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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36828107
ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:
"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.
Period.
If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.
There is no pro-capitalist Left. That’s a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."
Firstly, I challenge the assumption that efficiency is the most important goal. This was addressed very convincingly almost 70 years ago in The Affluent Society:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
This book explains that we should not use the same policies for a society which is constantly struggling on a knife edge between starvation and death. That was not the reality 70 years ago and is much less tha case today.
Even if we assume that efficiency is the most important goal, what you are actually arguing for is well-designed markets as the tool to achieve that. I question even this, since a profitable company is by definition less efficient than one that makes little or no profit, since profit is the extra wealth that the company extracts after paying all bills.
Even if we assume that a for profit market is the best way to manage resources and achieve efficiency, capitalism is fundamentally a bad model for that, since practices like hiding information from consumers or capturing regulators are great ways to increase profits without improving efficiency or managing resources effectively.
tl;dr fuck capitalism. 😉
I agree that a hyper focus on efficiency is a bad plan. At the same time, we would need some corrective mechanism.
A good example would be food preference. Say you have 3 food options, A,B and C. A is the easiest to produce, but bland. B and C are more difficult and so more limited. Some people love B but hate C, others vice versa. Some people would happily just have A, and use the excess value on other luxuries. How do you resolve this?
A limited capital based system would find it easy. Each person has an assigned value. They can choose how to distribute it. This dynamically finds the fairest distribution. By passing it to the farmers, they can choose how to direct effort.
As for regulatory capture, etc. That’s a sign that capitalism is getting out of control. It’s akin to your curtains starting to smoulder. It needs to be used like fire on a wooden ship, with extreme care and control.
I guess we’ll never know if the system you describe here would work, since it has never existed. Companies have been using induced demand, loss leaders, cross subsidies, bundling, marketing, and a million other similar tricks to limit consumers access to knowledge and confuse them since long before Adam Smith fantasized about capital as the best of all possible worlds.