[gopher_space]

> One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent.

The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago.

I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.

[freeopinion]

You might think that my brain is broken, but I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive. I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. I think that people can act in a way that they think is in their best self interest when it actually isn't. Also, "self interest" can have qualifiers like "near term", "long term", etc. Self interest is frequently complicated.

Sometimes socialism can provide solutions that are in the best <qualifier> self interest for a particular issue. In those cases, a good capitalist will choose socialism when <qualifier> is their priority.

I would expect that a good socialist would utilize the principles of capitalism to execute the most cost-effective socialist solutions.

[komali2]

To be honest I think you're conflating terms.

> I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest.

Acting out of self interest has results that can be described in many ways, but is too unrelated to the economic structure of capitalism to draw the thread I think you're trying to draw.

Capitalism is a very simple definition: private ownership of the means of production in service of capital accumulation. It's a system that rewards selfishness, but selfish behavior alone doesn't lead to capitalism - there were selfish people in gift economies, and there were selfish Party leaders in the Soviet Union.

The fact is, the charity stuff you do is in spite of capitalism. It's suboptimal behavior under this system. Every dollar you donate could have instead been invested, and then leveraging compound interest, used with higher effectiveness sometime in the future. Also, in giving money away, you harm yourself as a capitalist actor - for no return of investment for your capital accumulation, you spend money. That's suboptimal behavior.

It's certainly POSSIBLE to behave this way under capitalism, you and I both are doing it, however meanwhile a lot of corporations and people aren't doing it, and because capital == power, those corps and people will have more capability of directing the systems that cause whatever issues we're donating to ameliorate.

Donating time to dig wells in a town whose rivers are polluted by mine waste? Meanwhile, the mining company is buying politicians to let them spew more waste. Soon, a several hundred billion dollar oil and gas company is going to show up to frack, and now the wells are poisoned too.

Spending money on groceries that you give to the homeless? The Walmart you bought it from will redirect capital to its lawyers and lobbyists that let it get away with paying such low wages that its workers need to be subsidized by food stamps and your charity in order to survive.

Perhaps capitalism was necessary to get to where we are today. Marx thought so. I don't know. At this point though, it feels like we're industrialized enough that we don't need this "hyper optimal" industrialization economic structure to provide for our society. Look at how poorly resources are allocated: public health crisis in the streets of America while its billionaires horde and control truly unfathomable amounts of capital. Incredibly inefficient and ineffective system!

[samantp]

1. Capitalism: Efficient, progress, but channels all benefits to very fewer and fewer as tech progresses. Trickle down is too slow.

2. Socialism: Bureaucratic and slow, no private enterprise, finally poverty. Unless it is the special form of global efficient state capitalism (same as capitalism then); just that commonfolk of the state-capitalist nation can be happy overall, at the expense of many more unhappy citizens of countries exploited by the bully country.

3. Capitalist with Minimum-basic-services: Let anyone with strength do anything they wish as long basic needs of food, health, education, safety, etc are handled. Will lead to pacified but meek, non-interfering masses and those at the helm take care of development and throw additional goodies to the basic-service pool as per their gains/wishes (plus doors of fashion are always open for philanthropy). Latest trends seems be toward this.

4. Ideal, Private enterprise with strong oversight by democratic state: Private enterprise, be it for profit or anything else, who cares. Just have enough knobs (taxation, holidays, freebies, policy, force, etc.) in place such that development happens where needed (balance parity, environment, nex-gen research etc. dimensions) wholesomely. This is ideal, should have worked, but alas, since all elections are funded by big money, the patrons will definitely expect returns in the form of favoritism during policy formation (including a big no to state-funded elections, or big yes to curbing public agitations by weapons and state force).

In short, masses are doomed, and tech progress will expedite it!

[komali2]

Isn't the failure you note in 4 always inevitable in a system where Capital translates to power?

[samantp]

Yup.

Just that, capital translating to power is not a universal truth. Historically too, various recipes have tasted success to move up power ladders. Be it high moral values, smart statecraft, peaceful bottom-up people movements-art-science, or worse like violence, anarchy, barbarism; or a hotch-potch of all those!

Will be fun to watch how things pan out today!

[komali2]

Could be worth giving anarchy another look - try Kropotkin's "Anarchist Communism" for a brief overview, or the conquest of bread. It's not an inherently violent ideology at all :) you could also look into Keith McHenry and his rewrite of the anarchist cookbook.

[blinkbat]

"I am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society."

sorry, but these cannot coexist. you are deceiving yourself.

[NonHyloMorph]

There is social market economy which can be cosidered to operate within a capitalist framework to some extent, but also to operate within a socialist framework to some extent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy. So it is worth to also think about it as continuous phenomena and not as binaries. But I agree with you: "I'm a devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society" made me think selfdeception, too.

[ninalanyon]

> I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive.

Of course they are not, after all my home country of Norway is largely like that.

But the capital needs to be harnessed in the service of the people at large, not concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.