I'm Brazilian (not a shaddy judge though) and this comment is baffling. It reminded me why I left it in the first place.
> No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy
Indeed true.
That's why you see Brazilian politicians embezzling billions of dollars and running away with it. At the same time, impoverished individuals are imprisoned for years after stealing a basket of eggs (literally).
No, it's not the same as in the U.S. Many innocent Americans are put in jail because they didn't know their rights. Impoverished Brazilians are not even given that choice.
The law isn't the same for everyone. If a Brazilian with a college education is arrested, he goes to a different, more pompous, prison "by law".
People seem to be assuming that free market capitalism means companies are perfectly happy about competition, because competition is what we expect to see under perfect free market conditions. No, companies do not like competition; any sane (not to mention rational) actor in such a system will do anything it can to ensure its own monopoly. Pitting various actors with such tendencies against each other is kind of the core idea of market economy. It's pretty obvious that some actors will temporarily get ahead, and then capitalize on that to get further ahead. Hence inequality, centralization and TPP, which is another stepping stone towards companies being in charge of governments, and not the other way around.
As for unemployment, there are many things that give rise to it, but part of it is definitely market optimizing things so much that people are being pushed under minimum survivable wage and have to rely on (the bad, communist) welfare to survive. Automation is playing a serious role here, even companies know that (hence the "don't vote for increased minimum wage, or we'll have no choice but to replace our workers with robots" ads that started to appear).
The line dividing "market" and "political system" is blurry and pretty arbitrary, like most lines in models we make. There's nothing in reality that makes meddling with politics unkosher; if it increases profit, then the incentives created by the economy will make companies choose to do so. The problem isn't that they're crossing some arbitrary lines - the problem is with the incentives that lead them to it.
Seems clear to me. The market consists of voluntary associations. An association is voluntary if it is entered into without coercion. The "political system" more properly called the state, depends on coercion. There is no purpose to a law other than to involuntarily compel, by violence if necessary.
Voluntary trade at the level of basic needs is bullshit. Fear of hunger or death from sickness is coercion. I have to have a job, and I have to buy food. Companies are very happy to exploit that. A lot of blood was shed a century ago to establish some minimum safety net for this "voluntary trade".
> Read up on e.g. lives of miners in the United States
We all know the about the suffering of industrial workers. What's less well known is the far greater suffering of the pre industrial revolution peasant. What's also less well knows is that the advances in conditions and prosperity that bring us to today were will under way before, and had very little to do with, progressive state interventions.
Whether or not there was a progressive reduction of suffering, it doesn't in any way support the statement that real-world market is based entirely on voluntary trade. We still have to eat; in the past this coerced us to deal with nature, today it coerces most of the world population to deal with market economy.
You must obtain food but not from any one specific provider. No company will long "exploit" you (Hmm, where have we heard that term before?) unless they are protected from competition by a coercive state.
Read up on e.g. lives of miners in the United States in the past. It happened many times that a private interest controlled all your life - your housing, your food, your tools. Companies can, and if allowed will, create conditions where competing with them is impossible. One of the reasons we have states is to prevent exactly that from happening.
What you present is a naive fantasy. There do not exist any corporations that do not engage in coercion. Coercion is human nature. Corporations are run by humans. In the real world things are messy. Politics and capitalism go hand in hand.
Indeed, that's the problem. The state gains support of corporations by "partnering" with them. I will certainly not dispute that a free market system is often perverted by state cronyism.
In the west. Yet. They can and do that in poor/failed states, even if indirectly (by funding local mercenary armies).
Also, there are many that could kill you and get away with it even in a western democracy. It may not be "legal" if the public ever found out (it won't), but the end result will be the same - you'll be dead.
The current, legal solution is to drive you to financial ruin. Equally effective as means of coercion.
Of course established companies do not like competition, it is the startups that do. If we didn't have free markets, then MS would not have risen up to replace IBM (for example; maybe not the best example). What we hope is that MS is better at doing what IBM used to do.
