Moody Monday: capitalism again

[mellowtigger]

I still want to write a think piece about capitalism. That word, capitalism, was never used by Adam Smith. It seems it was defined by Karl Marx (yes, that one) in Das Kapital, which I really need to read before launching into a proper investigation of the concept. Apparently he detailed its uses and pitfalls.

These days, though, the pitfalls abound. The idea is very much on my mind. Here for Moody Monday is just a short collection of the things that we are doing to ourselves (they don't passively happen to us) in the USA because of unregulated capitalism and profit-at-all-costs psychology.

• Why Americans Are Obsessed With Big Cars (hint: "heavy trucks" avoid regulation, even though bigger vehicles are more dangerous)
• Corporate Profits Surge to an All-Time High of $2 Trillion
• Most theft is wage theft. (and necessary citations 1 and 2, plus a related GQ article)
• ‘Pay or Die’ Review: A Scathing Doc About the Cruelty of Insulin Costs
• Munger: A little inequality is good for the economy
• 39% of Americans say they’ve skipped meals to make housing payments: report
• Assisted-living homes are rejecting Medicaid and evicting seniors
• Why are working people being blamed for inflation?
• Inflation and Price Gouging
• What if We Actually Taxed the Rich?
• Man 'eaten alive' by bed bugs in Atlanta jail - family (disturbing death image available here)
• Homeowners Associations (John Oliver explaining another abdication of government's role)
• Prisons for Profit: An Industry of Exploitation (yet another abdication, and with another good John Oliver video)

By far the best thinking material, though, is this 95-minute YouTube video on Chokepoint Capitalism. I already knew some of the bad stuff that was happening, but this discussion opened my eyes to a lot more. That video explains that we need to have alternatives ready to offer. The Real-World Economics Review is a good place to learn what actual economists think on this topic.

We can imagine better. We deserve better. Failure would be unbearable.

Comments

[wispywillow]

A fictional podcast I listen to (Alice Isn't Dead) put the problem pretty succinctly:
- there are more and more people in the world
- there are increases in technology in efficiency
- more people to fill fewer and fewer jobs

AI is just the latest thing that will threaten creative jobs. Musk is hellbent on trucks being self-driving someday, which threatens a lot of jobs. These are just two small examples.

Capitalism as it is now is not sustainable. It cannot exist alongside increases in population and decreases in jobs.

Something is going to give.

[mellowtigger]

That's another problem with capitalism that I've hinted for years. It requires worker capital (aka human labor) and at minimum cost. For instance, see that Munger quote above. There was a time not too many decades ago when science fiction offered us utopian visions where daily labor was simply not required in its current form. Think: Star Trek or Orville economy. If we eliminated planned obsolescence in our products, then there really is very little that we need to produce from material resources on a daily basis. Capitalism has poisoned that ideal to convince people that it would be actively harmful to implement something like universal basic income, so the few things actually requiring labor could be offered (wages) at a premium, and everyone else got to pursue things that human animals ought to spend their time pursuing. You know... happiness. I say, bring on technological unemployment for everyone. Let's finally live the dream. But I'm a known radical. ;)

[ratcreature]

The term capitalism was coined before Marx. Actually Marx himself uses mostly "capital" and "capitalist" (as in people owning capital). The latter was used since the 17th century in somewhat the same way as we use it now, but definitely around the 1840s starting in France, like by the early anarchists and socialists and their criticism of property rights and the emerging industrial capitalism. The first proper definition of "capitalism" as term for an economic system is generally attributed to the French socialist Louis Blanc around 1850. So yeah, the term capitalism was coined as a critique of the system rather than by proponents, but not by Marx. He picked it up from the French. Though he certainly pushed the theory framework and analysis.

I recommend going with some kind of highlights version of Das Kapital though. We had to read excerpts in high school (it's part of the standard curriculum in Germany in both history and social studies classes and we read some in philosophy class as well) and it's very dense and tedious to read from what I recall, even if you are interested. I can't imagine it improves with translation and with reading the whole thing rather than just highlights.

[mellowtigger]

Ooh, thanks for this history! Now I'm curious about Louis Blanc too. I already was looking online for Das Kapital (English translations) and noticed complaints that particular books were not the FULL original book. It sounds like that's a good thing. I might continue with acquiring one of these abridged translations.

Wow. High schools not in the USA do serious reading. The best I ever got was an Economics professor explaining to us how banks work and that our entire monetary system is basically an exponentially growing scam based solely on confidence. Even our biology textbooks were forbidden from outright saying that creationism was nonsense.

[ratcreature]

In the German system high school is supposed to provide the whole liberal arts base layer, since you don't have to take general knowledge courses in university but specialize into your major right away with 18.

So in high school we read a lot of excerpts from various philosophers but mostly they were short. Marx wasn't the worst to read (Kant really liked his sentences too long), but still hard going.

We actually covered Marx a lot in high school, because his framing permeated so widely. So we were explained Marxist theories several times over the years at increasing levels of difficulty before we read any original sources. BTW this wasn't in Eastern Germany, and we covered classical economist like Adam Smith too, as well as more modern ones like Keynes. So it wasn't dome socialist indoctrination thing.

[mellowtigger]

Actual philosophy and politics. If only USA high schools did that. I never encountered Kant until college coursework, and I agree that he's longwinded too. Something about earlier eras disliked concise, maybe they "stopped caring" after we no longer relied on Catholic monks to hand write new copies of books. LOL ;)

In my senior year politics class in high school, we created our own political party. I don't remember what I called mine, but I do remember when I created a chart describing where it was on the political spectrum left-to-right, I created a circle and put my party opposite the Democrat and Republican parties. Already in 1985, I was completely disillusioned by the USA's stupid 2-party system. :)

P.S. Wait! I remember now! I called it the "Apathetic" party, for people who found nothing desirable in the major political parties.