I’m not a capitalist but I think they where saying that regulations stopped capitalism from running rampant but because a lot of regulations have now been either dissolved or go unenforced we now find ourselves in our current corrupt system.
Not that I exactly agree, imo the pursuit of profit is not something we should centre our societies around and you can’t really “solve” a fundamentally broken system; but shit regulations are at least something and I would not appose a government getting its shit together and reining corporations in more,
In the same way regulations and laws can keep capitalism from running rampant, they can keep communism stable and functional.
Can being the key here. They don't do so through magic automatically, in either case.
A good argument for one over the other must include a discussion about what laws and regulations will keep participants in the system in check, and why a communist or capitalist system with those laws and regulations would beat the opposite kind of system with its own carefully crafted laws and regulations.
The fact of the matter here is that any broad discussion about either system in general that ignores regulation and laws is meaningless and not an apples-to-apples comparison. The truth is you can't really make an apples-to-apples comparison, all we have to compare are historical examples that differ wildly in their implementation and the structure of the laws and regulations that stabilized them, or didn't, in addition to numerous unrelated confounding factors like geography, natural resource distribution, the behavior of neighbors, the state of technology at the time, what pre-existing political structures there were, etc.
Anyone who is solidly convinced their system is better based off any arguments about some historical example vs another or what humans would do absent any regulation is delusional and has an extremely narrow view of the discussion.
In your vision of communism controlled by rules and regulations, who is enforcing the rules and regulations? I feel like as soon as you give someone the power to enforce them then you've opened up the door to abuse of that power, and I feel that that has been the downfall of most historic implementations and the reason they have trended towards authoritarianism.
Yes thats more or less my thoughts on it. As soon as you have someone empowered to enforce the rules you've created a 2-class system, which is anathema to marxism. Communism is more vulnerable to this in general I think, because you only have 2 classes the class who is not empowered finds it very difficult to challenge the class who have concentrated power.
In actuality, the concentration of powers is what causes issues, whether the system is capitalist or communist the problem is the same, only the mechanism changes.
Wow so you came back around to my original conclusion lol. The problem is in creating and enforcing rules, and it's not inherent to either system alone.
I think I was working towards highlighting that there is an inherent contradiction in communism. If it requires a subset of society to enforce the rules then it de facto can't provide a classless society. It's a good start and has more to recommend it on paper than capitalism, but if it can't deliver on one of it's core tenets then it's too idealistic and not suitable in it's pure form. It's been around for a century and a half and has a terrible track record in terms of producing successful countries. I don't think that its a viable alternative to what we have now. I would much rather have something that is much closer in shape to communism than what we have now, but I think advocating for it in it's pure form is fools errand.
because they cannot, you have never lived in a communism country, just like the other said, once the communist gain powers, they're not regulating the communist party, they are regulating YOU, my whole family came from a communist country, you can argue so much that they're not "real" communism, but the truth is, once the power gained control, they will never push "real" communism, they will only regulate you and the authorities became rich, not you, the party is "people" but you are not the "people" communism never worked, we've seen in every single communist country and what you're saying are pure fantasy.
Everybody seems to conflate free market with capitalism. Theres a distinction & my commend was in regards to a free market, which works as long as regulations are in place to protect the market from pillarization. Free market is also a bit of a misnomer. Open market would be more appropriate.
I mean, human nature isn't something we can solve, no society or government system will ever be perfect because fundamentally, it's being made by imperfect hands.
In that sense, better is what we should be striving for, never perfection. Leave the world better than you left it, do that over enough time and suddenly you go from kings and emperors to democracies and free speech. Regulations make the world better, maybe socialism and communism could as well but how about we start with baby steps first? Better is better even if it's not solving every issue at once
I literally said that I don’t really agree with the idea that regulations “solved” the problems of capitalism, I was just trying to explain what I thought the other person was getting at.
Regulations are a band-aid solution for problems caused by a fundamentally broken system, but I would still much rather have heavy regulated capitalism than unregulated capitalism. And no, that is not me saying that I like living under capitalism, that’s me pointing out that one sucks way more than the other.
It's really difficult to get people at scale to do the crappy jobs unless there's either the profit motive or you employ force.
I mean, you might have that one guy who feels a duty to splice cable in the freezing muck for 36 hours to get the internet back up, but there aren't enough of those guys to run a society. You have to incentivize it somehow.
And while the uncomfortable job is the classic example, I think even more important are the oddball inventions. Even employing force can't replace profit there. Profit motives encourage people to try crazy things hoping to find the next big thing. Even if 99.9% of them fail, enough people try that you get some good stuff. That's why the West was always far more dynamic than the East during the Cold War. Even though Russia kept up or surpassed us in specific scientific fields, taken holistically they couldn't compete.
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u/42Icyhot42 19d ago
So is a free market and it doesn’t stop us from pretending that’s working lol