[jpab]

I don't think that follows.

To conclude that these are properties of capitalism you need to examine both capitalist and non-capitalist societies and observe that capitalist societies exhibit poverty, crime and violence (true), and that non-capitalist societies don't (false).

[phaemon]

Not really. If I state that humans are mammals and one of their properties is that they need to breathe air, I'm under no obligation to demonstrate that there are mammals that don't breathe air. And nor does the existence of non-mammals that do breathe air invalidate my point.

But I understand your point that perhaps these are not necessarily inherent to Capitalism. I believe they are, as Capitalism structurally enforces inequality which inevitably leads to these things.

[qayxc]

> Capitalism structurally enforces inequality which inevitably leads to these things

That's of course nonsense. It's human nature that enforces inequality, which doesn't necessarily lead to crime and violence either because again - human nature does.

Every social animal displays hierarchical structures, that's just biology. I don't know why so many people hold the belief that humans are special somehow and above biology.

Every economical, political, and social system will result in some form of inequality, if only because education, training, and skill need to be rewarded unless of course, you are willing to trade fairness for equality.

Finally, crime and violence aren't the result of (economical) inequality. They are correlated, sure, but crime isn't limited to property crimes and most of the other crimes don't need inequality.

A crime after all is nothing more than an action, which is defined as being against the law. You can in principle get rid of all crime by abolishing the law...

A similar story applies to violence.

[phaemon]

It's not nonsense at all, and nothing you wrote contradicts what I said. You can blame any human activity on "human nature". At one time human nature gave us the slave trade, but we still made slavery illegal. Calling it "human nature" doesn't mean there's nothing we can do about it.

When I say "structurally enforces", I mean that it amplifies the natural urge to have more, or do better, than someone else.

For example, we might say that someone with $100,000 is fairly comfortable. And perhaps someone who's more ambitious might have 10x their wealth. Or, let's be more generous: let's say 100x or even 1000x. That last would give you someone at $100,000,000 which most folk would agree is pretty wealthy.

Bit it's a bit much when you end up with someone who has 10,000,000x the comfortable persons wealth. That's not human nature: that's a structure set up to funnel the wealth that ordinary people have created, to a tiny number of individuals. And I see that as a problem even if you don't.

[qayxc]

> Bit it's a bit much when you end up with someone who has 10,000,000x the comfortable persons wealth. That's not human nature: that's a structure set up to funnel the wealth that ordinary people have created, to a tiny number of individuals. And I see that as a problem even if you don't.

That is not enforced by capitalism, though. Capitalism isn't a single incarnation of an economic system, it's an entire landscape of systems. Crony capitalism isn't the be all and end all - just look at the Gini-coefficient worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient); there are plenty of capitalist countries that do quite well.

> When I say "structurally enforces", I mean that it amplifies the natural urge to have more, or do better, than someone else.

And you base that assessment on what exactly? I happened to have experienced two worlds (communism and capitalism) first hand and I can tell you for a fact that no "amplification of urges" was necessary to have people striving to have more than others.

The main difference is that in communist countries common folk had no way of (legally) getting access to most consumer goods (apart from food and basic supplies).

Corruption, stealing (mostly public property, e.g. from state-owned factories or farms), moonlighting, and under-the-counter sales were the norm and overall everybody suffered the consequences of an economy of scarcity.

This however, didn't stop party officials, former squires, factory directors or high ranking government officials from owning big houses and villas, driving western cars, and having access to luxury goods that were unavailable to the general public (both domestic and imported from the West).

The main difference between capitalism and communism that I experienced are a higher standard of living (in capitalism), less corruption, actual opportunities for those who seek them and much less state sanctioned despotism.

There's downsides, too of course, but I live in a country where it's incredibly difficult (and somewhat frowned upon) to get obscenely rich and many of those that are inherited their wealth (something that could be easily fixed by 100% inheritance tax for sums exceeding some still generous threshold).

That's why I don't see mega-rich people as general problem with capitalism (it's more of a result of a global economy and financial markets anyway - the bulk of most billionaires' wealth is in stocks and options, not actual cash or physical possessions).

Just to give you some perspective on how "shit might go down": there was this guy, Markus Persson, who programmed a computer game that became the best selling computer game to date (200 million copies). He became a billionaire when he sold his company and the rights to the game in 2014.

Then there was this other bloke, John Carmack, who worked on 42 games and created genre-defining masterpieces like Doom. His games sold well, too, but he was 30 years too early and thus "only" became a millionaire (~$60 million).

The difference? Opportunity! Back in the early 1990s there was no internet and (PC) gaming was a niche.

I guess the lesson here is that the size of the market has changed and getting obscenely rich relatively quickly is easier than ever before. But that's just a direct consequence of the average person being wealthier than ever before and thre being more capital around.

[phaemon]

> This however, didn't stop party officials...[gaining massive wealth]...

Well, exactly. And you don't think they earned that wealth, I presume? You think they took it from the ordinary working person. So why are you arguing that this exact same behaviour is acceptable under a Capitalist system?

Your other points are worth addressing and you argue well, but there are too many for one post. I don't like the funneling of wealth that happens with Copyright either, so I'd like to see it abolished, if that answers some of your later stuff.

[c22]

Do you think Carmack could have made 60 million under a communist system? I don't know if he really "earned" it (this seems extremely subjective), but wealth accruing to the people who make cool video games seems better than wealth only accruing to the people who make the rules.

Sure, there's a fair amount of wealth accrual to the people who make the rules in capitalist systems as well--that effect is perhaps orthogonal to the economic system in play, but the fact that capitalism provides opportunities for people to accrue wealth also by their own initiative is what makes it so attractive.

It's definitely not perfect, but what is?