Sure, there are all sorts of problems with capitalism. But as Churchill said about democracy, it the worst form of economic organization except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better. They're out doing the US in most important metrics, and they're trending more Socialist (though we'll see what intensifying climate migration and other climate change consequences bring).
I think that it is. Socialism is where the workers own the means of production. I think a democracy that's nationalized significant industries fits that description, e.g. France:
> 1982 François Mitterrand's proposals in the 110 Propositions for France and alliance with Jean-Pierre Chevènement's Socialist Party faction CERES, committed France to an explicitly socialist ‘rupture with capitalism’. Full nationalisation (100%): the Compagnie Générale d'Electricité, the Compagnie Générale de Constructions Téléphoniques, Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann, Rhône-Poulenc, Saint-Gobain-Pont-à-Mousson, Thompson-Brandt. Partial nationalisation (51%+): Dassault, Honeywell-Bull, Matra, Roussel-Uclaf, Sacilor, Usinor. Thirty-nine banks, two financial houses, and the remaining 49% of the SNCF were also nationalised, taking the size of the French state to unprecedented levels within a year of Mitterrand's election as president in 1981.
>Socialism is where the workers own the means of production.
Clearly that is not the case in any European country.
>Dassault
Literally family owned.
I don't think you realize just how capitalist European countries really are. State owned corporations are usually quite rare and generally known for being run extremely badly. On the other hand many of the largest corporations are still controlled by the families of their founders.
> Eh I would say Socialism as practiced in Western Europe and the Nordics is doing better
It is not an easy comparison.
They have the luxury of the US taxpayers taking care of their defense while they propped up Russia, which US is also paying the most by a large margin to fix now [1, 2, 3]. Hilariously US socialists are against US defense spending except when it comes to US spending on Europe.
They also have the luxury of oil money which American "socialists" are totally against [4].
Edit: All of what I say is objective. Luxurious Western Europe and Nordic "socialism" can't survive without gullible US taxpayers footing the bill over decades.
Arguably the US caused the Russia problem with the aggressive expansion of NATO, and the failure to defend Crimea, so this seems fair. Also the US produces a bonkers amount of oil; dunno what your point is here.
EDIT: how could I forget Trump's undermining of NATO, cozying up to Russia, and withholding aid to Ukraine?
Anyone who thinks that, say, Denmark is not a mixed economy with a strong bit of capitalism as well as a strong social safety net has never dealt with a kid who wants to buy lots of Lego.
> There are important differences between Denmark and the US though.
On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
They're both WEIRD countries with market based-economies and a social safety net. They both end up at the top of the lists on economic power (adjusted for population).
The differences between them are political fine-tuning of the system to target an extra 5-10% of the population with the safety net, or to target those people in different ways. That's incredibly minor in terms of economic systems.
When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
> On the human level, sure. On the level of "fundamental economic system" (which is, I believe, the line of discussion), there really aren't.
One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This dynamic is so common it has become a trope - kneejerk cries of "socialism". The original link that kicked off this comment tree was basically doing the same thing in more words.
The distinction between the motte and the bailey is easiest to see when aspects that we associate with capitalism end up in direct opposition to capitalism itself. For example, free markets can be directly opposed to capitalism, like in the context of imaginary property. A capital-centric view says that inventing a new form of capital out of whole cloth is the right thing to do. A market-centric view says that competition should drive the cost of information to within an epsilon of the copying/distribution cost.
> One of the problems with this whole "debate" is that defenders of the status quo apply a huge motte and bailey to the definition of "capitalism". Both strawmanning any criticism of it as a rejection of all aspects claimed by capitalism, and also giving capitalism credit for systems that share some aspects of capitalism even though they haven't gone all-in and let capital run roughshod over everything else.
This is a fair call-out, given that there's so much drive-by arguing on the internet.
I'm pretty sure I'm using a standard definition, but let me state the definition I'm using just to be as explicit as possible: A system is capitalist if it has private ownership of the means of production.
So, to give an example, a country would be a capitalist country regardless of their tax scheme/welfare spending so long as the means of production were privately held. Another country that nationalized industries (the oil industry is a common one) would be, at the very least, a mixed-economy, regardless of how free their markets are.
Given the above comments on Europe, I would argue that European countries do meet the definition of capitalist for the most part. While some European countries do completely nationalize a handful of industries, it's rare, and the majority of industries are privately owned, even if they are highly regulated.
If people actually bothered to read the link I posted, it is all about the lazy blaming of a wide variety of problems with specific solutions on a very hand-wavy "capitalism".
I know a fair bit about about the housing shortage for instance, and it's not "capitalism". It's a specific set of rules and institutions that cause the problem.
There are large differences though. The US poverty rate is 2.5x higher than Denmark's (15% to 6%). Denmark's life expectancy is 6 years longer. The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
> When comparing two different economic systems, you tend to see differences on the order of "mass-famines" and "percentage of the population involved in subsistence farming".
There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
> The kinds of policies you'd need to close that gap in the US would be transformative.
I disagree. When laid against things like the end of mercantilism, I don't think that qualifies as transformative.
I think the effects would look pretty much like the existing US system, because Denmark looks pretty close to the current US system by the standards we're talking about. If you want to argue they'd be fundamentally different, you can make a case, but I'd like to know why they would produce different results.
> There are plenty of capitalist countries that do a lot of subsistence farming.
Do you have some examples? The areas I'm aware of that practice subsistence farming, don't have a long history of leaving the means of production alone in private hands for very long.
A core element of socialism is that all industries and natural resources are state-owned. European countries are capitalist, not socialist, and got where they are by being so.
Anytime this point comes up, someone on the right/Republican will say any taxation is Socialism, that Europe is Socialist. So, to compare Europe/Nordic socialist policies, to US policies is not a large leap. You can't just say, "well technically that isn't really socialism so we can't use that as an example in this argument", when literally for a decade the 'right' has specifically called them socialist.
Minor quibble. The industries generally need to only be "socially-owned" rather than state-owned. Though I will admit that state-ownership is the most common in practice.
More of an academic point though, as Europe, as a whole, is still basically completely capitalist under this definition as well.
Edit: An example of a socially-owned company that is not state-owned would be an employee owned company.
> - European social democracies are trending more socialist all the time
Eh? Which ones? As a European this is very much news to be; not much seizing of the means of production going on. If anything, some divesting of the means of production; heavily regulated privatisation of state energy, transport etc monopolies has been going on all over Western Europe for a while.
I realise that in the US, the colloquial definition of ‘socialist’ these days is more or less “not actively going around kicking poor people”, but the idea that Europe is becoming more socialist by any reasonable definition is a bit out there.
There's a recent rightward shift for sure, but long term benefits are increasing, unions are gaining power, and you're seeing people use democracy to force industry to adopt green policies. This is the power dynamic described by socialism: people control companies, not the other way around.
This is a ranking of economic freedom which strongly aligns with capitalism. The U.S. ranks 25th behind European countries like Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Iceland, etc.
I mean, fuck Churchill and that quote, constantly abused to protect a horrible system by people who are too deep in it to even conceive an alternative.