Capitalism

[creativesoul]

Is capitalism immoral?

 

[Nogre]

I hate doing this, but define capitalism, or at least what you mean by it. Sometimes it seems like we spend our whole time clarifying and defining what we're saying...

 

[SchrodingersFinch]

I hate doing this, but define capitalism, or at least what you mean by it. Sometimes it seems like we spend our whole time clarifying and defining what we're saying...

Also, define moral.

 

[WRT54G]

The way I see it, capitalism softly implements a darwinian system of natural selection in the market. As long as you can keep government corruption out of the picture, I think it's practically the most perfect economic system conceivable. It annoys me that people get so hasty to interfere in it when they see even the slightest issue, blowing it out of proportion and assuming it won't smooth itself out.

Immoral? Quite the opposite. It imparts deserved wealth upon citizens, and deserved consequences too. It's quite the opposite of immoral from a utilitarian, consequentialist viewpoint.

 

[Andiferous]

I think it's practically the most perfect economic system conceivable.

Until it becomes apparent that it's commoditised everything from people, to relationships, to fruit flies.

 

[Prolescum]

I think it's practically the most perfect economic system conceivable.

Until it becomes apparent that it's commoditised everything from people, to relationships, to fruit flies.

I believe the current rights holder to this property is The Walt Disney company.

 

[obsidianavenger]

I think it's practically the most perfect economic system conceivable.

Until it becomes apparent that it's commoditised everything from people, to relationships, to fruit flies.

and whats wrong with that? are you less in love because of the commercial wasteland that is valentines day? if people are willing to pay for something then other people will pop up to make a buck off it- which i think is mostly a good thing. provides for people's needs without them having to do everything themselves, or having to depend on the charity of others. i would much rather depend on my neighbors self interest than his goodwill

 

[WRT54G]

Until it becomes apparent that it's commoditised everything from people, to relationships, to fruit flies.

That's simply the nature of the beast. Is there anything particularly wrong with it? Other than your personal illusioned resentment of it..

 

[Fictionarious]

Yes. Food, water, medicine, and shelter are held "hostage" and those who need them (everybody) are forced to rent their bodies out indefinitely (for the rest of their lives) to the land owning class in order to "earn" them, as though they were "earning" a Van Gogh portrait in a fair trade on the free market.

as much as I despise it being said,
/thread

 

[WRT54G]

Yes. Food, water, medicine, and shelter are held "hostage" and those who need them (everybody) are forced to rent their bodies out indefinitely (for the rest of their lives) to the land owning class in order to "earn" them, as though they were "earning" a Van Gogh portrait in a fair trade on the free market.

as much as I despise it being said,
/thread

You act as though people have natural, god-given (or evolutionary-given) rights to the supplies they need. They certainly do not. Pre-civilization they certainly did not. Pre-civilization everyone needed to work, and to work quite hard, for what they got. If they did not work for it, they starved. If they made bad decisions that put their resource supplies at stake, they likely perished. And if they worked hard and made smart decisions, they thrived. (And the beauty of natural selection lies therein.) Why should it necessarily be any different now? And if it should, who should provide to actually make it different?

We all work regardless of the market type. It's what we as animals do. And it's what every animal does. We aren't renting our bodies out, we're doing what comes naturally and what evolution has naturally prepped us to do. The only difference with communism (which you seem to be implying) is that hard workers are forced to subsidize slackers and get no benefit of their hard, dedicated labour. Rewarding slacking and punishing hard work seems exactly counterintuitive for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who's studied darwinian evolution.

Let me digress from your points for a minute in saying that I know it's easy to hate on capitalism given the stereotype of your greedy fat-cat CEO that's often portrayed in popular media. That stereotype hits especially hard in hard times, and that's precisely what we're in now, so I entirely understand people's attraction to socialist ideas right now. But I don't condone them. Taking the time to step back and look at the market in a theoretical manner rather than a practical manner is important (because after all a practical manner forces you to look with bias as our current standing is poor, and it's just too easy to have no faith in the power of the market, and want to point the finger). I don't expect it to be self-evident that capitalism is necessarily better than socialism, but it think that reason would necessarily lead to that assumption, because it has for me (see: above, among other reasoning). I'm not going to turn this into Economics 101 to try to outline why (even if I were an expert in the field). I'll leave the stage for an actual expert to explain things better than I can if they want.

 

[Nogre]

This isn't a particularly easy topic to discuss. People tend to gravitate towards the extremes, either saying that capitalism is anathema to society or the answer to every problem.

The truth of the matter, in my opinion, is far more complex. Having a market free from government control (beyond laws against causing others suffering and providing services that don't work in a free market like roads and basic education), is a good thing because competition encourages us to better ourselves.

