Item — HN Reader

I honestly don’t know and feel very conflicted about my own ideology. I recognize how broken it is at scale, but also value the personal autonomy, entrepreneurship, nonconformity capitalism promotes.

Though my version of capitalism isn’t the libertarian free market one, libertarianism will always evolve into oligarchy or something fascistic given enough time, it’s just baked into the incentives.

My personal ideology aligns with a managed capitalism, markets are created by an authority that ensures the incentives aligns with its overall goals. Mixed with very liberal social values.

I don’t know if that can survive overtime though. And that would very likely degenerate into something else when under stress.

As I said, I feel conflicted. But I appreciate the question

3 comments

Perhaps this will help: commerce, free market and capitalism are three different things. Commerce, or trade, has existed for millennia, even among tribes and villages. The free market emerges when there are multiple producers of a good or service, and there is no compulsion upon any producer (from either a third party or another producer) to buy or sell. Capitalism would be when one or more of these producers no longer need to engage in production themselves, but are able to use their surplus savings to employ other producers and then keep for themselves the difference between market price and production cost (including cost of labor). There is nothing inherently wrong with that latter mode of production, except that it never reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Since it's surplus savings that enable the acquisition and direction of other producers (i.e. their labor), and that process leads to additional surpluses, the accumulation of surplus becomes exponential. At some point, the surplus becomes sufficient to apply compulsion on other producers, thus effectively eroding the free market that led to that mode of production in the first place.

I really appreciate the self-reflective answer and I fully understand the conflict.

You seem like a thoughtful dude, kudos.

I fully agree with your assessment about capitalism devolving into either fascism or some sort of feudalism.

I, too, have been struggling with what a more just system could look like.

Personally, some aspects of Yugoslav worker self-management appeal to me.

Basic idea is: Companies compete on a market, but theres no stock market. Companies <= 5 employees can be run however the founders envisioned, past that boundary the board and exec suite are required to be elected by the workers.

Combined with state grants and regulations to direct the overall direction of the economy, I feel like it solves for a lot of issues of shareholder capitalism without swapping them for a whole separate set of Commissariat problems.

Of course, the state itself wasn't democratic in Yugoslavia and it suffered from ethnic tensions that ultimately tore it apart. But we don't need to copy their setup wholesale.

Wonder how you'd feel about something like that?

Yugoslavia failed spectacularly economically. People had to smuggle bananas, diapers, coffee and jeans among other goods from the neighboring Italy and Austria. Millions of people (Gastarbeiter) migrated to Germany to be able support their families, because there was no opportunity at home. Inflation was horrendous, people exchanged the local currency to german marks on the same day as the payday, otherwise by the next day it was worth half as much. There was a shortage of gasoline and people sometimes waited years to get a car. But yes the dictator and the red nobility lived very well for sure.

First of all, as already acknowledged above Yugoslavia wasn't perfect - I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. As already mentioned, I'm not arguing for copying their entire setup wholesale - I just find the specific bits I pointed out interesting. Democracy comes was both invented and then repopularized by societies of slave holders, but that doesn't mean we have to throw out the baby with the bath water!

Inflation was horrendous in many countries, including lots of very capitalist ones. Think Weimar Germany for a famous example, or the Latin American debt crises of the 80s and 90s for ones contemporaneous with Yugoslavia (note also the IMF involvement here)

In the case of Yugoslavia, there's a good argument to be made that the root cause were western trade barriers as part of the successful plan to push it into IMF loans that could then be used to dismantle the country.

Anyways, why are we even religitating the 20th century? We need to be looking forward and figuring out a solution to the crisis right in front of us instead of going all cold war again. The forest are burning right now. The rivers are running low right now. Yugoslavia, however you may feel about it, ended decades ago.

This is what Europe has, in one way or another. Europe is a huge spread - sort of semi-functional communism/socialism that France has for example, and it has nothing to do with more capitalistic approach of say Switzerland. Economies and their state show this very well over time.

Every system is potentially broken, there is always room for it to go extreme in some way. The last thing I would want in Europe is for of unhinged corrupted oligarchy that US has - common folks are squeezed like there is no tomorrow, crappy healthcare and expensive education, almost no chance to escape their allotted class within system based on income ('american dream' is not really... realistic to be polite and I could easily use a word 'lie' there, just to keep poor desperate masses in check around the elections or during crises). Maximization of pure income to suffer in literally every single other aspect that makes society a well working society long term - no thank you, we can and do get it better overall.

So one has to be realistic, there is no ideal system, Swiss system of minimal centralized power that is frequently changing hands is, as many things Swiss had come up with, IMHO the most resilient for the future. Any counter-argument to that can be easily dealt with the reality of frequent public votes on all major topics. If you follow their politics a bit its lightyears ahead of typical cesspool US or EU politics had become daily. But one can't have this system (or any other) without underlying population making it work, day by day, out in the streets. Swiss have it working, work actively and hard on preserving it as much as possible, again not something I see elsewhere, certainly not in EU.