[cpursley]

How would it be in a corporations interest to abuse either their employers or customers in a competitive market? Last time I checked, I have many product and employment choices (with the exception of select industries ruled by cronyism). Last time I checked, Stalinist USSR murdered far more people than McDonalds or Ford.

[_khau]

> How would it be in a corporations interest to abuse either their employers or customers in a competitive market?

Ask AT&T and Verizon. Or Facebook. Or Monsanto. Or Nestle why they behave the way they do towards their customers.

You guys have WAY too much faith the benign passivity of publicly-traded companies. There is a LOT of money to be made in price-fixing, cartels and customer abuse.

And I'm not sure why you're bringing the USSR into this. This is almost a Godwin-like reprieve for those with no awareness of the 10-20 million people a year who die as a result of capitalism and capitalist policies, globally.

How about the US itself? It has murdered almost 20 million people since the end of World War 2 in its efforts to maintain its economic hegemony and take revenge on countries that leave the petrodollar.

The US, most aggressive and expansionist nation of the 20th and 21st centuries, is a capitalist country that can't even provide many of its citizens with clean drinking water.

"Capitalism is the worst system, apart from all the others" is a common refrain amongst those capitalism actually serves. They make no mention of the lives destroyed when a capitalist wants what you have.

But we move off topic.

[cpursley]

I don't disagree with the bad behavior by the US since WWII (and period before it as well).

But you'll need to provide a source for:

> the 10-20 million people a year who die as a result of capitalism and capitalist policies

And are you so sure those are capitalistic policies, or cronyism (the two are often conflated by the hn crowd)?

[_khau]

I'll find sources for my numbers after work, but I recall:

- 8 million due to lack of clean water

- 7.5 million due to hunger

- 3 million from preventable disease

- the millions killed by 'friendly dictators' and their regimes, like Pinochet.

- the unrecorded deaths as a result of national or global depressions, bankruptcies and debt (don't know where to get the numbers for this though)

Capitalism is a global system at this point, apart from the odd hold-out like North Korea etc. A lot of the deaths from lack of clean water and disease are attributable to things like the privatisation of water supply in Bolivia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization_in_Bolivia

Then we have Chiquita, Coca-Cola etc. hiring miltias to crack down on labour movements in Central and South America resulting in countless murders. How did they get away with it?

Most of the deaths caused by capitalism are due something called 'structural violence':

It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.

So, clean water, healthcare and access to medicine. Something that capitalism has failed spectacularly at.

If you're going to say the crony capitalism we have now isn't capitalism then that's as much a No True Scotsman fallacy as people who say true communism has never been tried.

What we have now is capitalism by the very definition of the word. The cronyism inherent in it isn't some transforming influence, it's part of the core.

I was going to write up a massive post but this guys seems to sum it up pretty well if you fancy a read:

https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-...

[cpursley]

Ok then, what's your suggestion for fixing this or an alternative system?

[_khau]

The first step would be admitting that capitalism is far from perfect and that we should start looking to change it.

Of course, a sustained decades-long propaganda campaign has been waged to portray capitalism as not only 'the natural way' but also as being 'simply the only option', as if it is axiomtically good and natural.

Some have even tried to spin it as capitalism being a core part of the human condition, and fighting against it resulting in things like the millions dead under communist economic mismanagement.

I personally think you'd have to be a moron to believe that capitalism is the same as simple trade which humans have been doing for millenia, especially considering capitalism is a man-made economic concept that originated in the 1700's and has an actual dictionary definition; but it seems we are surrounded by the gullible.

I don't have an alternative system ready for you. I'm not a political scientist or a revolutionary. That doesn't mean I can't see when something isn't working for everybody and needs improvement.

The biggest disservice we have done to ourselves is to believe free-market fundamentalists like Hayek, Friedman, Thatcher ansd Reagan when they told us that there is simply no alternative.

Friedman's monetarism has been widely discredited as bullshit by now. It's time to question the rest of the neoliberal ideology.

[nilskidoo]

Step 1: Full-on civil war and overthrowing the federal government. People are kidding themselves thinking it will demand anything less.

[itronitron]

>> in a competitive market

Not all markets are competitive, and corporations that are operating at the state level are often effectively monopolies.

[cpursley]

I don't disagree. But tech is one of, if not the most, competitive sector right now.