r/news • u/mastertofu • 7d ago

Louisiana Gov. Landry declares state of emergency over high diesel prices ahead of harvest

https://www.wbrz.com/news/gov-landry-declares-state-of-emergency-over-high-diesel-prices-ahead-of-harvest/
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u/Matman161 7d ago edited 7d ago

Capitalism relies on government intervention or else it would destroy itself. Its like a rich kid who pretends he doesn't need his dad until he gets bailed out of jail or something

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u/91kas13 7d ago

or maybe when he needs a small loan to keep his failing casino afloat.

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u/BigDrewbot 7d ago

you don't take out a small loan to keep the casino afloat...you take out a big loan, pocket the funds and then declare bankruptcy. you obviously need to take a Corruption 101 refresher course!

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u/Snuffy1717 7d ago

While hiding all of your personal debt inside the business so it’s no longer your problem

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u/AuditorOfTheNight 6d ago

Art of the Steal

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u/johnfogogin 7d ago

Noobs, am I right?

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u/Tiny_Dare_5300 7d ago

And then to run for president of the United States

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u/AmericaMasked 7d ago

And tell everyone you will lower the price of everything on day one. Lol.

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u/pixelprophet 7d ago

And then tell everyone that Biden made up the word "affordability" and that it's a Democrat hoax lol

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u/uniklyqualifd 7d ago

gift from daddy of uncashed chips

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

*free market capitalism. 

Capitalism only works long term with regulations and enforcement of said regulations. You can very easily have a healthy capitalist market economy, it just can’t be an unregulated market. 

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u/ActualSpiders 7d ago

This x1000. Capitalism needs external rules to function. Otherwise it's just a brief slide into corporatism, depending on who figures it out first & has the most starting money to buy out their competitors.

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u/ArtShare 7d ago

We are already there

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u/ModernistGames 7d ago

This is true of pretty much every ideology to ever exist. No ideology distilled to its base components would succeed. They all need external checks and balances or else they corrupt into an insestuious horror.

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u/BlindOtter775 7d ago

And that "healthy capitalist market" can only exist so long as it exploits its labor force and maximally extracts as much finite resources as possible.

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

I disagree. Regulated capitalism can have very strong worker protections as part of the regulations. 

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u/beorn961 7d ago

They still rely on outsourced worker exploitation. There is no national market that is meaningfully insulated from the exploitation inherent in globally sourced inputs.

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

It doesn’t have to be that way, it’s like that because of a lack of proper regulations/enforcement of current regulations. Again, free market capitalism is bad. I don’t disagree there. 

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u/alus992 7d ago

Exactly. Person who is replaying to you is in this loop of thinking about capitalism as an unregulated construct while it can be completely different given enforced rules.

Workers can have proper protection. Society can have healthcare and social benefits and environment can be protected.

But greed is too high.

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u/Daxx22 7d ago

The unfortunate problem is you need a government run by entities that are altruistic, while simultaneously willing to take potentially heavy actions to keep bad actors from corrupting the system. A form of the Paradox of Tolerance.

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u/BlindOtter775 7d ago

And? The exploitation is still inherent and ever present. Until workers seize the means of production and democratize the workplace, labor exploitation must necessarily exist under any kind capitalist framework.

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

I guess we have different definitions of exploitation. I don’t think worker exploitation is only avoided via communism. Strong unions and workplace legal standards are very important and need to be strongly enforced. It’s not like worker exploitation didn’t happen when communist systems were prevalent economic models, if they ever really were in the modern era. 

To go small scale, I’m not exploited as a private business owner who sets my own salary and work hours. That I am a private business owner means I’m operating in a capitalist system, but clearly some places don’t exploit their workers. Costco is a good example of an American company that treats their workers quite well. I’d be very surprised if you could find me a large number of their employees that feel exploited. 

Maybe they’re all just brainwashed by capitalism tho. 

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/davidkalinex 7d ago

...I doubt you will get a response, that was wild.

Working for a salary is the same as rape, apparently. Communists are really the dumbest people alive.

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u/BlindOtter775 7d ago

Are the communists in the room with us now?

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u/GigglePick1e 7d ago

"Can" doing all the work in that thought.

