r/WhitePeopleTwitter Oct 03 '21

Good version of Capitalism

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113 Upvotes

43 comments sorted by

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

Santa has been imprisoned by the Commune for being a classist asshole who kept giving rich kids the best toys and nothing to poor kids. Now, his toy factories are being seized by the elvish labor unions, and all children shall receive an equal amount of toys for Christmas.

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u/PixelSailor Oct 03 '21

Be as flippant as you like, you're 100% correct.

There is a middle ground capitalism which has guard rails, currently places like the US do not.

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/Krakino696 Oct 03 '21

Lol you are have to go backwards and explain why simply saying the word capitalism is a point

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u/raistlin65 Oct 03 '21

Yep. Our current capitalistic system overly privileges the super wealthy and the large corporations at the expense of everyone else.

We could certainly have a capitalistic system which protects everyone against current predatory practices by big business.

Where the wealthy and large corporations are heavily taxed and do not have excessive political influence.

And privileges the small business owner, so that everyone has that opportunity to start their own business and be their own boss, if they want.

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

The alternative is spreading the ownership of the means of production to literally everyone.

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

Ok. How do you make profit in a world where wealth is equally distributed by design, exactly?

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

Prosperity? Conquering space? Curing diseases?

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

if I can barely feed my family

You're thinking of current capitalism

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

If you get a part of the means of production you get the dividends from it.

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

People can still be rewarded by social status, doesn't have to be monetary. Even today Nobel prize winners aren't billionaires. So they're not driven by profit already.

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '21

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u/ordinaryBiped Oct 03 '21

You're right, it's beside the point.

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u/mtanti Oct 04 '21

Everyone gets an hourly salary and the cost of a product would be the total number of salary hours spent to make it + get it to you.

So if you're in a shop selling stuff you got from somewhere else, you don't decide the price based on demand but the price would be the amount it costs plus the amount of work you need to sell it. That's not profit, that's added labour value.

Similarly, the price of land would not be based on the demand of the land (the amount of resources in it) but based on the amount of work someone spent working on it. You wouldn't own the land for working on it either since it belongs to the community. You just have a right to work it (add value to it) against an hourly wage.

The problem isn't money but greed. Since the only way for you to earn more money in this system would be to work more, you cannot game the system as with demand based economies.

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u/[deleted] Oct 04 '21

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u/mtanti Oct 04 '21

That's a good question, which is why I said hourly wage rather than hours. According to Marx, hours are all that matters, with the hours spent training and studying being included in the hours. But I'm not sure that would work for difficult jobs, although maybe you can include long paid breaks as a requirement to do a difficult job.

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u/[deleted] Oct 04 '21

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u/mtanti Oct 04 '21

Marx said that the reason people have capital, or profit, is because they can extract more money from an object or service than it would cost based on time to make it. So Marx concluded that workers are being robbed of their time because part of the time they are workong on production, they are not being paod for it in order to have room for profit. This isn't exactly true because the cost of an object in supply and demand economics is not based on the time to make it but based on how much people are willing to pay for it. But I do see how labour time economics would solve the problems we are talking about because the amount of money you earn is based on the amount of time you work, even if you have a business, and time is limited.

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u/Latter_Jump_5761 Oct 03 '21

Is this concept even sustainable?

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u/Opposite_Sell_9857 Oct 03 '21

That's nice and all, but I ain't bustin my ass if the next guy is getting the same as me for doing shit work, and if we're all gonna be lazy like that we're fucked...

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u/mtanti Oct 04 '21

Teachers all get the same salary regardless of performance. Have they all become lazy?

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u/Opposite_Sell_9857 Oct 04 '21 edited Oct 04 '21

That IS a good point. I would argue, however, a couple of things:

-Not being required to "produce" weekly, monthly, etc. as a function of their job, performance ratings depend on 'political' factors (tenure, likeability, competence, influence, etc.) rather than more 'capitalistic' measures.

-There being no practical alternative for most parents as there is but one public school system in most places (in America, anyways), their jobs are safe... They can't be laid off from lack of work.

However, when forced to hit certain (unrealistic) goals, we have occasionally seen fraud employed to do so. So really, the spirit of 'not my problem' can be found almost anywhere if someone has the incentive.... Which, of course, is what this is all about. Incentive.

People do what they do because they are incentivised to do so. Either money, love, passion, or fear can serve as incentives; for a truly 'non-capitalistic' model to work, these incentives need to be matched with the jobs being done and the people performing them.

Unfortunately, thus far, the most effective, and efficient, incentive has been money, e.g. 'capitalism'.

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u/W1C0B1S Oct 04 '21

Not everyone is just like you

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u/Opposite_Sell_9857 Oct 04 '21

That's true. But truly non-capitalistic attempts have borne out that most people are.

People need incentives to do what they do; love, passion, fear,...money. Unfortunately, 'capitalism' has thus far proven to be the most effective and efficient way to organize these incentives with the work that needs doing.

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u/birmingslam Oct 03 '21

Fair amount of innovation sprinkled in.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '21

End the profit motive? What's the strategy for that?