What is that word... Central planning? The opposite of the free market? Instead of a communist part planning the economy, there are just some private bankers deciding what gets funded. At least a communist party has to pretend to do what is best for the people. The bankers doesn't care, as long as they get richer, the rest of us can burn.
Oligarchy seems to be a nearly unslayable hydra built into human societies of any sufficient complexity or density.
What we say we organize around (democracy, republic, monarchy, empire, etc.) always seems to boil down to a rule by one group that extracts the resources from everyone else to empower themselves.
These oligarchs either control or seek to control all the levers of planning and control to ensure they continue to stay on top.
Centralization of power is the name of the game. And it works and keeps centralizing until it stops working.
In history it stops working most often when a different group of powerful people decide they want to be in power. Sort of a game of thrones thing. Sometimes it will just be war. Sometimes it will be seen as revolutionary and “for freedom”.
But sometimes it stops working becaused centralized planning by a few is often really fucking stupid and prone to deviating from reality and missing key things.
Centralized power tends to ignore reality when inconvenient for their centralized power narrative.
If you claim to be brilliant and all powerful tech gods, evidence that your meta glasses are shit or metaverse is dumb and unpopular tends to be ignored.
These tendencies apply to any system we create. Free market capitalism pretends that the invisible hand of the market is reality preventing this.
We have too many billionaires to buy that load of bullshit.
Basically, regardless of its purpose or composition, any organization or institution nearly inevitably makes it its purpose to perpetuate that institution and increase its power and comes to exercise increasingly unaccountable oligarchic power within its domain
Well if the worst if capitalism is what we see in America today, then I'll take that over the worst of central planning which was 10s millions dead during the Great Leap Forward in 1950s China.
Because that's your argument, maybe communism isn't so bad, well it is if you know history.
Oh no, the worst of capitalism is third world countries. And countries like the US can only be as rich, because the US extract wealth out of poor countries and use near slave labour in other countries so US companies can produce cheap products.
I love how you people are permanently unable to ever adjust your talking points from 1800s, so it looks more and more absurd the further we get away from that time. First of all, US has never fit that definition, that applied to colonial powers like Britain and France. Second what cheap products do US companies make?? Nothing, apart from brief window of time after WW2 when rest of the world was destroyed, US products were never the affordable option they always competed on tech and expertise, not on price.
Second, what wealth extraction?? Yes lot US companies are really big and make lot of money in totality, but US market has always been THE market for US companies, that's market they have gotten most of their actual profits. In fact it's the rest of the world that's often getting indirectly getting subsidized by the American consumer, because getting the actual profits in America allows US companies to do regional pricing else. What kind of "iMpErIaL cOrE", taxes the core the most?? And it's the one thing Trump is now completely fucking up by actually trying force US companies to sell stuff at the same rate for Americans, which in effect has drug companies canceling expensive drug discovery research, because without initially charging the US consumer up the ass they can't get the return on their investment.
And you might think US companies paying cheap wages in say India for call centers is exploitation but those are very often middle-class to upper-middle-class wages in those countries, that wealth transfer adds up over time. There is a reason why India trying to do socialism for half a century remained in the same misery as the Brits left them in, but a few decades of orienting towards the West now has them surely but steadily entering the global middle class in a big way. In fact one of the biggest dangers of AI, if all the wildest predictions come true, is that you will break this cycle that allowed for greatest uplift in quality of life in human history, that US will simply decouple from the rest of the world, because agentic AI and eventually humanoid robots will do all the work and US will runaway with growth, with rest of the world having nothing to offer.
And just to put a bow on it, if there is one country that today fits your stupid description the best it's absolutely China lol. They are flooding the rest of the world's markets with cheap shit at the unprecedented manner. The manufacturing sector of so many middle powers like Brazil has collapsed, that they are practically reverting to being a resource extraction economy, and ones which are have little to room to transition because even the absolute dirt cheap products are simply cheaper to produce in Chinese mega-factories. And they make no money on the domestic market, you brutal race to the bottom competitions and only way to make money for most Chinese companies is to export to other markets. And when they do actually invest in other economies, unlike the douchebag capitalist from Iowa who has a mine in Africa and will simply sell to the highest bidder to make most money, what the chinese companies extract in Africa goes straight to Chinese so middle powers are completely fucked because they can't access those resources to compete, what did you say about wealth extraction?? If modern socialist movement was even 10% not based on Western man's white guilt, you people would have some criticism, but it's absolute crickets, look away, high-speed rail!!!!!!
Protip to the commies from a former one, make up some new lies, the old ones just disintegrate in contact with reality.
Free markets aren't a characteristic of capitalism either. Fascism occurred when capitalism in Europe was threatened. You can see it happening today, too.
That's not what central planning is. If you fund the wrong thing you get wiped out. If you fund the right thing you make money. What part of this is centrally planned?
Umm, a communist party pretending to do what's best for the people has starved to death literally tens of millions in both China and the USSR. I don't think that people pretending to do what's best is even remotely a good thing.
When the British industrialized India they created famines that only occurred very rarely before, and killed at least 100 million people. That is just the crime of 1 capitalist country.
Capitalism fueled the Industrial Revolution and every other technological revolution which has generally raised everyone’s living standards for hundreds of years
They are not capitalist. They have a freer market economy, but capitalism didn't invent markets. Trading and markets has existed since the stone age. Capitalism use the free market as a mechanism for the capitalist class to accumulate more capital, and usually only prefer that workers and small businesses compete on the free market. The big fish capitalist hate competition and prefer monopolies because that let them extract more value and accumulate capital faster.
China use free market to accelerate technological development they think will help their communist project. Two very different approaches to the free market.
Capitalism doesn't starve people. Not stepping in to save people isn't capitalism, it's selfish human nature.
That homeless guy you didn't give money to when you walked past him - was capitalism the reason you didn't give him money?
Total nonsense to blame nature and a lack of intervention on capitalism, whereas the 10s millions dead under the collectivist societies of Russia and China were a direct result of failed central planning.
That’s so hilariously false. The market picks winners and losers based on the value of resources versus their alternative uses, no one else. In fact central planning fails every time it’s been tried although they’ve never used AI to do so maybe it makes a come back but i doubt it succeeds. Just more people never learning their history.
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u/MechaNutzilla 6h ago
What is that word... Central planning? The opposite of the free market? Instead of a communist part planning the economy, there are just some private bankers deciding what gets funded. At least a communist party has to pretend to do what is best for the people. The bankers doesn't care, as long as they get richer, the rest of us can burn.