Capitalists love to conflate things like free market economies and capitalism.
There is only one good hack that free market capitalism figured out. If you make it profitable for people to satisfy others needs you can create a system where needs get satisfied and without explicit planning.
That’s the good bit about free markets. You want a hamburger, well if enough people want it then there will be a profit motive for someone to supply it.
There that’s literally it. That’s the good thing. It causes people to not sit idle but to go find ways to make profit and in the best most ideal version the ways they find to do that are a net benefit to society at large, people get hamburgers.
It doesn’t do anything to control for the psychopaths who would rather gather another bag of money they can never hope to spend by exploiting people. It doesn’t supply things that have low demand (like cures for rare diseases). It doesn’t have any short circuit for the profit motive in case it makes us do something stupid like destroy the ecosystem.
I wish we could look at it objectively. If you make it so people have to do things to make profit to survive they won’t sit idle. That’s the upside. The downside is pretty down though and one can acknowledge the upside and still think “yea this system still kinda blows, it’s predicated on people not being allowed to exist unless they are generating profit”
I want good cheap internet service. But our society values ownership, and people of value agree: that should be illegal. I want a (name a thing) app that won’t spy on me. There is literally nothing i can buy. I want a dumb tv-there’s one company im not sure they’re still in business and it’s impossible to get one; the factories just can’t keep up. I want a car that doesn’t spy on me ajy more than legally required (i don’t actually, fuck cars, but every driver i know does). Nearly every product i buy, there are simple popular (combinations of) features i want that do not exist on the market.
It diesnt even do that. 'Windows isn’t done ‘til lotus won’t run’ platformism, old fashioned cartelism/bribery/blackmail, and the modern information economy completely completely negate that
Capitalists love to conflate things like free market economies and capitalism.
There is only one good hack that free market capitalism figured out. If you make it profitable for people to satisfy others needs you can create a system where needs get satisfied and without explicit planning.
That’s the good bit about free markets. You want a hamburger, well if enough people want it then there will be a profit motive for someone to supply it.
There that’s literally it. That’s the good thing. It causes people to not sit idle but to go find ways to make profit and in the best most ideal version the ways they find to do that are a net benefit to society at large, people get hamburgers.
It doesn’t do anything to control for the psychopaths who would rather gather another bag of money they can never hope to spend by exploiting people. It doesn’t supply things that have low demand (like cures for rare diseases). It doesn’t have any short circuit for the profit motive in case it makes us do something stupid like destroy the ecosystem.
I wish we could look at it objectively. If you make it so people have to do things to make profit to survive they won’t sit idle. That’s the upside. The downside is pretty down though and one can acknowledge the upside and still think “yea this system still kinda blows, it’s predicated on people not being allowed to exist unless they are generating profit”
Its not good at that though.
I want good cheap internet service. But our society values ownership, and people of value agree: that should be illegal. I want a (name a thing) app that won’t spy on me. There is literally nothing i can buy. I want a dumb tv-there’s one company im not sure they’re still in business and it’s impossible to get one; the factories just can’t keep up. I want a car that doesn’t spy on me ajy more than legally required (i don’t actually, fuck cars, but every driver i know does). Nearly every product i buy, there are simple popular (combinations of) features i want that do not exist on the market.
It diesnt even do that. 'Windows isn’t done ‘til lotus won’t run’ platformism, old fashioned cartelism/bribery/blackmail, and the modern information economy completely completely negate that