That goes beyond capitalism. People are just selfish. The hoarding of wealth was a thing way before capitalism. I think the left sort of shoots itself in the foot by obsessing over capitalism and ignoring the much deeper cause of a lot of societal ills. Being evil is part of human nature, just as much as being benevolent is.
Not really.
There have been extensive sociological studies over this. Condition in a capitalist society and the promotion of the “homo economicus” model continually reinforces “greediness” and leads to people in capitalist societies being far “greedier” on average.
It isn’t a natural thing, it is conditioned. Obviously everyone is greedy to an extent. But in anthropological examinations of different forms of societies, altruism scored far higher than greediness in non-capitalistic societies.
Kate Raworth, Oxford Economist, wrote an excellent chapter about this in her book called “doughnut economics”. The chapter is “Nurture Human Nature”.
The view that all humans are greedy and rational was promoted by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and is the precursing foundation of capitalism. But modern economics have rejected this view as it has been proven to be inaccurate, and increasingly rely on theoretical models built within behavioural economics.
I seriously encourage everyone to read this book, even if you read it back in school and found it boring. It’s incredibly topical to this day.
I also just read In Dubious Battle for the first time and recommend it. A great illustration on why it’s so hard to get together and organize when it seems like it should be easy.
I seriously encourage everyone to read this book, even if you read it back in school and found it boring. It’s incredibly topical to this day.
I haven’t. But I may at some point.
My English teacher would look at me with that demonizing look because I knew how economics work and wanted some explanation of various leftist views with logic in it, not that emotion of hate and envy and indignation and “you stupid capitalism bad meat good stick bad strawberry good mushroom strange”, it got especially absurd when I got accused of not watching TV as if that made me dumber. Without such explanations being given, I naturally felt closer towards anarcho-capitalism, because I love freedom and the logic of economics and morals known to me supported it. And they also very clearly didn’t love freedom (it takes away the feeling of authority of a certain kind of cowardly people), so I would be kinda hated.
Bad memories, in short.
I wrote a long clumsy text, tldr - one should be very careful with regulations, since in some sense they are what led us here. Strong anti-monopoly regulations - yes, splitting big companies and even franchises - yes, corporate death penalty - yes, reforming (or abolishing) patent and trademark and IP laws - yes, labor regulations - yes, some quality control (not selling “dairy products” completely from palm oil or something) - yes. But any regulatory apparatus is a target for bribes and regulations working in the opposite direction.
I knew how economics work
you mean you knew that it is a system of myth making by the preistly class, with no predictive power?
I naturally felt closer towards anarcho-capitalism, because I love freedom and the logic of economics
oh. you’re just a religious fanatic.
Damn it, Bobby Capitalism.
In today’s world every person who starves, who does without, who suffers unnecessarily…
Does so only because someone wants it so . Not because there is not enough
