What's the alternative to capitalism?

Post Reply New Topic

A very fine argument for getting government out of the loop.

ruveyn

Thanks

Dominos pizza got a few million in government subsidies. This whole relaunch of their pizza and what not is thanks to government intervention. They would have shut down otherwise.

Guess they should have been shut down then. Their pizza usually tastes like cardboard.

This is what I think too.

Perhaps it is cardboard that tastes like dominoes pizza

False dichotonomy, unless you'd rather eat the cardboard and not the pizza?

I don't think that there really are many viable systems other than capitalism. At least not for a modern society. The best I can see is a very rigid planned economy, and that would likely degrade due to corruption, and meet demand for products very poorly.

The late and unlamented Soviet Union is a case in point. It was a country run by a Red Mafia.

ruveyn

I don't think completely eliminating every aspect of capitalism is the answer, but letting them have free reign is a bad idea. I think people should stay out of the box on this stuff and not tie their selves up in one ideology or another. The radical, globalist agenda that's in full force right now needs to stop. I believe governments should look over the well being of their people and that moderate, economic protections to keep a country as autonomous as possible would be good. However, there has to be enough slack to allow for the trading of economies that can't be produced in country.

One of the major criticisms of capitalism, as you pointed out, is the unequal distribution of wealth, and I think multinational corporations are ultimately using the global economy to ultimately drive down the cost of labor in different countries. Nowadays, if you unionize for legitimate reasons to get sufficient pay for living costs, a company can just close down and go to China or Indonesia. Oddly, China's labor costs are going up so much that companies are packing up and going elsewhere now. More economic protections and not these extremely over-liberalized markets would be a good way to keep companies in country without ditching the workforce that depend on them just because they want to save money.

I also think that moving from a dominator business model to a partnership model that treats human labor as more than just a resource would be a good change to. I think more workplace democracy in business and not just treating people as rented serfs would be a good solution to a lot of the problems. I see a lot of it as relating to a sickness of the human soul, and what's needed to remedy it is more compassion and more heightened awareness.

Well, there's worker self managed cooperatives that function independently from government oversight. The Mondragon corporation's a case and point.

The Mondragon Corporation is actually what I was thinking of in terms of alternatives as well. It would be interesting if this became the standard template for all corporations

The issue is that any system I can see working like this will still be a market system. I suppose, we might argue that the term "capitalism" not apply due to the nature of how finance might work under this kind of system, but still, there will end up being supply, demand, profit, etc.

I don't think that we can simply abandon the market system; the Mondragon template I think could serve as an intermediary towards something more effective

It would change the dynamic quite a bit if committed workers and committed management treated each other more as partners though. If everyone who had a stake in a corporation had a say in whether their job was going to be shipped to China or not, nobody would vote for it. That's why Mondragon, since 1953, has stayed in Spain to this day. If it was a traditional business model, it would have been shipped over to China or Indonesia 20 years ago. There would still be competition, but there wouldn't be this massive, class divide.

I guess it would be a free market system, but I don't know if it would be capitalist exactly. The terms capitalist and socialist have been bastardized so much because of the cold war. I don't know if I have use for either term really, because they have too much baggage. More autonomy is better than less, being that wars have been started over the dependency of globalized economies. The act of the Germans sinking British passenger ships to protest the central powers sounds extreme, but when they were obstructing shipping to Germany in the Northern Atlantic, it was literally starving them and their economy.

I think free markets are a necessity but that a truly democratic society, none of that central democracy crap, should impose moderate regulations for the safety and well being of the country. I think we should protect the well being of our own, respective labor forces from country to country.

Though a rigid, planned economy is stupid and impractical, I'm not completely closed to the idea of a mixed economy. The government could probably create jobs through using tax money to set up mining operations to dig up raw materials on public lands and use the profits to pay workers, grow the operation, and put money back into the system. Storable, non-perishable goods would be be fairly easy to manage, and when miners are laid off during lower economic activity, they could have a fund set up in advance for them so they can pay their bills and what not.

lowercaseism