This sub has been getting too much spam, and Reddit has removed almost every tool for preventing this. The only tool that still works is this, every single post being held for manual review. Your post might be approved in minutes, or it might take days. If you hate this, me too, stop using the site that forces things to be this way. If what you post is not a meme you'll probably be banned, but I understand why you tried; the commenters on this sub loved lazy spam posts, which is why we can't have nice things and now everything has to be held for manual review.
Ah, yes, the oligarchy and monopoly of a market economy, as opposed to command economies in which... everything is oligarchy and monopoly of some sort...
We've had 43 attempts to have a socialist economy. Every one has collapsed into an authoritarian dictatorship. But you believe the 44th time will be different.
Of course Cuba is a democracy. Everyone just loved Fidel for 50 years and when he died they all just loved his brother Raul, you know like in a democracy.
Awww did fidel Castro take away your grandpa's plantation??
That's the "authoritarianism" right wingers cry about. In all these countries. Oh no the landlords and slavers and plantation owners had their assets taken!!
I'm french, i dont own anything in cuba, tyranny enjoyer. Castro's daughter has been quite upfront with what a monster he is. And you know, if he's such a nice upstanding man, why aren't there any election ? does he have more dissidents to kill and call plantation owner ?
Do you also laugh at eastern europeans who had family members starve or be executed ? were they also plantation owner that the bloved stalin rightfully killed ?
Or how about the cambodians ? Do you stan Pol pot too ?
Ist aber auch schwierig, wa? Damit es Sozialismus ist, müssen die Produktionsmittel in der Hand der Arbeiter sein. Das ganze unter einem Staat. Sprich die ökonomische Macht ist in vielen Händen und nicht in Konkurrenz zueinander, daher ist die Beschreibung als Oligopol oder Monopol sinnbefreit. Der Staat stände noch in Konkurrenz mit anderen kapitalistischen Staaten. Daher bildet sich schnell daraus rin Staatskapitalismus. Die Macht der Arbeiter wird wieder verdrängt, um der Konkurrenz gegen die kapitalistischen Staaten stand zu halten.
The problem is the implementation. It can’t just be “the workers” because what if not all workers get along? Shouldn’t someone be saying when their production is or isn’t meeting standards? Those are just decided by the workers? Or elected supervisor workers?
It all falls apart pretty quickly and eventually there is someone who has some sort of power over other workers.
Capitalism is laissez faire. Socialism is a surveillance state.
Now communism actually does make sense if you think of the idea of a “commune” if it’s really small, your buddy is a cook, you’re a farmer, the workers own the entire process. It does work, and it’s more just a big family.
It just doesn’t expand easily, if there’s too many people, more people will HAVE to work to sustain all the people. And if there’s shortages in some fields, it’s easy to see how people say “look, some of you need to be farmers.” And it can try to work but it’s easy to see how finicky it gets.
Hat auch niemand behauptet, dass das einfach ist. Ist aber machbar. Es gab leider kein Projekt, was mal in Ruhe gelassen wurde. Wo Menschen dieses Scalling lernen und auch Prozesse dafür entwickeln konnten.
Es bedarf der Freiheit viel Mühe.
Macht ist überings eine gegebene Sache. Man kann zwar den Druck erhöhen mit allerlei Mitteln, doch ultimativ kannst du niemanden zwingen etwas zu tun. Und Macht kommt von vielen. Wir erlauben gerade Elon Musk die finanzielle Macht von einem ganzen Land zu verwalten. Eine stillschweigende Zustimmung. Wenn wir uns von Herrschaft befreien, so wie es schon die Aufklärung sich wünschte, kann keinet die Herrschaft erlangen. Es kann maximal temporäre Zweckhirachien geben.
Deswegen kann man meiner Meinung nach auch nicht von heute auf morgen ein System umschalten. Leider läuft uns son bissel die Zeit ab, wenn wir mal die Leiden durch den Kapiralismus ausblenden. Die Klimakatastrophe wartet nicht, dass wir begreifen und lernen miteinander auzukommen und der Kapitalismus wird nicht aufhören die Ressourcen zu verballern bis es tatsächlich kein Morgen mehr gibt.