But incorporation, which is almost always associated with capitalism, is something I immensely dislike. This is the real source of "the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules." It stems from a dichotomy between the owners, who have money, fund the business, and get the majority of the benefit and the workers who make it happen and only get compensation. However, this is a business model that arose during the industrial revolution and is by no means necessary for the general ideas of a free market.

Get rid of the owner/worker dichotomy and set up businesses owned and run by a group of people working together to succeed in their business endeavors. Each individual is both a worker and an owner and has a personal stake in the success of the bussiness, and thus, and you get both cooperation and competition within society, working in concert. You can only better yourself through competition, whether with others or yourself, and you can only really achieve something through cooperation, usually with others if it's anything significant. And with internal cooperation allowing each bussiness to achieve great things and external competition driving those achievements to new heights, the economy is most successful.

How to go about this? Stop giving your money to corporations and support local businesses! There's hardly a need for government interference to change this, although I guess they could stop giving corporations their special legal recognition. We all just need to decide that living in a better society is worth more than the extra few dollars or the extra convenience. Can everyone do this? Certainly not. But it's equally certain that not everyone in the world has to go back to local businesses for the corporations and chains to break down and die. Then the end of the separation of workers and owners is just a short hop away.

 

[creativesoul]

I am happy to see a thread receive such a variety of well thought out responses and some of the classic arguments which I had once heard but have since forgotten...

Dad would be proud.



I would like to return consideration to several different responses, but I fear that I may not get to them all. Please nothing personal is meant by it if I miss one or two or five...

I hate doing this, but define capitalism, or at least what you mean by it. Sometimes it seems like we spend our whole time clarifying and defining what we're saying...

No apology necessary Nogre, I too have had enough of those kinds of unintentional double entendums(sp.?)EDITED TO ADD: double entendre<i></i>... :|

Capitalism, as intended in my thoughts, means a sub-system of government which regulates the currency exchange, price of goods, and ownership of land and/or business(es) I am sure that my view is influenced tremendously by the U.S. That is one of which that is supposed to be residing over a democratic republic of free people, and was originally implemented in order to allow the citizens to have as much personal freedom as possible, to be free from unnecessary taxing, to be able to be self-sufficent landowners through the uninhibited use of a freely owned and regulated market,so that s/he may enjoy the fruits of his own labor.

A government which also held honesty as one the highest, if not the highest virtue.

 

[xman]

What also hasn't been mentioned yet is that it forces the worker to sell his labour power at a deficit to the owner. That's at least somewhat immoral.

 

[obsidianavenger]

What also hasn't been mentioned yet is that it forces the worker to sell his labour power at a deficit to the owner. That's at least somewhat immoral.

hardly. the laborer could start his own business, become self sufficient, look for a better paying job

if no one is willing to pay more for his labor then in what sense is it worth more? if he thinks its worth more thats great, but unless he can find someone with resources willing to exchange them at a higher rate for his labor, then he is mistaken. if everyone set their own worth and decided what they ought to be paid things would fall apart incredibly quickly.

 

[creativesoul]

SchrodingersFinch wrote:


Also, define moral.

Holding oneself and fellow humans with high regard: as valuable.

 

[Andiferous]

I would much rather depend on my neighbors self interest than his goodwill

I admit I'd probably hate to have my neighbour's "charity," but I believe there is a third option between charity and self-interest that is a hybrid of common good and social responsibility.

Until it becomes apparent that it's commoditised everything from people, to relationships, to fruit flies.

That's simply the nature of the beast. Is there anything particularly wrong with it? Other than your personal illusioned resentment of it..

Right. First, my resentment is not entirely illusory, even if I admit I am a bit petulant.

[You act as though people have natural, god-given (or evolutionary-given) rights to the supplies they need. They certainly do not. Pre-civilization they certainly did not. Pre-civilization everyone needed to work, and to work quite hard, for what they got. If they did not work for it, they starved. If they made bad decisions that put their resource supplies at stake, they likely perished. And if they worked hard and made smart decisions, they thrived. (And the beauty of natural selection lies therein.) Why should it necessarily be any different now? And if it should, who should provide to actually make it different?

We all work regardless of the market type. It's what we as animals do. And it's what every animal does. We aren't renting our bodies out, we're doing what comes naturally and what evolution has naturally prepped us to do. The only difference with communism (which you seem to be implying) is that hard workers are forced to subsidize slackers and get no benefit of their hard, dedicated labour. Rewarding slacking and punishing hard work seems exactly counterintuitive for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who's studied darwinian evolution.

Genesis gave man the right to have dominion over everything, and this attitude matches quite seemlessly with economic territoriality. Surely land and mineral rights don't rightly belong to a single "person"? I certainly can't begrudge another human being (or animal of any kind) for need of water.

