, but it would be easy to prevent this if people simply made a collective effort to do so. 

[SeanF]

3 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

This did put me down a rabbit hole of looking at post-capitalist economic models and alternatives. Especially weird was going down the hole of seeing the nonviolent proposals - where violence is defined effectively as coercion forced via a state or other agency - and how they want to deal with things. (Spoiler alert, it assumes a spherical human)

The most promising ones to me look like systems where virtually everything is state-owned and most businesses are run as effective democracies, with the ability for private businesses to be made but only to be sold to the state as an option. I thought that was especially interesting because it means that while corporations can, in theory, exist, in practice they would end up being pretty small. 

It does, of course, require a state (and therefore violence) but I'm not that concerned about that honestly.

A system where almost everything is State-owned seems a lot worse than the current system, to me, and one that could only be maintained by extreme coercion.

Why would I wish to give up my house and business to the government?

And, it’s not a system that people would vote for, in large numbers.  Radical socialist parties (as opposed to social democratic parties) rarely break through 10%.

Edited September 19, 2023 by SeanF