[kragen]

In almost any version of Democracy, an authoritarian politician can choose to run for office on a platform of establishing a dictatorship; in most of them, they can even succeed. That doesn't make the would-be dictator a democrat, and it doesn't make their platform a democratic platform. Similarly, free-market incentives to lobby for government monopolies don't make monopolies capitalistic, because capitalism requires a free market, and monopolies and monopsonies are the opposite of a free market.

Marx called this sort of thing "the internal contradictions of capitalism"; he argued that capitalism was an inherently unstable structure, just as many writers have argued that democracy was inherently unstable. They might be right. But in either case, the possible fact that one system inevitably gives rise to its opposite doesn't make it the same as its opposite.

[pessimizer]

If the premise is that being elected dictator in a free and fair election is undemocratic, it's an authoritarian premise. It presumes that elections are only democratic to the extent that the results agree with some "democratic values" that are separate from the process of having elections.

I agree that the outcomes of democracy can be bad. But I don't believe that bad and undemocratic are synonymous.

[kragen]

I don't think that the election is undemocratic, no. I think that when the new dictator bans all opposition parties, dissolves the parliament, replaces judges with his allies, and starts having the police shut down newspapers and torture dissidents, that's undemocratic, even if the dictator was democratically elected in the first place, and even if what the dictator is doing is not bad.

[cloudfifty]

You're missing the forest for the trees. This is what Capitalism has always been and always will be due to its incentive structure. If you accept wealth and thus power concentration, you accept market manipulation. The corps won't skip this due to some overarching ideological free-market reason. That's just naive.

I mean, just look at the jungle of regulations and the vast inefficient bureaucracy of the US healthcare system. Those 15k layers of shite can only happen with just as many corps doing everything to either save their profits or trying to get as large a piece of the cake as possible. Public good be damned.

Say if the US gov planned to add $100 per patient in some grant for whatever reason. How much do you think would actually trickle down to the patient? I'd be like nervously donating $100 to a dodgy charity in a corrupt developing nation in the 1960s.

[kragen]

This is an absolutist fallacy. The fact that no capitalist market has ever been free of market power doesn't mean that they all function just as badly as Brezhnev-era Soviet "markets" or the US healthcare "market". There are actually existing markets that are more capitalist and less capitalist. Markets mostly organized around government-granted monopolies are by definition failing at capitalism.

I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.

[cloudfifty]

> This is an absolutist fallacy.

Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage.

> I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.

You're missing the point entirely. The comparison if ofc with what would happen if e.g. a Nordic government would do the same thing under a system of universal healthcare.

[kragen]

Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are. Actors in all of these sectors, even the noncapitalist ones, engage in lobbying and other forms of anticompetitive behavior, but they generally aren't successful in obtaining monopoly or monopsony power and thus ending capitalism where it exists.

Sectors that lack competitive markets include the military, healthcare in much of the world, banking, and most of telecommunications.

I agree that business (not just capitalism!) creates incentives to destroy free markets, just as politics creates incentives to destroy democracy. When actors succeed in following those incentives, that ends capitalism by eliminating competitive markets, which prevents the price system from being used to allocate resources. Competitive markets and the price system are central characteristics of capitalism; where they fail to exist, what you have is not capitalism, but something else.

At this point I'm starting to repeat myself, because I've already explained this about as clearly as I know how, and you still apparently don't understand.

[cloudfifty]

That's like saying that a Leninist system stops being Leninist when its vanguard inevitably becomes corrupted, because its vanilla state is - in theory - democratic. But that's ridiculous, each system should be held accountable for the outcome of its incentive system, not just its vanilla state.

[kragen]

If a Leninist system institutes free-market capitalism, as in China, it stops being Leninist, however dictatorial it may still be. As it happens, in this case the incentives usually run to the preservation of the system rather than its extinguishment.

The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism.

I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?

[denton-scratch]

> Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are

You seem to be relying on a rather narrow definition of "capitalism".

[kragen]

The bit you quoted is the definition made up by the folks who invented the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology

But the standard definition I'm using has evolved a bit and is somewhat richer. Quoting the Wikipedia definition:

> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

I think that is a very good and uncontroversial definition of "capitalism", and that is the one I am using. It sounds like you have some non-mainstream definition in mind?