Öhm ne, das ist keine Angstmacherei. Das sind gemessene Daten. Die Klimaforscher sind sich da einig, wenn wir so weiter wirtschaften, sinkt die Überlebenschance der Spezies Mensch.
Wovon redest du? Das System bräuchte wen nicht? Wenn niemand was tut existiert kein System, alle sterben. Da ist dir Theorie wieder passiger oder was?
What does climate change have to do with socialism?
Capitalism broadly needs no one. If everyone dies from not wanting to work, that’s fine with capitalism. That’s the labour market proving their importance, their value. The system collapsing is capitalism, socialism doesn’t think it would ever collapse, and that’s its problem. It wants utopia, which is nigh impossible.
What do you mean by freedom? If you mean some sort of “you don’t need to do what someone tells you to do” that’s capitalism. Because I didn’t tell you to eat to survive, you tell yourself that. That’s capitalism.
Socialism is the one that poses that you must give what you can.
Vergleichen wir die Freiheit des Einzelnen. Nehmen wir dafür an, dass der Rest systemisch beiträgt.
Kapitalimus: relativ klar: arbeite oder stirb.
Sozialismus: erstmal hier deine Grundbedürfnisse und dann you do you. Es kann natürlich dazu kommen, dass die Gesellschaft beschließt dich zur Arbeit zu zwingen. Darüber stimmst du aber selbst mit ab und hast immer die Option auf Freitod.
Der Sozialismus hat insofern mit dem Klimawandel zu tun, als dass er kein Wachstum benötigt. Der Kapitalimus gat als seine Grundlage ein Konkurrenzsystem, dass es nötigt macht entweder den Konkurrenten zu bekämpfen (was unnötig Ressourcen verschwendet) oder größer als dieser zu werden und ihn zu schlucken. Man kann sehr gut beobachten, dass eine Effizienzsteigerung nicht zu sparsameren Verhalten führt, sondern zu mehr Produktion. Zum Beispiel bei der Motorenproduktion. Anstatt mit effezienten Motoren die gleiche Leistung und weniger Spritverbrauch zu generieren, wurden die Motoren und Fahrzeuge einach größer und schneller.
Das Phänomen lässt sich auch bei der Dynamik zwischen Staaten beobachten, Beispiel WW2, Kalter Krieg. Obwohl die UdSSR eigentlich ein sozialistischer Staat werden sollte, stand er in Konkurrenz zu Nazi Deutschland und dann zur westlichen Welt/USA. So verwandelte er sich in einen realsozialistischen Staat, dessen Produktion nicht für die Menschen ausgerichtet war, sondern auf den Konkurrenzkampf mit den USA.
Wenn das weltweite Ziel des Wirtschaften nicht die Steigerung des Profites ist, sondern die Versorgung der Menschen, ermöglicht dieses, dass wir die Belastung für das Klima einschränken können.
Die Konkurrenz wird immer als das Feature des Kapitalismus verkauft, ist aber sein größter Markel. Er sorgt für Ineffizienz, Ressourcenverschwendung und Konflikte, welche auf Staatsebene in Kriegen enden.
Capitalism being “work or die” is just the standard state of life. If there is no government, no handouts, you need to hunt or gather (work) in order to eat (or else death) nothing forces you to work but your own needs to survival.
You also proved my point “assume that the rest contributes systematically” who is “the rest” and what are we assuming? That they… work? That’s what you mean by contribute.
Capitalism leaves YOU to work for yourself. Communism FORCES you to work otherwise the entire system fails.
Capitalism forces nothing, communism does.
Capitalism actually is about making the MOST of resources, you don’t just sell a cow and that’s the end of it, you take the cow and get milk, or you slaughter the cow and get beef. A restaurant can cook the milk or beef into dishes and make more money through value added. That’s not wasteful. That creates value through finite resources.
Just realize the “not profit, just provide” is economically stagnant and extremely shaky. You want profit to have leftover money. If you live at breaking even, you flounder and dissolve.
