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by e5india 2160 days ago
No it would not necessarily be better, on balance. A critique of a system is not meant to be an attack on it nor an argument that there is necessarily some other better system. In fact, I would argue that the difficulty with having these conversations nowadays is precisely your response.

In the American context at least, most of the time when people point out the failures in Capitalism people mean it more in the way that you might point out edge cases that need to be accounted for. The problem in having these conversations is people take it as some rhetorical device meant to actually promote Communism or some other philosophy.

The point OP is making here, as I understand it, is that there is a paradox in a Capitalist system in that if self-interest and profit are at it's core, then by definition that self-interest will override any other consideration to the point that any company will be more than willing to sacrifice any other concern for the possibility of making money.

We have known for the past 30 years at least that China is on a trajectory to surpass or challenge American supremacy and yet corp after corp was willing to send them technical knowledge and jobs that grew their economy to the point that they can build artificial islands in the South China Sea. Let me remind you that we won WW2 primarily on the strength of being able to outproduce our adversaries, not on technological superiority.

So now though, we're super concerned about Chinese influence in the tech industry, specifically. I am worried too, of course you have to be. But it's tremendously silly to act like now it's suddenly a concern and single out one sector or company (e.g. NBA) as if the sacrifice of values in order to make money is not an inherent characteristic of Capitalism.

1 comments

It's not just that capitalism encourages sacrificing other values, it punishes keeping those values since one of your competitors will make the sacrifice and profit