We're living under true capitalism right now. Look at the incentives. I don't see how we could have progressed to anything besides this, this is the natural outcome of the system in place.
American libertarians often imagine some kind of wonderland capitalism where everyone agrees to play by the rules that aren't enforced by anyone. To my knowledge this has never existed as a long-term equilibrium and it can't exist. I've yet to meet anyone who can tell me how their imaginary ideas go up against claims like
1. Encouraging infinite growth with no controls or limits will always lead to monopolism and is a one-way ratchet
2. Power vacuums are always filled (no public government leads to private companies stepping in and taking the dictatorial role, this time without any of the democracy)
The answer is that most libertarians see both 1.) and 2.) as a good thing they want to achieve. They imagine themselves benefiting as a high profile worker of that monopoly or rule setting company.
Also, note how super ok and welcomming libertarians are toward racists or even fashists. They do dislike pro-democratic center groups, they hate democratic left.
The United States is far more socialist than capitalist and it’s not close. In the early 1900s the federal tax rate was 0. Now we spend 125% of what we bring in in taxes. That is definitely not capitalism. That’s not a free market, that is the government spending far beyond what’s even feasible
What does the relative level of government spending versus taxation have to do with whether businesses will self-regulate? You're just spewing non sequiturs here.
They said we live under true capitalism right now we I’m clearly showing we do not. Not to mentions the US is far from “self regulating” there are millions of words of regulation in the US.
No you didn't, all you did was complain about taxes and say that there exist regulations by counting the number words in them. Not all words are equal, not does it mean that they're effectively enforced. Looking at various monopolies like Ticketmaster or the UnitedHealth group and how they've been allowed to flourish it doesn't seem like America has anywhere near enough regulations to be considered true capitalism. If the market economy isn't a free market because a monopolist is exerting outsize control on the market, it's not a free market. That doesn't make it socialism though, that makes it crony-capitalism instead.
> socialist than capitalist [...] federal tax rate
My dude, you're acting like Federal government is the only government that matters. It's a common mistake, but in this context it's fatal to your argument.
It's fatal because federal spending is the least relevant kind, since so much of it (and so much of its growth) is for the military, and military spending indicates very little about whether a country is socialist or capitalist on the inside.
In contrast, state/local taxes and programs are--even today--still a majority of the spending that actually tells us anything useful for a socialist/capitalist spectrum, the stuff that involves schools, libraries, policing, homelessness, property rights, etc.
"since so much of it (and so much of its growth) is for the military"
So clearly you are pretty uninformed as the military spending is only 13% of the federal budget. Social Security (AKA a socialist program, IDK if anyone can deny that) is 22%, Medicare (another socialist program is 14.2%). Interest on our prior spending (a lot of it from SS and Medicare, etc, some military too. is 14%
So, if you add social programs you has (SS = 22.5%, Medicare = 14.2%, not counting education) that is 36% of the budget or nearly 3x miltitary spending.
A capitalist economy would NOT have those things are as they are not free market at all, they are the government forcing your to pay into them.
This is another aspect where your thesis is not-fully-baked. If you want people to receive what you meant, you have to stop writing it wrong.
1. You spoke about "the federal tax rate" and claimed it was "0" in 1900.
2. The most charitable interpretation of that is that you meant to say income tax: That's usually what people mean when they're too-vague; It would literally be $0 before it was introduced in 1913; You can't have meant all taxes because those were absolutely >0 and you wouldn't make that kind of math mistake, right?
3. When critiquing the growth and dominance of the income tax, that excludes the separate taxes (payroll) that go to SS/Medicare.
> capitalist economy
I'm not taking a stand on the "what the US is" conclusion at this point. What I'm saying is that your argument--how you're getting there--is unsound (can't ignore state/local level) and unclear (which numbers from where).
The term "capitalism" was literally only created for the purpose of writing criticisms of the (then) current system of markets/trading/taxing/investing.
Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.
Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.
The formalization of the process of buying shares in a company and receiving dividends/profits as a result is a bit newer, but the general concept of "I give you money, you use it to make something and sell it then give me money back" has been around for roughly the same amount of time as currency itself.
Anyways, my point is that there is a lot of things to criticize about our current world/economy, using the term "capitalism" while doing so is too vague to be useful in any way.
(Communism/socialism does have more of an actual definition, but very few people are aware of or use it, so it doesn't help all that much).
Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.
I would more simply define that as "wealth inequality" rather than capitalism (or more broadly, power inequality) and perhaps go on to say that the real problem is that, while you can't realistically prevent/remove all inquality, most systems do a poor job of preventing the people with more money/power from using that to consistently increase their own share.
No need to do that, Capitalism—just like feudalism and mercantilism before it—is about how power is distributed. Both feudalism and mercantilism also had extreme wealth (and power) inequality (feudalism arguably had more), as did communism for that matter.
What makes capitalism different is that the power is distributed along capital (as opposed to handpicked by the king under feudalism; or embedded in government monopoly under mercantilism).
In other words, in capitalism, the owners of capital (or the owners of the means of production; i.e the rich; the aristocracy; etc.) are the ones who get to dictate the living conditions of the rest of society. The rulers (be it democratically elected government; an absolute monarch; a military dictatorship) will legislate in order to maintain the interest of the owners of capital. The police (or military) will fight for the interest of the owners of capital, and will suppress any resistance against the interest of the rich, etc.
Nah, Ancient Greece has nothing to do with today’s capitalism. It’s a dumb example and the parallels will fall down to a close inspection. Different world.
Pretty sure Adam Smith captured that in his writings.
Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).
I can't see any system where people are treated fairly (equally and able to reap benefits of their labor aka not slaves) that won't lead to inequality. People are just different, and will have different production rates.
> Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.
That's a market economy, which may or may not be capitalist. Markets have existed for thousands of years under various economic systems.
Agree on your other points though, 'capitalism' was coined to just describe and criticize the system they saw emerging, one of private ownership of the means of production, combined with wage workers who do not own their tools or the product of their labor, but instead sell their time.
But its hard to have discussions around because too many people conflate "market economy" == "capitalism" but you can have markets in a feudalist, socialist, communist, any other society, that doesn't inherently make them capitalist. But I still think its useful as a term, but only to specifically describe who owns the capital.
Apply it to reality, and things get muddy really quickly.
The major issue is the "private ownership of the means of production". While some argue it's a recent development, others (like me) argue it has been present since the dawn of civilization and, ignoring the "free market" and "voluntary transactions" part, one could argue both feudalism and socialism are capitalistic systems, with the latter often receiving the term "state capitalism", instead.
And then there's the issue of "wage workers". Workers who own their means of production (i.e. freelancers) are still often considered "capitalists" themselves, as under the umbrella of "small capitalists", even if they rely more on their labor than their ownership.
> Feudalism is a term often used to describe the social, economic and political conditions that existed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At its core, it was a system in which a landowner, or lord, granted a piece of land called a fief to a subordinate known as a vassal. In return, the vassal pledged loyalty to the lord, providing labor, military service, payments—or a mix of these.
And then the next paragraph goes on to say that historians think this is way too simple to describe what real people were actually doing.
Either way, unless every single piece of property in the kingdom (including, like, plows and mill stones and spinning wheels) was granted by the king (or someone he had granted to) it seems like there's still a lot of room for buying/selling/investing.
I mean, it's an interesting answer but my basic point is that the "real world" is far too complex for a term like capitalism to be at all useful.
Even stuff like "free market", can a market be "free" if a government exists? What about monopolies? Etc etc.
I just want people to be more specific when they criticize systems!
plows and mill stones and spinning wheels are excellent examples of exactly what a feudal lord owned. They owned the land, the major structures on that land, and the major implements on that land. If you wanted to use them you paid the lord in fees via goods, labor, etc. It's basically the gig economy - you will own nothing, your labor will be for his benefit, and if you want to keep participating you'll make it worth his while.
Empirically this isn't true. However you feel about "true" capitalism vs socialism, countries underpinned by capitalism have prospered, even the socialist flavors (China, Scandinavia)...while the countries that have attempted pure socialism have all failed.
The problem with that logic is you're treating economic systems as if they all exist in a vacuum, and you're setting up a circular argument of if its successful its actually because capitalism, if it fails it must have been socialism.
It completely ignores the decades of external hostility toward any nation that attempted to build a socialist economy. Almost every attempt has been met with near immediate intervention from captialist super powers, particularly the USA. Nixon activeley worked to cause the military coup in Chile, Cuba has faced the longest trade embargo in modern history (and yet still managed to outperform its peers in the region in healthcare and literacy). Its unscientific to attribute these struggles purely to internal failure when they are subject to deliberate economic warfare.
Secondly, your definitions are being stretched to fit your thesis. Scandinavia is not "socialist flavored" it IS a social democracy, with free markets. Claiming China's success is from captialism is ignoring that its economy relies entirely on state owned land, state owned and controlled banks, and state owned companies, and mandatory five year plans coming from the state.
If we classify any successful state-led initiative as "capitalist" and any blockaded, intervened upon state as "purely socialist" then the argument is an unfalsifiable truism.
I see socialism benefitting from capitalism, but how have capitalistic nations benefitted from socialist ones (other than a place to put military bases)?
Usually "true capitalism" means one of two things:
1. Capitalism where there is no government or regulatory interference, and the "invisible hand of the free market" produces some kind of utopian society based purely on every business abiding by rules enforced by no one, where somehow corporations don't take advantage of workers they way they do now despite there being no laws against it.
2. The same thing but sarcastically because it's obvious that that system would be demonstrably worse than the restricted version of capitalism that we have now.
The "invisible hand of the free market" works only, if you have many market participants competing one against another. When a participant wins the competition you get monopoly, when multiple participants collude you get oligopoly, or cartel. Market can not solve this.
Where does capitalism mandate corruption? Yes, it is not realistic to assume there is no corruption, but capitalism in and by itself does not mandate corruption.
Obviously this all falls apart when capitalism can buy legislation. We are seeing how the USA is currently eroded by a few oligarchs.
They're not saying it 'mandates' it as law, but that the systematic incentives inevitably lead to corruption. The ability to buy government is irrelevant - this is just the easiest method right now of converting money into power. If there was no government to buy, private business would execute that conversion themselves by ruling over people and enforcing their wishes directly.
"capitalism" was meant to harness the greed in men- they're self-assembling groups on mostly level playing fields, and the people vote during every purchase. The more votes they get, the more opportunities to expand. Only when the people fail to choose wisely is a governmental body supposed to come in and help "regulate". The other option is the government decides from on-high how things should work, and you'd better hope that what got them to power was good. Then these people need to be wizards at allocating labor, research, and benefits.
And the amount of votes someone gets is proportional to the votes they previously received, so the best vote-getters end up having all of the votes to cast between each other, and everyone else ends up with zero votes.
Crony capitalism is true capitalism. The idea that capitalists will simply choose not to organize to benefit their own positions out of some sense of altruism is insanely naive, and puts you in the same camp as USSR apologists claiming that their issue was the lack of true communism. A system that fails when people subvert it to their own benefit is a system that fails.
The power of who lives, dies, and what's allowed are made by the individual consumers (or groups of consumers), so it's the same problem we have with democracy.
> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own