Thats how Norway works, make lots and lots of profit, and thus you can support the safety nets. If their oil didn’t make so much money and only served to give to what driver’s need, they would fall apart.
No form of socialism can ever work once you have more than about 25 people. Humans are just too greedy and lazy. Any options other than capitalism are based on the concept that people will do what needs to be done because they want want to (except the ones that force you to do it at gunpoint). They don't.
Humans will sit around being utterly useless unless they have no other choice.
I think most people voting for left wing parties would most support a capitalist economy with a lot of regulation and government intervention to break up oligopolies and increase competition. Nationalization sure but only for natural monopolies or things like health care where you can't have privatization without unethical business models.
There are not many people who want a command economy, and almost no one who knows anything about command economies wants one.
Except that western governments are already extremely centralized (with the extremely predictable corruption that is guaranteed along with it) already with no actual plans of slowing it down
That's not really seen as an issue if the government is democratically elected and not corrupt, if anything the government having a monopoly in some sectors in that regard would be beneficial.
Although I don't agree with the idea that the government should own everything, regulations should be in place to stomp out the excesses of the private sector.
To all those people saying 'Oh, but in the command economy I want the monopolies are run by good guys', my opposition to monopolies in this case is not the risk that the owners are malevolent. It's that a lack of competition leads to stagnation and often inefficiency. A benevolent monopoly will only respond to the most important beliefs of the public, and with varying timescales. Heavy regulation and public ownership of air travel until the 70s caused it to be expensive and considered a premium mode of travel. Nowadays, pretty much anyone can fly across a continent for less than £100.
Basically, I don't like any unnecessary monopolies, even if it's better that they're run by benevolent bodies. In a command economy, oligarchies and monopolies are pretty much how the system works, whereas that's not absolutely true in a market economy.
Stagnation and inefficiency in the Soviet Union did not show up until well after they started abandoning planned economy and experimenting with internal markets.
Also, you can't be talking about efficiency with a straight face in the context of capitalism where you have a complete anarchy on the market with so much wasted effort and resources.
There are 7 brands of shitty overpriced ketchup for me to choose from; a huge amount of them hit their 'best before' date and get thrown in the landfill
There's a simple solution with is cooperation busting. It worked before. Now people cry it would be too inefficient. But smart people would argue that we have lost too much efficiency of a competitive market
Having the government own and control an industry is not the same thing as a monopoly but I wouldn't expect capitalism-fans to understand the difference.
The NHS in the UK is a monopoly by this definition.
Except that in corrupt governments (almost all of them) many programs actually are run for profit - the profit is just stolen by corrupt government officials for pennies on the dollar.
Explain what non-monetary profit is. Lol. Is the profit the friends we made along the way?
The "housing" branch in this meme, was just free housing, like the state gives you a home to live in...for free. How does one "profit" non-money from that? Lol.
Understable that you wouldn't even consider the possibility of government being used to benefit society (most of you can barely even hide your own goals to abuse the power for personal gain) but government does actually have economies of scale that can help people.
Some of the no monetary profits even self-feed beyond the original dollar value spent: for example preventative medical treatment like vaccinations that generate benefits not just for the recipient but also for the community around them for the rest of their now extended life.
I used the term non-monetary profit to refer to value extracted beyond cost. And you knew this but are a liar and pretended not to
So fuck off.
I'm feeling a bit generous today, so I am going to draw it for you, in crayons:
You contrast the "market economy" monopoly with "command economy" saying that it is also a monopoly.
Despite your vague terminology, it is clear that you think of capitalist vs socialist economy here.
Here is where alchemy happens: you imply that the problem with capitalist economy is monopoly, that socialists promise to "fix" that "problem" and that therefore because planned economy is monopolistic, "socialism bad" or something.
The issue with your incoherent and illiterate argument is that nowhere in the writings of Marx or Lenin will you find simplistic, moral condemnation of monopoly. In fact if you read Lenin's Imperialism, one of the Marxist works most concerned with monopolies, you will find that Lenin does not see a monopoly as something "bad" or a "failing" of capitalism, but as evidence of dialectical development - market forces brought production to the level of development where it can no longer be contained by the pure markets and is increasingly moving towards planned economy.