I can't be convinced that self-serving industry is the result of evolution. This would be the case were we as twitchy and obsessive and as individualistic as hamsters. Did you know, two male hamsters forced to share quarters are likely to kill each other? Our brains are the main source of our evolution. If any one of us were thrown in the African Savanna all by ourselves we'd be unlikely to survive because we've got very few physical qualifications to do so. Thankfully we've evolved to cooperate with each other in societies to share work and knowledge and learn a bit about each other and the world around us, and this includes a certain sense of social responsibility and regard for other folks in general proximity to ourselves. It takes an untold number of individuals to create our knowledge, history and culture, not a single person with a particularly astute sense of industry.

(By the way, I happen to love hamsters, even if my daughter's hamster has, on occasion, tried to escape us by running away frantically on her stationary wheel. This might be a good metaphor for pure capitalism unhindered by any kind of social conscience and meaning.)

With this said, I agree that there are positive aspects to a "free-ish market" economy, but like all things, checks and balances are key, and being driven and obsessed entirely by a meaningless symbol such as money is not going to lend any kind of evolutionary advantage to anyone. We've evolved beyond shiny trinkets and we've now got the time and capacity look to more "aesthetic" concepts like ethics.

 

[TheTruePooka]

I would say capitalism is amoral.

Although even that is not quite right.

Perhaps it would be better to say capitalism itself offers no morality, it is a system that has one goal in mind; the seeking of profit.

Morality only plays a part when it affects the ability to earn profit.

 

[creativesoul]

...I can't be convinced that self-serving industry is the result of evolution. This would be the case were we as twitchy and obsessive and as individualistic as hamsters. Did you know, two male hamsters forced to share quarters are likely to kill each other? Our brains are the main source of our evolution. If any one of us were thrown in the African Savanna all by ourselves we'd be unlikely to survive because we've got very few physical qualifications to do so. Thankfully we've evolved to cooperate with each other in societies to share work and knowledge and learn a bit about each other and the world around us, and this includes a certain sense of social responsibility and regard for other folks in general proximity to ourselves. It takes an untold number of individuals to create our knowledge, history and culture, not a single person with a particularly astute sense of industry.

Well said(minus the biblical reference). Morality is why we are different from animals. We take care of our weak, sick, helpless, and injured. I could make a case that capitalism(or as Nogre so aptly said - incorporationism) negatively affects our evolutionary progress, but what would be the point? Natural Selection doesn't revolve around the power of money, or have anything to do with an economic system.

 

[TheTruePooka]

...I can't be convinced that self-serving industry is the result of evolution. This would be the case were we as twitchy and obsessive and as individualistic as hamsters. Did you know, two male hamsters forced to share quarters are likely to kill each other? Our brains are the main source of our evolution. If any one of us were thrown in the African Savanna all by ourselves we'd be unlikely to survive because we've got very few physical qualifications to do so. Thankfully we've evolved to cooperate with each other in societies to share work and knowledge and learn a bit about each other and the world around us, and this includes a certain sense of social responsibility and regard for other folks in general proximity to ourselves. It takes an untold number of individuals to create our knowledge, history and culture, not a single person with a particularly astute sense of industry.

Well said(minus the biblical reference). Morality is why we are different from animals. We take care of our weak, sick, helpless, and injured. I could make a case that capitalism(or as Nogre so aptly said - incorporationism) negatively affects our evolutionary progress, but what would be the point? Natural Selection doesn't revolve around the power of money, or have anything to do with an economic system.

hmm... I think I could make that case as well. I also think I could make that case for the exact opposite point as well.

 

[obsidianavenger]

...I can't be convinced that self-serving industry is the result of evolution. This would be the case were we as twitchy and obsessive and as individualistic as hamsters. Did you know, two male hamsters forced to share quarters are likely to kill each other? Our brains are the main source of our evolution. If any one of us were thrown in the African Savanna all by ourselves we'd be unlikely to survive because we've got very few physical qualifications to do so. Thankfully we've evolved to cooperate with each other in societies to share work and knowledge and learn a bit about each other and the world around us, and this includes a certain sense of social responsibility and regard for other folks in general proximity to ourselves. It takes an untold number of individuals to create our knowledge, history and culture, not a single person with a particularly astute sense of industry.

Well said(minus the biblical reference). Morality is why we are different from animals. We take care of our weak, sick, helpless, and injured. I could make a case that capitalism(or as Nogre so aptly said - incorporationism) negatively affects our evolutionary progress, but what would be the point? Natural Selection doesn't revolve around the power of money, or have anything to do with an economic system.

capitalism is about cooperation- figuring out the most efficient way for people to cooperate with each other without having the fruits of their labor taken from them by force. a single industrialist is useless- he needs to trade with others, goods and ideas, and everyone is better off for it. the poor get jobs, and products, that they wouldn't have the resources or ingenuity to create themselves. and the industrialists get rich. is it perfect? hell no. but to say that it is anti-cooperation is a butchering of the facts.