[rbanffy]

Capitalism is a wonderful thing, but only when the social benefit of a service is well aligned with the profit of realizing that benefit. When they are completely misaligned, they may pretend to do a job while they are actually doing a very different one.

[ltbarcly3]

"Capitalism" is totally orthogonal to this, any alternative to capitalism requires the use of force to confiscate carrots from one person to give carrots to someone else, by definition (replace carrots with whatever you grow on your farm or make at work all day). This sort of scheme is so unnatural to human psychology that it can only persist where there is a total lack of any criticism, which means there is no 'media' whatsoever in non capitalist countries, there is only state propaganda.

You might say "what about slavery", and you would be correct, except that this makes my point perfectly. It was illegal to teach a slave to read, at a time when the only media was newspapers and the written word. Why did they have to prevent slaves from having access to media? Because the system was so unnatural to human psychology that it could only persist while there was no media whatsoever.

So talking about 'media' in an environment besides 'capitalism' doesn't even make sense.

[throwawayjava]

> "Capitalism" is totally orthogonal to this

The rest of your post fails to substantiate this claim. Concretely, the "this" that you claim is orthogonal to capitalism is that:

>> When [social benefit of a service is completely misaligned aligned with the profit of realizing that benefit], they may pretend to do a job while they are actually doing a very different one.

Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not reward profit-making. It is certainly true, as you note, that there are other ways in which the distribution of reward warps behaviors even in systems that aren't organized around profit-making.

But the problem of social benefit being misaligned specifically with profit-making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem. Witness e.g. the fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and attempting to solve this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about your own biases and value systems. People who grow up and are successful in other political/value systems tend to say similar things about their own milieu.

[ltbarcly3]

> The rest of your post fails to substantiate this claim.

Re-reading what you posted I have to agree with this.

>Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not reward profit-making.

There are few examples of such systems and they are extremely unstable, there are certainly no examples surviving more than a hundred years or so.

> Witness e.g. the fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and attempting to solve this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

All systems end up solving all problems with a patchwork of laws and regulations, except the problems that go away by themselves, or the problems that are not addressed at all.

> But the problem of social benefit being misaligned specifically with profit-making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem.

Again, this is just a tautology. Above you effectively define capitalism as the system that rewards profit-making. So any feature of any system that is specific to profit making can only exist in capitalism in the structure you set up, so it's not a meaningful claim at all.

> Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about your own biases and value systems.

No, this is simply not the case. If you think that mammals don't inherently have a concept of personal property you should see how my dog reacts when the cat is sleeping in her bed. We have to spend countless hours teaching children to share, not because it is natural for them, but because what is natural for them is not adaptive to life in a society. Our social structures have evolved much faster than our biology.