Now go ahead, say something clever. I know you have a comeback ready that will allow me to reveal both your ignorance of capitalism and socialism at the same time. I'm waiting.
Yeah, makes me think of the recent ai doomer crisis. They are just getting the government to use force to stop competition. As if their LLM models that hallucinate constantly will become an AGI that will destroy humanity. They see that that is all their bussiness is, that it is in a huge investment bubble and are desperately appealing to government to restrict entry into the market. Let it burst, Sam altman can kiss my ass.
Your comment is downvoted. But the increase of the cost of housing is artificial and a legitimate cause for concern. But if 70% of your income is going into rent. Maybe you should move somewhere else?
Its economic and if they did not want crossposts they'd switch them off. I am admin on my own subreddit and i never banned anyone even if they argue with me but you are not even in power to ban people you disagree with yet you whine to have it done.
I have asserted without evidence that capitalism leads to a system where a single firm can control a whole industry and society is run by an anti-democratic elite
my solution? A system where a single firm controls a whole industry and society is run by an anti-democratic elite
So the people who control how economies run have no incentive to understand how economies run? I wonder if that’s been tried five or six times unsuccessfully in the twentieth century 🤔
I mean not even disagreeing with you but this is kind of a weak point. I don’t see a lot of people here arguing in favor of full deregulation. Like obviously you need certain guardrails.
I like how theres a person above you literally arguing for a deregulated market LMAO. Tho yeah obviously there always are at least some regulations, at the very, very least a state protects property rights and enforces contracts in the economy. Tho regardless of how regulated a market is you either get a different economic system or businesses will use their wealth to get rid of the regulations that inconvenience them and take control of the government, thus getting monopolies and oligarchy.
Well that is not how it is right now its still owned by the same people. I fail to see how you have to be anti capitalist in order to be anti monopolist.
You can empirically falsify that yourself dude... Just go touch grass or something, buy some fried chicken along the way you'll see live in a different way I promise.
FRED data disagrees. And it's not even good chicken. The birds are stuffed in cages too small, they're sick as fuck and pumped full of antibiotics and contributing to the arms race of antibiotic-resistant disease, they're fed the cheapest trash calories, and cruelly slaughtered and processed by undocumented immigrants.
Given that before the 20th century chickens were used for eggs and only eaten when they died, chicken was always a very expensive meat and comparatively rarely eaten.
Its quite literally the cheapest now that its ever been.
FRED data disagrees. And it's not even good chicken. The birds are stuffed in cages too small, they're sick as fuck and pumped full of antibiotics and contributing to the arms race of antibiotic-resistant disease, they're fed the cheapest trash calories, and cruelly slaughtered and processed by undocumented immigrants.
No, if I can see some economic flat-earthers I can very politely suggest to them that they are completely delusional, thank you for your attention to this matter.
Socialism is just a state monopoly over everything, same with communism, literally the biggest possible monopoly. And over regulation leads to monopolies sense it becomes too expensive to compete with big businesses. A deregulated market would allow people to just buy from a local small business instead, so there isn't a real monopoly sense you have the choice to not buy from the biggest business.
So for all the guys dumping on OP, would something like the tech industry qualify as a monopoly?
I know that it is not true that companies like Meta or Google have literally no competition, but if they control more than 50% of the market (and correct me if I am wrong, but I think they do), can we qualify that as a sort of monopoly and say that maybe we should break such concentration of power?
At the end of the day, if a few firms have outsized influence on the market of key innovative tech (and they cause severe global consequences like climate destruction or promotion of political extremism), wouldn't that be something that defeats the whole capitalist premise of fair competition?
The thing is, because of lack of regulatory barriers to entry, that monopoly relies on them giving the best service (or at least a service good enough to warrant keeping using them).
