| > It should be uncontroversial to state that that arrangement has facilitated extraordinary increases in global prosperity. No it did not. Market economy combined with the positive feedback loop between science and productivity were the key components. They helped bring about prosperity for at least several thousand years. Recent fad of factory owner(s) hiring other people, paying them wages and skimming the difference is actually a net drag. > I'd like to hear just one example of a society which does not have capitalism (as defined by the ability to risk capital in hopes of future profits) which is a nice place to live. And if there is none because our societies co-evolved and at the present moment in history it is the universally dominant economical and political model? You sound like a person who would ask for an example of a non-feudal state in medieval Europe to prove the point that having a king is the best arrangement ever. You can risk something else than capital ("time of people who do what I tell them to"), for example your own time. With that, everyone can risk something important to them to try to build something better and we don't even need a special social class to bravely take on the risk ("of wasting time of people who have to listen to them or starve"). Wooooot?! Maybe we would have some such societies, if fascists in Europe and then fascists in US did not take great care to crush them. http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/0.html |
Or maybe, instead of that that, those other societies just sucked.
Given that lots of societies have attempted and failed at non capitalist systems, how about instead of inventing excuses we can just use that as evidence that those other non capitalist systems are bad.