[dontoni]

What exactly is the alternative to capitalism? If you aim for a watered down capitalism with regulations, that’s still capitalism, just not as fast or fully-fledged. In HSL, if you reduce saturation you still have the same hue and thus the same color: it just doesn’t look that aggressive to the eye.

All other alternatives than capitalism or partial capitalism have been ruled out by any country that has anything to do in the world, or for any society in which material well-being is present for the majority of their population.

The fact that ads are annoying doesn’t mean that capitalism is bad or degenerate.

If I have had a bad girlfriend and I’m ugly as hell as to not afford any other, then yes I’ll be prompted to say the relationships market has become degenerate. But probably it’s just that I can’t find good partners on it.

The same if you can’t pay for YouTube Premium, X Premium+ or the like. And precisely because capitalism isn’t degenerate but buoyant, ad-free solutions like Perplexity for search are rising at such a rapid pace it can’t do anything but increase optimism in the future.

[JohnFen]

> What exactly is the alternative to capitalism?

First, I should state up front, I am not remotely anticapitalist. Quite the opposite. However, as practiced in the US right now, capitalism has become a cancer that is distorting and consuming everything and replacing it with the profit motive. We are all poorer for it in many ways, and growing more so. I even think it's become a serious threat to our freedom and liberty.

I think any pure "-ism" is an undesirable thing. Every approach has a degenerate condition that it will trend toward if there isn't a countervailing force. The alternative to capitalism is to mix in the strengths of the other "-isms" and to stop treating capitalism like a religion.

[muzani]

Every "bad government" out there has been a response to capitalism. Communism and fascism sparked from the outcomes of capitalism. Back with uncontrolled capitalism, 8 year old boys were blowing glass.

Capitalist-democracy is what works. When capitalists hoard power, democracy is the sink that redistributes power. Right now, a lot of that power is being held by tech, which is why the interests of the technocrats are opposed to that of the democracy. AI is going to greatly accelerate this process. When the rich also control politics, the remaining solution is violent force, which collapses into communism/fascism.

Most countries are functioning happily on socialism - healthcare and education is available to most, and not restricted to the rich. Debt cycles are illegal.

Ads are also not the nature of the internet. They are a remainder of an era when micropayments were not possible. By default, the world uses freemium now. It's no coincidence that Google rules micro transactions; microtransactions could gradually chip away at ad revenue. Instead of watching an ad for 30 seconds for 30 minutes of game progress, it might be easier to sell that 30 minutes for $0.009.

[dontoni]

Envy has always been a response to successful people, and that doesn’t justify it or undermine the successful.

The hyperinflation that caused turbulences in Germany as well as previous wars aren’t either of them capitalism-like.

Hyperinflation countries suffer it because the government steps in and manipulates the currency. We have the examples of Venezuela and Argentina as the most recent. Germany had the same destiny, although more caused by the constrictions placed on them by the States that won World War I.

Kids blowing glass is caused by poorness rather than capitalism. Precisely now that our capitalists societies created wealth is that we now don’t need to send our children to factories. It’s precisely poor countries the ones that gotta send their children to factories, like certain populations in China. Even before capitalism, children did still worked, yet on farms rather than factories. And their conditions weren’t greater at all either.

Marx wasn’t actually against child labour and he favoured it: he just wanted them to work under socialism and not under capitalists. He actually said that work was essential for the development of those children, but they shouldn’t do it under very poor health conditions. But again, that’s caused by poverty, not capitalism. In the Soviet Union children still worked in practice and conditions weren’t great either.

Regarding health and education, the US is weird because such a system has the absolute worse of markets (having to pay) and socialism (being hyper regulated). Nonetheless, it’s as easy as to fix one or the other. In Switzerland the system is essentially private and doesn’t suck so much. In fact, quite the opposite: it’s much better than most other systems like British or Spanish ones. Here in Spain you can wait 3-4 years for just a diagnosis for a colon cancer. 3-4 years. For the diagnosis only.

In Switzerland you don’t have such long waiting lists and costs are much manageable relative to their living costs.

Most of the US education and health system problems are outrageously caused by the State. As Mises said, every government regulation requires more government regulation, since politicians need to try and palliate the inefficiencies created by them with more regulatory patches.

Even so, how do you define a socialist healthcare system? In Spain or the UK there are private providers of healthcare and actually most of the public administration in Spain (at least the top ranks) are paying one. You could say that if the majority of spending is made by the government it’s socialist-like, and if not it’s capitalist-like. But in the US most of healthcare expenditure is government made, by a small margin. Such a system can’t be considered capitalist, and maybe trying to emulate a more friendly framework like the Swiss could be more beneficial that trying to stack more regulations on top of what the US already suffers.

So either you end hyper regulation and let markets lower prices or you go all in and go with full regulation and no market prices (think of British healthcare), at the expense of lousy quality in terms of speed and procedures.