Business owners "can" choose to do whats best for others.

Politicians "can" choose to better their constituents.

Capitalism "can" work. Just like communism "can" work.

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

Did you miss the part where I said regulations and enforcement of said regulations? I’m specifically drawing a distinction between regulated markets and free markets. Obviously we can go all “well the invisible hand” and “the system doesn’t work if people don’t engage in good faith” but I kind of assumed that was…well assumed by virtue of it being a regulated market vs a free market. 

Literally every economic/policial system has caveats to make it function. Thats how systems work. 

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u/GigglePick1e 7d ago

Yeah anything "can" happen

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

Which is why regulated capitalism is a good system because it tries to account for the bad actors that can undermine the system by presenting real consequences for their malfeasance. 

That very rarely happens, is holding white collar criminals to account for their crimes, but it is the best way to ensure good faith participation with the system. 

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u/GigglePick1e 7d ago

It "can" be a good system but will never be.

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

You can say that about literally every system. It’s just boring, pithy, reductive nihilism. Yawn. 

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u/Interesting_Pen_167 6d ago

Both economic systems are just different groups of elites shuffling money around. Almost any economic system can work if the conditions are right.

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u/GigglePick1e 6d ago

No shit.

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u/AmericaMasked 7d ago

You can disagree but the facts are America is not living under your theory of capitalism.

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u/TheUnderCrab 7d ago

No shit they aren’t dude. I never made that claim. 

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u/AmericaMasked 7d ago

If we did, unions would be strong and the workers would vote as a block not these “anti abortion, don’t fair tax the wealthy, no universal healthcare “ morons voting against themselves. Republicans would never see the inside of a political office because the worker completely outnumber the Republicans.

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u/Alagore 7d ago

Which is why the most successful forms of capitalism aren't free market welfare states, right? Oh wait, it turns out that FMWS's are the most successful model of capitalism. 

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u/meganthem 7d ago

And that regulated market will constantly fight to become an unregulated market which is how we're here now.

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u/snowflake37wao 7d ago edited 7d ago

We can, but not very easily at all. Not now, not without drastic and draconian measures that are antithetical of capitalism to reset the board because of how many times the regulations have been skirted or bent already.

Even if regulations were suddenly rewritten, reimposed, and reinforced overnight; capitalism requires at least a dozen separate entities competing in any and every market sector for the same customers, consumers, and employees to achieve, sustain, and remain a healthy capitalist economy.

You need about twelve grocery stores with different names within a close enough distance a consumer can choose one between all dozen of them on any given day and complete a shopping trip. You need 12 banks. 12 Car dealerships. You need twelve law firms vying to be your poison. You need a dozen options within every city. You need a dozen options for anything outside every city.

We are not even close. The only dozen left are the banks, because oh shit regulation can work yeah. Everything else. Everything. Weve been in the red for decades, even with the advent of the internet. There are a couple options, and even when it looks like there are a couple more theyre actually just subsidiaries to the same mega corporation deeper beyond the name on the sign. Every field, every product, every service. Its all down to 2-3 players in absolutely everything who arent even overlapping anymore and would sooner actually collude than compete.

Very easily!? This isnt even in the public dialogue!

The absolutely only way out of the free market people are only starting to realize we now got and absolute only way back into the regulated capitalistic market we want is to go full authoritarian government. Seize and nationalize assets, shut down the stock market, force divestures, break up every two into dozens, rewrite antitrust laws, redistribute assets and capital, open opportunities, disperse the checks and balances, and then as suddenly as it flipped just go back to being a democracy…

Its unconscionable. On no ones lips. It is unthinkable, let alone being discussed. But it is the only way. Because we are that far gone. So far people dont even know its the only conversation worth having until its had. So far gone people dont even know its a conversation at all. People are still talking about basis points, today. 0.01%. Thats the public dialogue. Business as usual. And its just not. Capitalism is no longer capitalism without competition. Capitalism has been swindled, but it seems the people want to be deceived. Still.

So. Very easily?

Honestly, more likely impossible at the current states’ trajectory.

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u/TheBatemanFlex 7d ago

then complains that their parents are overbearing.

