The problem with capitalism...

[kpete]

[AntivaxHunters]

1. I'll add this

[Emile]

9. +1 spot on!

Predatory Capitalism

[zentrum]

17. This is spot on. Thanx.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

18. Need some way to k&r a post.

[NullTuples]

19. Luckily since 1929, capitalists figured out how to portray themselves as too big to fail

After WWII workers began to amass a thin but very wide layer of wealth. Not everyone at one time and even now some are excluded thanks to the phenomenon of generational wealth accumulation, but still, it's there. And that thin layer means workers had power and capitalists didn't. So almost 50 years ago the decided to claw it back. Then Reagan came along and gave them a massive boost; the effects have been compounding ever since. Now we're in a struggle to survive as a planet, but they have all the tools they need to keep clawing all remaining wealth to ensure they're the last ones standing.

[2naSalit]

2. That's not the only problem...

But it's a good chunk of them.

[SheltieLover]

3. I've been trying to find an elect can opener made in USA.

Does not seem to exist. Wtaf?

So sick of the Chinese junk being pushed as viable products.

The new business model seems to follow Harbor Freight's suppliers: buy whatever you can for the least on any day & keep pumping out useless crap products. No quality. No consistency.

[RKP5637]

5. For the most part, buying products in the US is like renting them, you have to buy

them over and over again if not careful since many are crap and fall apart.

[SheltieLover]

6. Yup!

Very frustrating, not go mention wasteful!

[Zeitghost]

21. There are plenty of options for durable goods

I'm not familiar with can openers specifically (I would assume you would need to check professional kitchen distributors), but for almost everything you'd want, there is a high quality option that will last years. It's just nobody wants to pay for it.

Harbor freight is a great example. I love that place, but know it's limitations. If I need a specific tool I might use once or twice, I head there. If I need something that will stand up to abuse and last forever, I buy from high quality manufacturers with good warranties and I pay a heavy price.

Capitalist can only sell what people will buy.

[SheltieLover]

26. Very true. Greedy bloodsucking multi-nationals are the cause.

You're right about commercial brands, but I cannot pay hundreds for a can opener. I doubt many would.

Let's see how this junk made in China plays as covid ravages their country.

[brewens]

4. We've been remonopolized. That eliminates competition, the part that makes capitalism good to

a point.

I was in the beverage industry in my hometown for years. At one time we had five going family owned and operated beer distributors. There are now two that have been taken over by larger corporations. What I used to do is now done 100 miles north in a bigger city along with about half of the other jobs. The old warehouse is still there but it's really just a depot. No office staff and no full-time warehouse crew.

[brush]

7. So true of laissez-faire/unregulated capitalism.

Last edited Mon Dec 19, 2022, 05:18 PM - Edit history (3)

We got it right, for most people except POCs, after WWll and taxed the rich at a high enough rate that still let them prosper, but let everyone else do well also. The economy roared for decades until the greed and the republican party took over again in the 70s and our income inequity between rich and poor was/still is preposterously weighted in favor of the rich. Whether it is sustainable for the nation is absolutely in question.

The Nordic model of capitalism with robust safety nets for everyone, including universal healthcare and free college, funded by equitable taxation works best.

[betsuni]

28. +1

[kentuck]

8. And I would add...

...that the worst of the fascists look to fill the power vacuums, people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

[brooklynite]

10. Every social democratic nation in Europe with these things in Capitalist.

[ck4829]

12. Sure, they have SUVs and fast fashion, but they also have public transit and universal healthcare

What's up with that?

---

https://www.google.com/search?q=medical+bills+in+other+countries

https://www.bing.com/search?q=medical+bills+in+other+countries

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=medical+bills+in+other+countries&t=ha&va=j&ia=web

[jaxexpat]

14. Parse the sentence again.

[ck4829]

15. We're lacking the latter, why?

[jaxexpat]

25. This is a failure to communicate situation.

The sentence in question agrees with your point. It is a matter of understanding the tenses of the sentence. It's why god made punctuation and hates bumper stickers. See: Acts Of The Participles, verse 2, chapter 33 1/3.

