Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
Let’s say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it’s producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.
It’s good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can’t take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!
After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.
The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don’t know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as “veal”, a delicacy!
A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You’re still paying your workers the same amount, even though they’re now responsible for producing 100x more.
One day you realize there’s too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn’t give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!
You’re still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it’s from another species and even though humans don’t need milk after a couple years of age.
That’s why I hate capitalism.
So capitalism is bad because it’s extremely efficient?
Even if a process is efficient, which in this case it isn’t (overproduction is terrible for efficiency), that’s not the only thing to consider, the moral aspect is important too. Off the top of my head, in this example, there’s the inhumane treatment of the cows, the workers get paid inadequately for what they produce, and the dumped excess produce probably affects the ecosystem.
No it’s because wealth is unfairly divided. Workers should benefit from productivity increases.
Also, the example in the original comment describes a dystopian death machine. A torture factory for cows to facilitate overproduction. We don’t need to eat that much meat nor consume that much milk. This is why the entire planet is going to shit…
It shouldn’t be, the work isn’t evenly divided. People get compensated per mutually agreed upon contracts on the value and contributions of their labor.
They do… If you want to argue for stronger worker rights and protections then I’m with you. But to argue that Marxism is some sort alternative is beyond stupid. Marxism is just as bad, if not worse, than Nazism. It’s a failed ideology in both theory and practice.
Humans aren’t vegan. There’s nothing wrong with meat farms.
Capitalism works on the basis of supply and demand. If there’s a demand, there will be production. If there isn’t, then the businesses in that industry will either slow protection or close. If that isn’t happening then that means there isn’t enough accountability in the government.
We’re quite literally living in the golden age of humanity. The past 80 years human development has advanced so much in so many places to such a degree that it’s an anomaly in human history. The world will always face problems, but humans are very adaptable.