• CheeseNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    7 days ago

    This less famously led to the saying ‘The problem with conservatism is you eventually run out of other peoples stuff to sell’

    • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      7 days ago

      You eventually run out of people. People to work in your factories and to consume the products those factories make. If you don’t pay a wage people can live on and the people who are working can’t consume things then you don’t really have an economy except for the military/security apparatus that’s required to keep people from revolting. The end result of unchecked wealth and power is an autocracy and those end up failing economically in comparison to democracies. I like the analogy of a black hole. At a certain point too much power is concentrated in the middle and the whole system collapses in on itself instead of shining brightly as a star.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    4·
    7 days ago

    There recently was an article in The Street about multinationals complaining about people not having enough money to spend on their products.

    So basically, Capitalism is running out of peoples money right now.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    11·
    7 days ago

    No. With socialism, you’re spending other people’s money until you eventually run out and can’t achieve your goals. With capitalism you’re extracting other people’s money and if they’ve run out you arguably achieved your goal

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    11·
    7 days ago

    late stage capitalism

    Uggg… I hate this nostradamus ass term. It’s condescending and idiotic at the same time.

    • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
      1·
      7 days ago

      We can certainly design one that works better, but yes, every system will have contradictions that need to be overcome.

        • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
          3·
          7 days ago

          Socialism obviously works better than capitalism, and the fact that you’re arguing for capitalism in the Late Stage Capitalism comm tells me that you aren’t here in good faith.

          • CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org
            12·
            7 days ago

            i’m here because i don’t like to sit in an echo-chamber, preferring to trial my views in a dialectic process of discussion:)

            Also, this comm kinda mainly relates to US when it needs to dunk on capitalism, which kinda tells more about US and its inbred political system, than it is telling about capitalism itself.

            Now, how about you elaborate, telling exactly how socialism would work better than a capitalistic system with all the regulations and welfare would, rather than giving me a non-answer?

            • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
              3·
              7 days ago

              I can’t give you an entire education on political economy and socialist history in one comment. At the very least, socialism works towards solving the conflict that arises when one class of people do all the labour while another class reaps the profits, as occurs in the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production. This conflict is the main source of misery in the world today- war, starvation, deaths from preventable disease, climate change/ecological collapse etc. are all inevitable under capitalism because of the profit motive. Those things can all happen under socialism, but the system itself doesn’t incentivize them.

              • CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org
                13·
                6 days ago

                I can’t give you an entire education on political economy and socialist history in one comment.

                well, good thing you can’t, because that would be graphomania, not a concrete answer to my question.

                At the very least, socialism works towards solving the conflict that arises when one class of people do all the labour while another class reaps the profits […]

                Still nothing a good ol’ law regulation or two can’t fix… Without the need for a regime change.

                Hell, let’s imagine we live in the dreamland, where your average worker earns more-less same as their manager, or, better yet, ceo or even the business founder. Now riddle me this: who’d found the business in the first place? Who’d take the risks if reward is practically nonexistent?

                I already hear you saying “we don’t need no private enterprise!”. I won’t even talk about how the product diversity is a very good thing to have, because even if we don’t account for that, there’s still a new problem, two even. Namely, corruption and enshittification. When everything is centralized, and every enterprise is basically a government-mandated monopoly, those two become very prominent. So prominent, in fact, that by the sheer force of inheritance the post-USSR countries are still more corrupt than their western neighbours. Decentralization is the single most effective method to fight it.

                Enshittification? We live in the world where we live, i bet you know how monopolies tied to that word. Thanks to the previous “power word”, present in any highly-centralized government, no regulation would prevent it, only make it more creative in some cases.

                This conflict is the main source of misery in the world today- war, starvation, deaths from preventable disease, climate change/ecological collapse etc. are all inevitable under capitalism […]

                You count starvation as one of the sources of misery of a modern human? You’re either mindlessly quoting a 200yo book, or you live in one of not so many countries that still have problems with food. Newsflash, but starvation is not an issue for the majority of people in the 21st century, and, dare i say, there’s no correlation between starvation and capitalism, considering that the entirety of US, EU and pleades of other capitalistic countris haven’t known the taste of starvation for a very long time. According to the world resource institute 30-40% of the food produced in the world goes to waste. Any modern convenience store has a wider assortment of food than our ancestors have ever dreamed of. It’s almost as if since Carl Marx wrote Das Kapital, the food production had been solved by automatization and advancements in chemistry and biology.

                Preventable diseases? Well, technically all diseases can be called preventable, at least medical studies try their best for this statement to be as close to reality as possible, so i’d like you to give me examples of what you consider a “preventable disease”, specifically, a preventable disease people systematically die of in all, or at least the majority of capitalist countries specifically due to capitalism-related issues. Because, as i said, if there’s one outlier like US, it doesn’t paint capitalism as a bad paradigm, it paints US as a deeply problematic country with fucked-up laws.

                Next, the ecological issues. It sure is a challenge for humanity to solve, but i won’t say it makes us miserable right now. What kind of problems capitalism has with ecology that socialism is guaranteed to solve, or at least “doesn’t incentivize”? You think once socialism is established there’d be no schizo-politicians and climate change deniers? Or that a highly-centralized system isn’t a fertile soil for lobbying and greenwashing?

