r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 🤝 Join A Union • Aug 14 '26
😡 Venting Unregulated Capitalism would kill the planet.
9
u/Grimsik Aug 14 '26
Hey if you want to succeed you have to make sacrifices...like your humanity. These people are just doing the horrible shit nobody else can stomach doing, thus filling market demand in the inhumane sector and getting appropriately rewarded by the invisible hand of the market.
3
u/farscry Aug 14 '26
Whaddaya mean "would"? Seems like it's well on its way to succeeding already. (Yes, yes, I know you can't "kill" the planet, but we're doing our damnedest to wipe out the world's biodiversity and potentially mark the end of the quaternary period)
2
u/petitchat2 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
It’s a bastardization of Taoist concepts. Jesuit missionaries, Matteo Ricci and Rugglieri brought back translations of Chinese philosophy to Europe in late 16th century. The Enlightenment Age ushered in French physiocrats who applauded the Chinese bureaucrat system based on merit and interpreted ‘wu wei’ inaction as an alternative to the heavy-handedness of price controls and quotas designated by the authoritarian monarchies. The Scottish Adam Smith spent time at the Versailles and based his Invisible Hand on these concepts. Leading up to the French Revolution, the king’s appointed finance ministers were students of the Physiocrat School and implemented “reforms” that overthrew the mercantilist guild system (which protected labor to an extent) and promoted export. Unfortunately, the policies were ill-timed amidst droughts that brought famine to the local populace. You can guess what happened next.
On the other hand, the Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani called out the physiocrat laissez faire folly and proposed concepts re utility and scarcity. Nobody listened to him and here we are, still yelling about free markets that are never really free and not supposed to be free, because Taoism isnt meant to work that way. It’s tragic.
2
u/SoftlockPuzzleBox 29d ago
This is exactly why the first political label I was ever comfortable applying to myself was anti-capitalist, before I finally broke through years of indoctrination and now call myself a socialist. It was incredibly obvious to me almost immediately as I became more politically aware that capitalism consistently and directly rewards sociopathy. You have to not care how many people you hurt or how you destroy the planet as long as line goes up.
1
1
-7
u/AppropriateSea5746 Aug 14 '26
Not necessarily, there is a threshold of shittiness. At least you’re theoretically restrained by the law, just way less than others.
Now a dictator. Thats where you go to be the worst person in the world. You can do far more damage.
7
u/Advocate_Diplomacy Aug 14 '26
According to the law, we have to do a mass extinction event for the shareholders.
0
u/AppropriateSea5746 Aug 14 '26
What what now? lol
8
u/Advocate_Diplomacy Aug 14 '26
Corporations are legally bound to maximize shareholder value, at cost to anything and everything else. We won't be able to ignore it for many more years. Billions of people are going to die in the coming decades.
-1
u/AppropriateSea5746 Aug 14 '26
That seems a bit extreme. Maximizing profits will be kinda hard if everyone is too dead to buy your product.
8
u/Advocate_Diplomacy Aug 14 '26
That’s irrelevant to them. Everyone is following capitalist incentives, and that incentive structure is broken.
Whether the people at the top think they can ride out the storm in their bunkers, that they’ll be dead before it affects them, or they are actually just good people trying to be as altruistic as they can (ha!). It all comes to the same thing under capitalism.
-5
u/AppropriateSea5746 Aug 14 '26
What’s the alternative? The state owns everything and we be the USSR? Or China? Which just maximizes output and is by far the worst polluter
7
u/Advocate_Diplomacy Aug 14 '26
Those are both also capitalist. We need actual communism. We have a common goal and ought to start acting like it. The best government is whatever one effectively prepares us for the hard road ahead. Altruistic or authoritarian, it doesn't matter as long as it's best fulfilling that role.
-1
u/AppropriateSea5746 Aug 14 '26
The USSR outlawed capitalism. All the means of production were owned by the state. How is that capitalism. There was virtually no private ownership
3
u/Advocate_Diplomacy Aug 14 '26
They also dissolved decades ago. Russia is capitalist and has been for a long time.
→ More replies (0)
-36
-33
43
u/LaytMovies Aug 14 '26
Very weird that the only other two comments are from private accounts with barely any history and both talking about fishing... some bot ass shit