| We disagree a lot but I really like your post. Capitalism is a natural behaviour which emerge in human interactions. As you say, we're social animals and we interact with one another. The problem lies with the "capitalist" states which are not capitalism but crony capitalism, aka just socialism with extra steps. When a state with regulatory monopoly and a monopoly of violence exists, you can't have pure capitalism. Big businesses will just corrupt the government and you'll end up in a system where the top dogs can keep everyone else poor and under control - while still believing their democratic vote is worth anything. I don't think Marxism is a solution, for the simple reason that human beings are not perfect: they are corruptible and as soon as you end up having an institution with the power to do something for a large number of people, you'll have power and corruption.
Marxism is great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to the same system we live in where top dogs eat small dogs. The shift we really need is decentralisation. No centralised governments. People trading with people and exchanging services and goods with no third parties stealing a part. Healthcare and protection (and private protection agencies offering different sets of laws) being sold and insured like any other services. Voluntary charity to help those in needs instead of mandatory taxes. We need to have the smallest entities possible so that there won't be someone far away deciding what you can and cannot do.
In a world without taxes, big companies won't have ways of avoiding taxes and shift them to the upper middle class, they won't have someone to corrupt to prevent innovation. The answer for social networks is, again, decentralisation.
The systems we have now (eg. mastodon) are still immature but, unless Facebook pay some government to introduce even more laws to comply with (GDPR comes to mind), a good decentralised competitors is going to come up, eventually. Everyone should have their own server with their own data and communicate with other users on their own servers. |
Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion?
I hear this sentiment often, but I've never understood how anyone could think so little of other people and (evidently) themselves.
It sounds like you're saying you can't even trust yourself to resist corruption in a position of power, which strikes me as pure cynicism.
Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative.