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by pas 150 days ago
That's not capitalism. That's human nature. We want a better future.

Capitalism assigns a price to this, makes it more efficient. (By allowing people to buy/rent productive things (land, machines) hire people, and buy unproductive setups, improve it, and earn a profit on the effect of the improvement itself.)

If you think "shareholder capitalism" overplayed this, well, maybe, but it seems that manufacturing is getting fucked by tariffs, construction is getting fucked by NIMBYism, and ultimately the world is getting fucked by lack of improvements, by standing still, by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs, and not because people want to make number go up!

Of course there's a ton of problems with power concentration everywhere, but market liberalism correlates with liberty and well-being, and the solution is not USSR-style denial of markets (and in general, behavioral-, and micro- and macroeconomics), it's understanding them, and using taxes to help people to participate in them.

1 comments

NIMBYism is a very obvious form of "number go up". Boomers were promised endless property value growth, and they've destroyed city planning to make sure it happens. If there was a market correction retirees would be furious.

> by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs

People assume that rejecting capitalism requires us to take a step backwards. Why would that be? If you woke up tomorrow and there was more public housing your iPhone wouldn't disappear.

Density brings a lot of value increase.

Theoretically replacing capitalism with something else is not the issue. (As long as there are accurate supply-and-demand signals for efficient allocation of resources).

The issue is that people ideologically want to "set" inconsistent supply-and-demand curves. And since there's no signal things look fine and dandy initially. And then the usual smudging of the numbers start to happen. ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty... )

Of course, in a capitalistic system there's a very crude exchange rate for the things we want and the things we have through the profit motive (with all the speculation and technological (im)possibilities and everything added in), but it's usually more "correct" than numbers set by committees of people really really wanting to have something while denying some specific - usually hard to separate - aspect of that. (For example lot of people really don't like it when people 'inherit' easy money for very good reasons and this gets amplified when it comes to real estate, and this is a very big factor why a lot of NIMBY ideas found good traction with young "progressives".)