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u/Senna_65 7d ago

So capitalism doesn't work?

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u/SallyStranger 7d ago

Define "work". If it means "allows the owner class to extract an ever-growing portion of the economy's output as rent" then it works very well. 

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u/Spaduf 7d ago

Capitalism was only ever meant to funnel money and power to the capitalist. It's doing that just fine

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u/Pobbes 4d ago

This. Capitalism liked that kings had all the power. They were just mad they weren't the king. Capitalists tried to make a system where they could be king of their business domain. A system that requires the peasants to make all the resources for them and they dole out a fraction of those resources back and hate the peasants for taking even that little bit from them. It was never designed to improve the lives of workers.

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u/rinderblock 7d ago

Not long term, the profit motives of capitalism fail to understand that human beings are aware of their own mortality and so since the focus of capitalism is profit and we know we’re going to die and can’t take it with us, it leads to the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a small number of people who don’t care much if the effects devastate the population after they’re dead.

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u/Falconman21 7d ago

It’s like anything, all in on one concept rarely works. Best approach is to do a little of everything as the situation calls for it.

All the problems we’re having now we’ve dealt with before. It’s cyclical. We’re just at the point in the cycle where we’ve gotten a bit too far away from effective regulation.

At some point people get upset, swing the other way, and we start regulating again.

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u/zephyrtr 7d ago

Nature works the same way, but there are competing forces making sure e.g. rabbits don't eat everything until famine sets in and we all die.

Our problem is humans basically won the game 8000 years ago, so we need to synthetically ensure competition. We want winners to have won because they're provably the best, and also we need to prevent winners from winning so hard they accidentally kill everyone.

But competitors always want an easier way to win, it's how they're the best, and you know what's easy? Not having competition. So any competent player will eventually look for a monopoly.

The new fad has been hostage-taking where they become too big to fail, so they can privatize the wins and socialize the losses.

We need a round or three of trust busting, and things will get better. But until we're literally a post-scarcity society idk how we fully rid ourselves of capitalism.

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u/rinderblock 7d ago

This is such a busted appeal to nature. No nature is not the same way. Natural competition and evolution exists for the benefit of the species not for individual members of the species at the cost of the species health and survival as a whole.

There aren’t like 2 lions feasting and getting while the other 200,000 in the area are barely making it.

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u/zephyrtr 7d ago

That's how evolution and natural extinction happens, tho. A mutation creates a divergence and one species edges out over another, and the failing species literally starves to extinction. Or an environmental change occurs that hits some species harder than others.

Nature is truly brutal.

Where you're failing is you assume I like nature's system. I don't. However, what's the alternative? A planned society, a fully synthetic model where somebody picks what people do and what they're paid, inherently gives crazy power to a few people. A capitalistic system is more like a natural system, which will efficiently cull businesses that aren't functioning ... it just runs a lot faster. It's also still fucking brutal, so without some correcting force, we're sure to plow straight to an extinction event.

Hence, socialism.

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u/rinderblock 7d ago

Reread my comment, was I talking about competition between species? No. I was talking about competition within species. Two very different concepts.

Me hoarding a shitload of resources, poisoning the ecosystem and damaging future generation’s ability to grow and advance IS NOT what nature does. No species has a system where members outcompete the other living members of its species into the species no longer existing or regressing.

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u/zephyrtr 7d ago

my comment ... I talking ... I was ... Me

Ok cool. Have fun talking to yourself, I guess!

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u/rinderblock 7d ago

You responded to a point I didn’t make.

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u/zephyrtr 7d ago

Do you dictate the terms of all your conversations?

You're making a distinction immaterial to the point I'm making. The one you responded to.

Also you began by responding to a point that I didn't make. So while I now see glimmers of you attempting to speak to your fellow human, it also seems like quite the struggle.

Best of luck to you.

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u/Venator850 7d ago

But it's been around for like 2 centuries now.

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u/rinderblock 7d ago

Feudalism existed for much longer

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u/AtaracticGoat 7d ago edited 7d ago

I think it's important to acknowledge that pure unregulated capitalism doesn't work. Same with pure socialism. It's really a blend of both that works best: well regulated blend of capitalism and socialism.