                And finally, war. There’s an old saying. Something about wars ceasing only when there’d be a single person left alive or something. Do i really have to elaborate?

                […] because of the profit motive.

                Except socialism doesn’t get rid of the profit motive. It just moves it from per-enterprise to global economy scale, i.e. it practically turns whole country into a single gargantuan enterprise working for its profit.

                Those things can all happen under socialism, but the system itself doesn’t incentivize them.

                I tend to disagree. Check my previous paragraph to get the reason.

                To summarize what i’m saying, everything is a poison if the dose is wrong. I think the path to the least shitty system lies through gradual changes of the existing system in response to the immediate concerns

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    122·
    9 days ago

    Thatcher said that with 0 irony as she defunded public hospitals to get replaced by charity from rich child rapist Jimmy Sevile

  • ragepaw@lemmy.ca
    90·
    9 days ago

    Go back into the history of capitalism, and every “scare” that capitalists use to maintain the system as is, happens under capitalism. The irony being that most capitalists see the end results of their greed and project it onto other systems.

    Every accusation is an admission.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      185·
      9 days ago

      $40t in debt

      In debt to whom?

      It’s something of a joke to talk about credit expansion in a closed economic loop. Especially when the loop tightens and you end up with…

      If I owe you a million dollars and you owe me a million dollars dollars, are we collectively $2M in debt?

      We’re entirely too zeroed in on the fictitious credit balances and totally divorced from real material conditions. How many labor hours are we spending? How much of our fossil fuel energy reserve have we committed? What is the growth/contraction rate of potable water and arable land?

      I don’t really give a shit about $40T in IOUs. I care about the actual managed decline of the capital stock. The actual number of skilled laborers in a given profession. The long-term burn-down of natural resources relative to our ability to conserve, recycle, and reproduce them.

          • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            31·
            8 days ago

            Yeah but they are not indebted like a govt like you showed in your first post. I hate how stupid that circular “borrowing” is, but it has nothing to do with usa govt borrowing. NVidia are lending, and can choose to sell it off if/when they want to. The usa govt cannot sell off its debt if that makes sense.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              8 days ago

              they are not indebted like a govt

              No. They’re much worse off, as they don’t control their own currency or have sovereignty within their own borders.

              I hate how stupid that circular “borrowing” is, but it has nothing to do with usa govt borrowing.

              Governments (ostensibly) borrow money to provide economy-growing amenities and economy-preserving hedges against adversity. All of these loans can be described as investments, with an ROI tied back to national GDP growth and liabilities mitigation. The circular debt patterns of these mega-corps have a similar rationale. Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI are effectively partners in a project to create a value-adding service. Their debt is an accounting tool to allocate future profits, not a drag on their economic activity. Just the opposite. Credit expansion allowed a party to bring more natural, capital, and labor resources to bare in a shorter time frame, in order to obtain profits sooner than otherwise.

              NVidia are lending, and can choose to sell it off if/when they want to.

              To whom?

              Nobody else is in the business of producing microprocessors at this scale. NVIDIA extends the loans entirely to incentivize OpenAI to consume more compute, which incentivizes Oracle to build more data centers, which incentivizes NVIDIA to produce more chipsets.

              Who else would want this debt? It doesn’t serve the same economic end-goal. Who else would have enough currency to assume the debt?

      • mirshafie@europe.pub
        4·
        8 days ago

        You’re right to highlight the decline of tangible assets like skilled labor, value chains and natural resources, but I think you’re conflating the circular borrowing (and spending) between tech companies with the US Government’s ability to pay back their debts. The tech companies are using circular relationships to inflate their nominal revenue, but the US government actually owes money in a linear fashion. (And as you pointed out, the government has destroyed much of its domestic production capacity for the long term, with energy perhaps being the most worrying resource to have been squandered).

        The biggest problem is that the interest on the public debt adds about $1T per year, which means that 19% of all federal revenue (or 39% of individual income taxes) is needed just to pay off the interest.

        It is true that the Government could just essentially print money to wipe out their debts to domestic lenders, and that’s roughly 3/4 of the money that the government owes. But that would lead to massive inflation, and it leaves approximately $10T in foreign-held debt. Historically, the USA has been able to use the position of the USD as the global reserve currency to offload its inflation on the rest of the world (see how Europe stagnated after the 2008 subprime mortgage crash in the USA, or for that matter look at Japan).

        But the USD is now losing its position as the reserve currency. Foreign governments are selling off US treasuries. Foreign pension funds are selling off US stocks. The US is becoming increasingly isolated even to former close allies, and it is no longer seen as a safe place to park money. So if the government tries Quantitative Easing or any similar measure that has worked in the past, that inflation won’t be readily absorbed by the US’s allies, and it’s the US public that will have their investments and pensions wiped.

  • Fleur_@aussie.zone
    38·
    8 days ago

    Damn bro we spent all the billionaires money on public works and social security and now we don’t have any more billionaires and everyone is better off. What fools we’ve been.

  • fartographer@lemmy.world
    36·
    8 days ago

    It’s so funny, because only one of those two systems is designed to invest back into itself. The other is a zero sum siphon that perfectly embodies what she described.