this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I asked my co-admin once if he thought Capitalism was evil, he's usually extremely careful with his words. He responded with "it might be".
It seems to have a lot of real problems, wealth inequality, human exploitation, environmental destruction. I think countries that have a mixed system, where it's part capitalist and part socialist tend to do better in most metrics. I wouldn't want to live in a country without socialised medicine, socialised education and pretty strict environmental restrictions.
Is this really uniquely true of capitalism? After all, the Chinese government sacrificed their environment (and neighboring countries) to supercharge growth. Then there was the destruction of the Aral Sea by the Soviet Union, one of the worst environmental disasters. I'm not claiming that communism was the cause, but that neither communist nor capitalism was the cause.
Capitalism exploits resources with an eye on ever-increasing "growth". Capitalism abhors anything that either lessens "growth" or doesn't actively encourage it. Growth for growth's sake is a dead-end road, one we're rapidly approaching. That China had the same mindset isn't an aberration, the CCP and Chinese economy leverages the tools of Capitalism and the proceeds go to Communism (and corruption), to fuel stratospheric growth in order to counter Western hegemony. That China embraced Capitalistic growth models is a means to an end, it may be called Communistic Capitalism. It's an economic model, not a political one.
And what of the USSR and the Aral Sea? Point is, when the two largest examples of real world communism wind up doing largely the same as capitalism, I find blaming capitalism to be incredibly dubious.
From what I understand, the idea is that the CPC gains governing legitimacy mainly by delivering strong growth for the Chinese people. This is an alternative to an electoral democracy, where legitimacy flows from the choices of voters. The economical is the political, in a way.
If you're going to continue going to bat for Capitalism as your growth fueled world begins to burn around you, you might consider putting the blame at the feet of the petrochemical industry which is decidedly Capitalist. Have a nice day.
I think you're misidentifying what's happening. The petrochemical industry is capitalist in capitalist countries (or not, see Aramco) and communist in communist countries. Communist countries have various arrangements of state owned and run petrochemical industries. There was a petrochemical industry in the USSR. Present day Venezuela has PDVSA, Vietnam has PetroVietnam, and Cuba has CUPET. Laos is a little unclear and North Korea is shrouded in mystery.
Oil production and distribution is an international operation, and oil markets are just that, Markets. Very few if any countries drill, produce, refine and consume their own petroleum sources. Most countries may have only one or a couple facilities that can extract or refine oil. All crude oil is assessed by its grade and given a value on the international market. Extractive economies (Russia for example) have to either refine and consume their own product which they can't use to put currency in their economy or they sell raw crude to, say, India for US Dollars. India will either refine it for it's own needs or sell it at market. Canada extracts it's oil from oil sands, sends it down to the gulf coast for refining and transshipment to other markets. This is classically a Capitalist supply and demand market, and oil producing countries use oil proceeds to buy foreign currency reserves, regardless of their political system. The entirety of it is Capitalist from beginning to end.
That you're even attempting to try and deflect the various excesses of Capitalism with specious reasoning like "Communist countries produce oil too so not Capitalism" is puerile and an argument in bad faith. You're trying to work back towards your hypothesis "Capitalism good" without doing the work of actually building the argument. Your ineffective points are useless and wholly unconvincing. You're just a shill without an intellectual understanding of what you are attempting to put across. Your ham-fisted defense of Capitalism is simple refutation, you haven't posited anything yourself, you're just attempting to refute what other's have responded to your bait question. Saying "nuh-uh" isn't a defense or a rationale.
I've wasted more time on this than I cared to.
Agreed. I have a similar critique of some of the other comments. A lot of people are pointing to problems right now and drawing the conclusion that capitalism caused those problems. No doubt that capitalism was part of many problems but I think it's flawed to say the problems of today are uniquely caused by capitalism.
I can't think of a country that is purely capitalistic. They're usually some mixture of free-market with government intervention where needed. I think the US is in a period of transition but that description will likely hold for the future.
Thank you for having an answer that is not black/white. Australia seems to have a mix of social and capitlist policies, that has a decent balance. not perfect of course, and it never will be.
I like the idea of socialised public good (health care, etc) but with those capitalist mechanisms for how the markets operate etc. somewhere between the two is the best answer.