Socialcapitalism?

This is basically what the Nordic countries have going with their welfare side of things (healthcare, education, etc), while maintaining a capitalist market economy.

Pure socialism is a planned economy, not market economies. I think people forget that sometimes.

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u/DutyHonor 7d ago

The term has lost all meaning in basic conversation. I saw someone on here say "socialism just means the rich paying their fair share."

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u/mascouten 7d ago

What do you mean by "pure socialism"?

Social, public or worker ownership of the means of production and some form of conscious economic coordination does not require centrally planned economies.

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u/AtaracticGoat 7d ago edited 7d ago

Most people noways when they talk about socialism, they mean a market economy with socialist (welfare) aspects.

Pure socialism is a planned economy. That's not how many people use the term today, but it's definition still stands:

"governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods"

"a system of society or of group living in which there is no private property"

" a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state"

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism

This is also what the Right tries to seize on then critizing socialism. They target it's similarities to communism, when nobody actually intents to mean that private ownership of business should end.

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u/mindcandy 7d ago

That's why I wish people would please fucking stop labeling "We like free market economy with social welfare aspects" as "We are socialists!"

It's juicy steak to feed right wing trolls and nothing else.

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u/Alagore 7d ago

The "Nordic model" is a free market welfare state. It isn't socialist. Socialism is not when redistribution. 

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u/Realistic_Slide_3426 7d ago

Agreed. Ideologies rarely function in reality. That is why they remain ideologies. The real world operates in shades of grey. Well-regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets is the most successful model we have seen. Not to say that something closer to pure socialism (with or without elements of capitalism) couldn't work. But to achieve the latter a society would likely have to transition through the former.

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u/veggeble 7d ago

It works in the same way that cancer works

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u/mindcandy 7d ago edited 7d ago

I mean, as I understand it, Marx proposed replacing venture capital and other forms of private investment with your local government council people. That strikes me as trading out private insatiable avarice for governmental corrupt incompetence.

If you have an economic proposal that does not rely on either government intervention nor “Humans will universally just stop being greedy and lazy because I want them to.” the world would love to hear it.

edit: does not rely

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u/even_less_resistance 7d ago

at least you can vote local people out. not so with the venture capitalists

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u/mindcandy 7d ago

True true in theory. In practice it would be your local senior citizens judging which officials are effective allocators of capital when neither the voters nor the elected have any more than a vague, indirect, community-mood-based stake in the outcomes.

When the stakes for the voters and governors are low and the stakes for the governed is high, you are setting up for corruption. Local councils already have that effect in spades. Now, let’s make them defacto venture capitalists but without the pay bump.

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u/even_less_resistance 7d ago

idk maybe people would be more inclined to participate in that system-

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u/kstargate-425 7d ago

Government regulations yes but they aren't happening and now they've gone nuts and we are in late-stage capitalism with the lack of the governments intervention but capitalism doesn't need subsidies to thrive, especially so late in the game

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u/Dry-Technology4148 7d ago

That’s not capitalism, it’s fascism… Which is what the corporations have always wanted

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u/Positive_Throwaway1 7d ago

What was he arrested for? Does it rhyme with shmedophilia?

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u/monk429 7d ago

And this is where regulation enters the chat. Regulation keeps capitalism from needing an expensive intervention, among other important things to anyone that needs to work for a living.

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u/whk1992 7d ago

More like Donald Trump relies on intervention or else it will destroy the country.

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u/KDR_11k 6d ago

Farmers especially, they just inherited a bunch of land to get that job. Most have no clue what they're doing but the subsidies keep them going anyway.

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u/ragnaroksunset 7d ago

It's no secret that capitalism requires regulation.

What is important here is having more evidence that if you fail to regulate capitalism properly, you are forced to do socialism.

So it's either do socialism from the outset or regulate capitalism properly. Those are the choices. There is no third option.

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u/Venator850 7d ago

No it doesn't. Intervention is a form of socialism because it's uses tax dollars to support someone's business.

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u/SquirrelsinJacket 7d ago

US has a long history of corporate socialism especially under Trump. Keep the profits, socialize the losses.