Yes, but as the (hypothetical) MS is fighting against IBM, the IBM is free to employ every trick in their book, including shoving things like TPP down our throats, to get rid of the rising competitor. No rule of the market says that they should just give up and die, or that they should just compete on merits, ignoring the influence that comes with money and established position.
MS success started with a very generous legal contract, backed by copyright fee regulation protections, then became the anti-competiitve progress-blockimg behemoth they replaced.
Of course, they are consequences of today's corporate capitalism!
To have a shiny vision of capitalism, that just is not compatible with reality, does not help. Communism's failure was not, that it was not a nice idea, it's failure was, that it's thoughts where not compatible with reality!
Reality is, that international corporations have huge stacks of money and plenty of lawyers and lobbyists. And they use it for the only ethics they got: profits.
And TTP, inequality, centralization, unemployment ... are results of the thrive to more and more profits for the owning people at the expense of the working people.
Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
And when you talk about "free market" -- there is no such thing. A real free market would give everybody the same chance. But the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not. So there is no such thing as a free market with free and equal competition in reality.
I guess we should try and move away from labels a little bit - because a lot of time is spent discussing whether communism is true communism, or if what we have is capitalism, corporationism, corporate state capitalism or whatever.
Name it however you like, it doesn't change that there are processes you mentioned that bring about the results we don't like. We need to focus on those.
> Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
In a way, our economy is a paperclip maximizer. It doesn't love or hate you, but you're an expendable resource that can be used to make something else (profit within the system).
I would agree. Labels and names are not helpful, because everybody has his own view of it. For some, capitalism is hell, for some it means the only rescue against the hell of communism and vice versa.
Your last sentence describes it very well. It is the mechanics, which are the driving force -- and the direction is predefined by the mechanics. The driving force we have today is profits ... and the result is a de-humanized and un-ethical society, because profits are not ethical at all.
This is very important to establish every time there is a discussion, in that there are politically convenient labels, and there are what we can consider terms that are useful to further the argument. The terms capital-ism and commun-ism refer to compatible aspects of reality. Like self interest and sharing for common good co-exist in reality. Trying to eliminate either would make us unhappy. USA economy has been favoring a less people consolidating more capital.
> the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not
Indeed! How about we fix that and don't let big corporations shape the laws? Crony capitalism is not an inherent feature of capitalism, it's a perversion of it which really ought not be taken as a given.
The only way to do that would be to have a government completely disconnected from the economy. As long as the officials need to eat, need to send their kids to school and need the money to increase their chances for reelection, politics is a part of market economy. Pretending those two are not connected is fooling oneself.
Because politics currently is a part of economy, period. You can't disconnect the two as long as officials participate in the economy themselves, because any such participation is a bridge between the two "worlds".
From the slant of your comment, I guess you're an Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems.
If I'm right, you think the problem is the state, and the solution is getting rid of it. You are probably overlooking, ignoring, or downplaying the power of private corporations, or you think they would lose their power once we get rid of the state.
My guess is different.
I think that if we get rid of the state, we're more likely to get a corporate government than anarchy. Like what's described in the Continuum TV show. Whether that's a good thing… well at least, we would no longer kid ourselves about living in a democracy.
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Sorry if I put words in your mouth, but you forced my hand.
Anarcho-Capitalist: a Right Wing Libertarian who think universal private property will solve most current problems
FWIW there are variations of anarcho-capitalism such as agorism, which is much less overtly propertarian (i.e. either advocating land value tax or not readily accepting the labor theory of property), and moreover which makes a distinction between entrepreneurs and mere capital owners.
We can keep dividing and refining labels, but at some point one has to ask - isn't it better to consider problems on case-by-case basis and trying to find the right answer instead of subscribing to an entire philosophy wholesale?
Anarcho-Capitalist, Right Wing? Not really. All them I know are hard core peacenicks who want to end the drug war and Wall Street bailouts. They're more Nader than Cheney.
Just because 67% of consumers are choosing Google search despite a myriad of other options, doesn't make it a monopoly nor does it mean they don't have competition. Google is constantly being pushed by its competitors to improve and maintain its marketshare.
Google is also competing with every type of advertising on the planet.
> Why is it always "free markets" but never "competitive markets"?