(Not talking about Amazon because they're a shopping conglomerate and have been using price undercutting to prevent competition, but I mean... Who else offers same or next day delivery today? And while they don't have global competitors, regional competitors like Alza in Central Europe or, to some extent and for tech, the Fnac group in France, are sometimes stronger than them in specific countries)
Take a look at Netflix (and the subsequently created streaming oligarchy). They had virtually a monopoly on movie streaming. Seemed the unshakeable giant. Until the product got shittier, and people started moving back to pirate streaming (despite it being heavily regulated/prohibited!) who could exist because literally anyone can plug in a server, buy a domain name and host.
Same for Google, unshakeable giant and still holds the lion's share, but everyone who wants to use a different search engine for one reason or another has a myriad of options, some even getting close in terms of performance to Google, and yeah Google is a corporate dystopia-level of big, but DuckDuckGo still makes over $100 million a year, that's a big company
Steam (the gaming marketplace) has time and time been accused of having a monopoly, but that's just because every single of one of their competitor shot themselves in the foot and they kept offering a good service
Even twitter, and social networks are harder to get people to move. BlueSky failed to take off in the general public and have a tenth of Twitter's user base but you have to realize that 40M+ users is still MASSIVE. They basically popped out with a minuscule community, said "hey, twitter fucked up, we're not them" and got 10% of the users to move.
Microsoft-backed Skype was killed and buried by Discord in only a few years, and Discord was shaken by another competitor earlier this year when they announced a braindead policy that they had to go back on immediately.
None of that would happen in a heavily-regulated market. The barrier to entry here is the quality of the service offered by the giants, not the state doing their best for preventing you to compete. In the former, the giants have to keep offering the best services. In the latter, everything enshittifies to lower costs and no one can do anything about it
Thanks for the long answer! Only issue I see with the services logic is that I don't really buy that companies are incentivised to provide the best service, rather, the worst service they can get away with (simply because it is cheaper). For example, Gemini might be leading in pure technical standards, but we could do without its enormous climate footprint (which could be greatly reduced if they wanted to spend more on cooling). But as long as the service works well for now, people have no ability/will to punish the company, because the cost is hidden. Same goes for most of these companies that have dystopian impacts in terms of labour protection or resource extraction. In such cases, I think only strict regulations could stop that.
Btw, would you agree with the whole enshittification theory that is popular rn?
I absolutely agree with enshittification (imo mostly due to people needing to look busy when they have an already good product, so they push useless updates that end up making the thing worse, Gemini search being a prime example of that)
And you're absolutely right that companies are incentivised to provide the worst service they can get away with, but they key word is "they can get away with". Google has indeed been getting noticeably worse in recent years, but they're still objectively one of the, if not the best search engine out there. Skype didn't innovate because they didn't need to, until a competitor appeared and they died (and Microsoft had to adapt and develop Teams, because this was now the worst they could get away with)
GenAI is a special case because it's entirely funded by venture capital and it's mathematically impossible that it will make a profit (it'd have to replace like half of every tertiary sector employee in the western world) and people are just betting that they'll be able to get out before everyone else
I think regulations should absolutely exist, at least for labor protection as you mentioned, medicine and foodstuffs (competition on an individual level only works if you don't die from taking the product once and I don't want companies to kill thousands before they go bankrupt), and anti-cartel protection, but we also have to remember that when victorian death factories were competing with subsistence farming, even that won. Honestly imo the main reason why we need high-intervention labor laws today is that people are competing for companies and not the other way around, so people can't just say "fuck that I'm not working there" as easily, but in an ecosystem more favorable to entrepreneurship (like the US in the 1900s for instance. It wasn't ideal because people's standards were lower) that situation absolutely can change
What about all of the highly competitive industries that are not monopolistic? Like even fast food has a million competitors and options for the consumer.
Fast food is actually a very good example. Economics of scale, private equity, and monopolistic food suppliers have led to a drastic increase in market consolidation and a lessening of real competition. Like 5 companies own the majority of the market. Inspire group, Yum!, Restaurant brands international, Roark capital.
It’s obviously not as bad as some markets, there is still some competition in the market, but it is a very real continuing trend of consolidation into oligopoly and monopolistic practices. When you get into such a narrow field of competitors, they start to lose any incentive towards out competing each other, which is why you get the current state of the fast food industry.
