[ivewonyoung]

> Just because all modern states are capitalist does not mean that all states must be capitalist, as evidenced by the many erstwhile states that were not capitalist

However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.

[hackyhacky]

> However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.

An astute observation, if your knowledge of history begins and ends with the 20th century.

[ivewonyoung]

So not a single country out of ~200, not one, emulated the alleged great successes and utopias of historic non-capitalist economies for a century plus. Which is why you're unable to name one in the 20th century. Hmm I wonder why.

Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?

[hackyhacky]

Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious?

300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests.

Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?

[ivewonyoung]

The problem is that your proposed approach has been tried again and again and has failed every single time with disastrous consequences for several generations.

Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?

https://www.africadatahub.org/blog/what-usaid-funding-of-afr...

https://www.ft.com/content/c10e4f2f-5564-42a4-8aa7-66c78ca1c...

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/kathy-hoch...

[hackyhacky]

> Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work

You are again straw manning an argument. I said nothing about giving people all resources with no work. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite: I want a society where people compete to provide labor in order to gain material advantage.

My argument against capitalism is that that competition should be fair: people should compete for resources with labor, and not against those who contribute no labor.

[ivewonyoung]

That makes no sense because labor needs capital to take risks so they get salaries. For example new drug discoveries cost a lot of money and a huge percentage fail with big losses that go to paying labor but not eventually benefiting from it. Banning that model where capital is risked by passive investors would've meant far fewer life saving drugs being invented, literally making mankind worse off.

If someone wants to passively invest $3M into a new coffee shop and pay labor to work in it, banning it like you want to do will kill the economy and disadvantage the little guy.