You are right I am sure. That is an interesting perspective. That’s also what is so depressing about having a country ran by Amazon, it is almost certain to spread as Amazon’s influence, wealth and political power grows. It will spread to Canada, Europe and beyond even more than it has as you say.
I don’t see any evidence for this. The social safety net is expanding in these places, not contracting.
How so? First stat I looked up was real minimum wage in Alberta (is that where you are?) and it’s up and down, but a little lower than the peak in 1975.
The examples you used were social net things though. If you are taking earned income or disparity then I agree. But I can’t thing of good examples where the social safety net shrinks once established.
I might do some research later, but I expect the social safety net retracted quite a bit under Thatcher in the UK and I bet it has not recovered. Also Germany has had conservative governments for a long time now. Has the safety-net been expanding in Scandinavia for the last 20 or 30 years?
It certainly retracted here. Bill Clinton did welfare reform. Reagan cut lots. I’m sure public housing hasn’t anywhere near kept up with the cost of housing.
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Ya maybe I am being Canada centric here. I can’t think of contractions we have had. We are adding things like childcare, drugs, etc.
I think what you discuss is mostly the window display of capitalism but to make a final judgement we have to check behind the curtain. Yes capitalism created wealth. But at which cost? Not just the growing gap between rich and poor in our countries.
We rely on cheap energy. For centuries we burnt coal and reached a level of CO2 in the atmosphere thats getting to level where we reach a tipping point. The next one is nuclear energy. Mostly subsidized so that it can even compete on the energy market. Yet a lot of the demolition costs of the power plants will be paid by society. The energy companies didnt put enough money aside nor were they required to do so. It’s still in our interest that the waste gets disposed in the right way. Not to mention that there could always be another disaster. Japan showed it’s not just an UdSSR/communist feature to have a Super Gau. It could happen again with devastating effects on the environment and human life.
The rainforests get chopped down so that we get enough food for our meat production or to make palm oil.
Our cloth are often made in countries under questionable conditions. In some fields we rely on cheap labour from other countries. And even so this outsourcing led to these people having more money it goes hand in hand with a destruction of the environment because another feature is that these countries don’t give much about regulations or are easily bribed to look the other way.
Our natural resources often come from other countries/continents. Often enough filling the pockets of few and not lifting people out of poverty. Or we rely(and support them) on autocrats for a stable supply.
After overfishing our waters we moved to the coasts of other countries to catch their fish and destroying their livelihood.
The main problem with the current capitalism is that in most cases external costs are not accounted for and will have to be paid by others and future generations. So if we look now it might seem that capitalism was a success for life expectancy but if there will be millions of people dying in the future because of climate change then I am not sure that this was a success story overall.
This should not be seen as an endorsement of communism. Countries like Russia and China have their own problems. The new silk road initiative of China creates a lot of unhealthy dependencies. Also from what I read the smog levels in Chinese cities reach dangerous levels through their burning of coal. Just yesterday I read this article about Russia: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/15/africa/central-african-republic-russian-mercenaries-cmd-intl/index.html
From what I hear Cuba seems to have a pretty good health sector.
And If you look to Scandinavia it is not all roses. Norway can offer there people a great deal of stuff but their wealth comes from exploiting their oil resources. Even so they try to go full electric cars they still depend on selling their oil.
So yeah there is not much difference there.
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Australia has contracted like crazy over the last 40 or so years so lucky you (Canadians).
But hey, life expectancy is up so I for one bow to our two party overlords as I live until 100 in a shitty hovel.
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It recovered somewhat under Blair/Brown but since the banking crisis we’ve been under Tory austerity, another excuse to crush the shit out of the poor while the elite have got richer.
This scheme went under Cameron’s slogan “We’re all in this together”.
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I think the idea of externalities is interesting. While they are often not priced correctly in the current capitalist system, I struggle to understand how they would be accounted for at all in an non-capitalist system.
As you note, environmental performance has been pretty bad in places like China and Cuba.
Externalities are a feature of economics, not capitalism. But unregulated, dogmaticly libertarian capitalism is particularly ill suited to deal with them. As an ideology free market capitalism basically assumes externalities dont exist or that they will, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, be dealt with by consumer choice.
Which brings me to a related point of confusion. People very commonly use capitalism and consumerism interchangeably but they’re technically not the same thing. Capitalism is s political/economic system but consumerism is a culture. Maybe its a pointlessly subtle point but alot of the fatal failures assigned to capitalism are really inevitable outcomes of a culture where people see themselves primarily as paying customers and the world as a shop that should act as though the customer is always right. This culture completely undermines any attempts at social cohesion or appeals to civic duty.
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Fair points but I am not making that confusion, as I pointed out externalities occur in all systems.
My question is the mechanism used in non-capitalist systems, like barter, to deal with them don’t seem to scale (e.g., social pressure). I question how these systems could operate in a globalized economy.
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I think the biggest tool to fight externalities in any system is regulation. But consumerism culture has made regulation seen untenable. If you tell a person they can’t burn more than X units of fossil fuels in a year they react like you’re a waiter telling them they can’t order dessert because they’re too fat. How DARE you!
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Agreed. This is where it becomes so important to know what we are actually discussing. Is it market socialism, anarchism, libertarian socialism, classical communism ect.
They all would need different methods to price and deal with externalities.
Seems to be pretty broad agreement in here that a Euro-style system would be vastly better than what we currently have in the US. Although, as the Euro posters have pointed out ITT, it’s very far from perfect.
Perfect is also where these discussions often go off the rails. An anti-capitalist argues the capitalist system is inherently exploitative and some people hear “I want a perfect utopian system with no exploitation”. I know I did at one time. Whereas most anti-capitalist are really saying “I want a system with less exploitation”.
There is no perfect system as demonstrated by centuries of social science and history. All anti-capitalist debates should be assumed to be within the framework of degrees or graduations of some kind.
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Also if you intentionally factor out the stuff about capitalism that works (markets setting the prices and production levels of things mostly) and only leave behind the corruption of government, the totally unpaid externalities, and the exploitation of people’s labor… then yeah capitalism defined that way is pure evil and you’d be crazy not to be against it.
As far as consumerism goes our whole global civilization is going to need to pivot hard from quantity to quality and in a massive way. Raw materials need to be treated with a great deal of respect and instead of making things that are convenient because they are disposable we need to make things that are convenient because they last for generations. Those things are going to be pretty expensive so workers are going to need to make enough money to afford them. Anything we plan on disposing needs to be actually biodegradable and anything that doesn’t break down needs to be part of a circular supply chain where when it breaks it goes back to the manufacturer to be reused.
Thankfully one thing capitalism does well is react to changing market conditions. We need government to set the table by making raw materials much more expensive. Plastic should cost a fortune. Like 500 bucks a pound or something. We need to put a price on far more than just carbon.
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I totally agree, and this is a great example of why it’s kind of pointless to debate terminology or get overwhelmingly emotionally committed to ideological policy. The suggestion that government “manipulate” the price of plastic by charging users for the externalities will be met by THAT’S SOCIALISM! screams from the cultural/ideological “capitalists”. So for some people making that one change to the system is being “anti-capitalist” even if everything else about the production and distribution chain of goods using plastic (and their competing goods in the market) is thoroughly capitalist.
Western capitalism can’t continue without the capitalists and corporations pillaging everything from 3rd world countries even if we want to have some magical regulated capitalism in the imperial core