[The Jungle 1]

11. I question if we can even call ourselves capitalist.

The amount of corporate welfare given out is just wrong. Corporate welfare is socialism not capitalism. Our government picks the winners and losers. None of this is new it is just magnified. The government built the railroads.
We continue to operate under the lie of trickle down economics.
1902 coal strike Wiki
The strike never resumed, as the miners received a 10 percent wage increase and reduced workdays from ten to nine hours; the owners got a higher price for coal and did not recognize the trade union as a bargaining agent. It was the first labor dispute in which the U.S. federal government and President Theodore Roosevelt intervened as a neutral arbitrator.
That is not capitalism! None of this is new.

[jaxexpat]

13. Works fine so long as the government enforces its regulation.

[Warpy]

16. We already have a mixed capitalist/socialist system

The problem is that basic needs need to be moved back into the socialist column, private companies being regulated as public utilities instead of money generators for the fat cats who own them.

Capitalism is at its best when money is being kept moving instead of accumulating in as few hands as possible. That means taxing the hell out of the top to circulate it at the bottom via public works. Capitalism responds quickly to changing technology, socialism often moves at a glacial pace in comparison. Sometimes, things will move out of the socialist sphere; sometimes they will move into it.

It's messy, but like messy democracy, it might be the best we can do.

[uponit7771]

20. That's not text book capitalism that's just sociopathy. We call sociopathic actions and fascism ...

... anything we don't like and the words are losing meaning.

MAGA is doing the same with socialism even though they're losing that battle with a new generation.

[rlegro]

22. Aside from the serious political and economic academics who foresaw this happening....

... it has been at least since the 1950s a theme in disaster science fiction novels. The top example is Frederic Pohl's "The Midas Plague," a short story eventually collected with related stories into his novel, "Midasworld." He postulates that as automation and cheap energy take over industry, businesses will produce many more goods than are needed. Food, too, mostly super-processed, dubiously nutritional and packaged.

Eventually, the manufacturers get government to require people to consume more. Rich people pay a tax for living modestly, thus avoiding the constant in-stream of delivered products they do not need or want. Poor people can't afford to buy out of the system and so they are penalized for consuming too little, and even though the goods are cheap or free, they find themselves on a gerbil wheel, forever just trying to stay ahead, usually without success. And then comes fusion power, which itself becomes super-abundant and cheap or free, only increasing the manufacturing spree. I take issue with fusion power as a bad thing, at least in terms of its eventual potential to completely remove us from fossil fuels. But all the rest of it, written from the mid-1959s to 1980s, has all but come true. The satire of poor people living under a labor of forced consumption is one hell of a satirical idea, but it, too, is to some extent already true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

[Just A Box Of Rain]

23. The world needs fewer SUVs

and more child-drawn carts:

[Hortensis]

24. The BIGGEST problem with capitalism is PEOPLE.

Unfortunately, every system IS people. The VERY SAME people too. Just imagine a socialist state when its artificially grievance-soaked MAGAs and LWers elected Donald tRump president, today's captains of industry captains of our socialist industrial collectives, people who don't like and can't be trusted to work not having to worry about being fired, etc.

What's wrong with capitalism is what its father Adam Smith explained: It requires control and directing.

To have a good system, we have to elect good, competent people. No to radicals and incompetents of any ideology, or lack of.

Big clue for who to reject: Any who won't commit wholeheartedly to re-instituting the kind of regulation proven to do great things with the system we have. There's something really wrong with that.

[Just A Box Of Rain]

27. Every liberal democracy on earth has an advanced capitalistic economic system

including the liberal social democracies of Europe that some socialists and democrats socialists (seemingly without any sense of irony) point to as "models."

Advanced capitalism creates wealth that makes generous social programs possible, while respecting human freedom in the liberal tradition.

In contrast, nations with command economies have either been spectacular economic failures, notorious abusers of human rights, or both.