Yep. Capitalism isn’t perfect. It’s just that everything else that’s been tried was worse.
Discussion
No system is perfect.
Capitalism, *actual* capitalism over 10,000 years got us here today in spite of the zealots, monarchs, communists, socialists, fascists, statists and corporatists.
Building wealth for the future allows innovation to catch-up to wealth, that progresses all of us. This wealth bubble in real estate and stocks and bonds won’t last..
I like using the term "free market" over "capitalism" since Marx himself came up with the term, and "free market" is more descriptive and precise to our meaning. "Capitalism" as a term is additionally ambiguous as to who gets to be an owner of capital, and the communists will accuse the free market advocates of promoting exclusivity of rights.
Ironically Marxists are usually the ones to frame definitions on their terms..
Capitalism, as a means of producing capital goods is fine but only in a laissez faire free market, zero government intervention in any of it else the whole thing gets skewed - I’m happy to work with that.
I’m not accepting corporatism or cronyism or fascism in my definition though, which many do.
We still see capitalism in small startups but the large ones are all cronies who become fascists (who funds Musk and Thiel?) by means of corporatism (broad regulatory environment, high taxes etc)
Have to see it through a real modern lens.
How do we stop the cronies with zero-government intervention?
What if a State had to ask permission?
Say they have no right to taxation, all treasury contributions to be voluntary. They have to solicit funds rather than raise debt.
Each state is limited to your local community, ~100k max.
What if the state couldn’t support cronies because they have to bid for services in the free market?
I like the idea. States ought be much smaller by orders of magnitude. 100k people sounds about right. Small enough that you could definitely approach the nearest representative and give him a piece of your mind, and sending troops to your door in retaliation constitutes a measurable portion of their non-effectively-infinite budget, yet large enough that the proceedings can do real work.
I’m not convinced anyone will voluntarily pay taxes - you cannot even get a small community like Nostr out of the red.
I’m all for localizing power as much as possible, but nothing about that is going to address back door and shady dealings by $2T companies, which is the problem the world faces.
I’d love to be convinced on a method to do that without government intervention - being that I’m a small govt guy. I just haven’t yet. It’s a dilemma.
Companies being multi-billion (let alone multi-trillion) dollar entities is definitely an issue. Throwing that much weight around would definitely destroy whole states the size of mid-sized cities. Voluntary coordination between sovereign entities would have to exist.
That's what the United States of America used to be and was supposed to remain. Thank the first civil war for that change.