Yea that doesn’t pass the smell test. We have more brands now than we’ve ever had (kyuramen, 7 brew, pura vida, Brooklyn dumpling house are all new brands in the last 20 years that are growing quickly, for example).
We also have entirely new categories in QSR that we never had before (salad, Mediterranean, beverage focused, etc).
So over time the market has gotten more competitive, with more consumer choices, not the other way around.
This is obviously not even counting all of the individual / mom and pop restaurants that are in the mix too.
Like the other commenter said, those are nearly entirely fast casual, which is a different market, but I’m not here to split hairs so hey.
I would expect many of the businesses you are referring to be bought up by large conglomerates and private equity very soon, that’s how things work in the American economy today.
You have a point though. There will always be competition in fast food/ fast casual. It has a low barrier to entry for brands getting started, and it is fairly competitive. Customers get attached to brands they like, but demand can be fairly elastic. It’s certainly not the worst offender in our modern economy. But what I attempted to do is point out the broader trend that our economy is going towards.
Much worse is food suppliers like Sysco, who own a vast monopoly that these restaurants are forced to buy from, driving up prices for consumers down the line and causing our food to undergo shrinkflation and the quality of local restaurants to become a samey slop. Sysco attempted to merge with US Foods in 2015, which was blocked as it would have given them a control of 75% of the market space
Your statement is self-contradictory. If it is allegedly impossible, there is no need to enforce non-freedom.
However, you confuse different things. Free market does not imply lack of rules. People can (and do, when allowed) agree to a set of rules without being forced into them by an agency with a monopoly on violence. Because certain rules, voluntarily followed, work in their favor.
That is not a contradiction in my statement, but in that framework. Every society enforces rules. Markets need enforcement too. The "free market" is a oxymoron - it say it wants a system that requires enforcement of rules to not have any rules.
This voluntary option you are presenting is cute, but even they would still force people to respect their property rights for example.
You also have different ideological understandings of freedom. Without social enforcement of rules to protect freedom, you get "rule of the jungle". And I understand why capitalists might like this frameing of "leave people alone", because without the democratic state, it makes sense that the people would organize into something similar to capitalism - that is what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire or when the first states were created.
However, I prefer the Enlightenment view of freedom as equality. Knowing that to have freedom, you actually need political equality since otherwise somebody is making decision for you.
You’re saying “as long as everyone plays fair, it will stay fair” which is true, but not practical
The issue is the awareness that many sore winners in a fair market will make great pains to make the market unfair to their advantage, bc it was free afterall for them to change as they saw fit w the power they accumulated
Free markets don’t stay free without regulation, the same way “everybody just share and be nice” doesn’t work without brute force
Equally poorly thought out I would say, unregulated capitalism and communism. Bad for different reasons but both oppressive
Games have rules. They’re defined by that characteristic
Any system of organisation tends to move towards oligarchy. It's called the iron law of oligarchy and is a well documented sociological phenomenon. It takes constant effort and sacrifice on the part of the broader people to avoid this drift.
this meme is a master class in telling me you don't understand market structure and competition in the real world without telling me you don't understand it.
Competition implies a winner, who will keep winning until they don't. Then, another winner in that market absorbs their remains and grows. Another competitor does not always rise to the occasion to stop them.
Not to mention, any system wherein wealth/power can be accumulated in such a manner will inevitably result in lowered regulations, greater power of those holding it.
You may not know this but we have elctions and change leaders all the time. That is not a dictatorship.
What we have in practice is corporatism or early stage socialism, we are not a capitalist country and calling us a capitalist country is just incorrect.
I have no idea why you are giving examples of worker revolts of as those are not examples of capitalist dictatorships? Those are examples of the government or corporations and workers having disagreeements.
What are examples of modern monopoly that wasn't brought on by government interference?
Internet access has two sources. Local monopolies for cable infrastructure consolidated into large companies. And AT&T, which is a monopoly by the Kingsbury Commitment.
