Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dragonwriter 1610 days ago
> In the US we don't have "capitalism", we have "crony capitalism"

The real world system for which the term “capitalism” was coined, was, is, and always has been crony capitalism; the idea of a non-crony capitalism is a utopian fairy tale that was invented to justify real-world capitalism which has never resembled it.

1 comments

The idea of "freedom" and inalienable rights are also utopian fairy tales. There's a reason the guys that wrote the Constitution called it "a more perfect union". We aren't perfect, by we may strive for that ideal.
> The idea of "freedom" and inalienable rights are also utopian fairy tales.

No, they are normative ideals, not fantastical models of how interactions do, or even could, work. Entirely different class of things, even if you disagree with them.

(It's true that people build utopian fairy tales out of them, such as the idea that a society observing certain complexes of multiple and conflicting rights without any tradeoff between them can exist. But the ideas of the rights themselves aren't the utopian fairy tales, they are just a value function.)