I would put my money on newspeak. "Free" sounds more positive than "competitive". Freedom is like always good, while competition makes it clear that there will be losers as well as winners.
It's also much harder to be against freedom than competition. Often, we want cooperation instead of competition. But what could possibly replace freedom?
It's dangerous and biased to assume a company like Apple had its stock increased because of 'innovation' or 'disruption'.
A lot of it was a consequence of Fed's policies mainly with ZIRP and QE. From that angle, overvaluation of public companies is more likely than the latter.
And, if startups are 'less undervalued'~'more overvalued' than public companies, it only means they're more prone to volatility, busts and bloodbaths.
While investors look for gold and bonds as a response to falling equities, they're actually just trying to find 'safety'. That doesn't tell anything about which asset they'll necessarily choose.
Take the EM crisis we've been experiencing. Yes, everything going downhill, but many EM investors bought USD as a 'response'. If USD has problems, maybe certain commodities go up. It's hard to tell.
Genuine capitalism doesn't have a government controlling money supply, which is behind your 'exponential growth'. Instead of growing an economy, the truest capitalist is focused on freeing an economy
If you wanna name the socialistic Keynesian experience 'Capitalism', that's your call. I can't do it.
You don't use words the same way everyone else does. The most charitable thing I could say is that your take on Keynesian economic policy and 'genuine capitalism' is heterodox and stems from a non-mainstream ideology. There is no serious economist who would call Keynes a socialist, or socialistic, whatever that means, and the definition of capitalism does not proscribe government control of the money supply.
To be honest, I believe the trend is to only become worse.
Every generation appears to become more hedonist and think less about retirement. Many of my friends(millennials) make six figures and barely save any money for retirement.
This is quite funny when you think that "Carpe Diem" originally means literally the opposite of what people use it for nowadays.
The original quote is "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero" i.e. "Seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow (the future)". Meaning that one should do everything today to ensure a good future and be prepared.
> Every generation appears to become more hedonist and think less about retirement. Many of my friends(millennials) make six figures and barely save any money for retirement.
Well, maybe I am too unimaginative but not being an American, I am curious where does all the money go. Reading Paul Graham's article about Ramen Profitability, I get the idea that a bare minimum lifestyle can burn as low as ~$1000 - 1500 / month [1]. Now a person is earning 6x this figure, how you don't end up saving something. Bars, clubs would only be fun to a certain extent. The only reasonable explanation I can think is, people buy everything that they don't need.
Unfortunately, most people don't have minimalist lives.
With a 'humble' example:
$3000/month SF/NYC apartment,$1000/month on clothing(specially bankers), $1500/month on food(no time to cook, so $50/day), $2000/month on entertainment($500/week), $1500/ month on a decent car +gas. That's already ~110k a year. It's really easy to go beyond that.
Suppose I'm dropping $3000/month on a spacious 2 bedroom east village flat. If I'm spending $1000/month on clothing, I'll very quickly run out of space to store it in my second bedroom. $50/day on food is quite a feat even eating eggs and kale on artisanal toast 3x/day. Maybe if you are eating bodybuilder type meals at only the finest restaurants?
I'm trying to imagine how to do $500/month on entertainment. Fri/Sat/Sun bars with a $25 cover charge, plus 42 $10 cocktails every week? With that kind of a drinking problem, money is the least of one's worries.
Spending both $3k/month on a flat in NYC and $1.5k/month on a car makes no sense (the whole point of the flat is to never drive).
I realized I didn't have a hormonal or even psychiatric issue: I was an addict.
Addicted to sugar, fat, salt in extreme quantities. I would always go from a bowl to a box of cereal.
So I quit it all. Cold turkey. It could "fit my macros", but I took no sugar, no junk food, no snacks.
Only food. Real food.
And I realized it's really hard to become fat on rice, chicken and vegetables. You"d need an insane appetite.
And, after some time, I slowly regained control.
I stopped counting calories, and now I'm happy to say I'm able to eat half a Snickers bar and not crave anything else.
And I'm fit! Happy eating, keeping a bit of muscle and a low body fat =)