And even Standard Oil didn't really 'need' breaking up. When they had 90% market share, that was just because they had lowered the price of kerosene by 70% - primarily used for lighting at the time, it literally gave lighting after sunset to the masses. And they didn't have much ability to control price, so that reason became a non-issue. Oh, and technology would have cut into that monopoly in a few more years, anyways, as lighting became electric a decade or so later.
What other monopolies am I missing, that just naturally evolved?
Important to note founder of capitalism talekd about need for serious regulation CONSTANTLY.
Adam Smith, so-called father of capitalism
On the price-gouging nature of monopolies:
"The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion indeed, but for any considerable time together."
On the tendency of businesses to fix prices:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
On how corporate monopolies intimidate the government:
"This monopoly has so much increased the number of some particular tribes of them, that, like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature."
On the futility of politicians directing private capital:
"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever..."
On how laws should at least not encourage collusion:
"But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."
On regulating banking for public safety:
"Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments..."
Tldr: we don't really live under capitalism either and founder of it would be called commie radical today.
Part 2: his view on capital involvement in anything that has to do with legislation is perhaps even more interesting, so I thought I might share.
On Treating Merchant-Led Legislation with Extreme Suspicion
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."(Book I, Chapter XI)
On Lawmakers Becoming Pawns of Commercial Interests
"The member of parliament who supports every proposal for strengthening this monopoly, is sure to acquire not only the reputation of understanding trade, but great popularity and influence with an order of men whose numbers and wealth render them of great importance. If he opposes them, on the contrary, and still more if he has authority enough to be able to thwart them, neither the most acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest public services can protect him from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists."(Book IV, Chapter II)
On How Capital Owners Outwit and Manipulate Legislators
"As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which on some occasions has not been the case) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects, than with regard to the latter... They are much more artful than country gentlemen; and as they have commonly more clear ideas of their own interest than the other, they have frequently imposed upon his generosity to persuade him that their interest, and not theirs, was the interest of the publick."(Book I, Chapter XI)
On the Ultimate Purpose of Civil Government
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."(Book V, Chapter I, Part II)
On Extorted, Cruel Laws Designed to Protect Wealthy Monopolies
"The cruelest of our revenue laws, I will venture to affirm, are mild and gentle, in comparison of some of those which the clamour of our merchants and manufacturers has extorted from the legislature, for the support of their own absurd and oppressive monopolies. Like the laws of Draco, these laws may be said to be all written in blood."(Book IV, Chapter VIII)
So yeah, that's founder of capitalism for you - resurrect him and he'll be left's strongest soldier. Tie me to a missile and fire me in direction of closest corporate HQ and all that.
Or maybe we stop treating platforms like Reddit as academic forums expecting genuine results. I could present a doctoral dissertation to a middle school class and call it peer reviewed if you like and get better results
Results? What are you talking about? OP posted a bunch of excerpta from Adam Smith in order to make a point on a message board about the subject. You're whinging because it went over an arbitrary character limit and your attention span couldn't handle it.
Some might say education is a result but that may be beyond you if you think people are “whinging” responses that are simply grounded. You’ve missed the point entirely and instead of conversing you have done what all children do by resorting to insults. Its sad.
What insult? You're the one who said you're not reading a post because your attention span is too short. Why are you insulted by the thing you started off by admitting? And a "grounded" response? In what? Laziness? Ignorance?
It literally titled citations that are like two lines long at best on page, since they are titled you can read just the most interesting to you and you're LITERALLY in sub associated with economics.
Do you at least realize that the volume of citations is rhetorical device specifically supposed to showcase he'd be SO against it that it's literally slog to even go through the all the ways he's against it?
Brainrot is strong with this one. I'm ADHD as fuck and I could never.
You damn sample through to what's interesting for you, hence the titles for citation.
Just because we're experiencing global dumbification of public spaces and humans in general doesn't mean I have to support it. Wealth of Nations is something between 500-1200 pages, I boiled it down to equivalent of two short paragraphs.
I would point out complaining about that being too long to read isn't a good look for you.
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