Is Capitalism Moral?

[NED funded]

At this point im sure youre used to the no scotsman bs. Ill spare you. Rather ill simple ask what the diffference is if trillions get spent on social programs instead of wallstreet? I fail to see why whats good for them isnt good for the rest of us.

That's a good intention, but socialism at least to me is an excuse for the goverment to seize everything and benefit those they want to (which is usually the goverment itself).

[Halicia]

That's a good intention, but socialism at least to me is an excuse for the goverment to seize everything and benefit those they want to (which is usually the goverment itself).

And in capitalism the government does the same thing.... so ?

[Deleted]

And in capitalism the government does the same thing.... so ?

Not really the government but the one with most money. Banks and corporations in our time.

[Glorious Leader]

That's a good intention, but socialism at least to me is an excuse for the goverment to seize everything and benefit those they want to (which is usually the goverment itself).

Aside from the obvious evasion of the question, the same does happen in economies run by so called free market capitalism. Pinochet is illustrative but not the only example sadly.

You argued that wallstreet is only proof that socialism works for elites and nobody else. Can you tell me what the difference between spending to bail out wallstreet is from spending to fund healthcare? Are you suggesting that money has a preference?

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Not really the government but the one with most money. Banks and corporations in our time.

The ones with the most money end up running the government anyhow. Actually it's a little more insidious than that. Put aside intellectual and regulatory capture, put aside campaign financing and revolving door appointments. Capital is free to move as it please, labor for a number of reasons is less so. With access to free movement capital will always leave for the countries whos rule of law most favors the interest of capital. This effectively means that policy is determined by capital.

[schwarzkopf]

Extreme capitalism?

Yes, that is correct.... extreme capitalism. Glad to be able to answer your question.

US is NOT a capitalist nation.

Exactly .... why such vitriol if you agree with my sentiments ?

[Felya]

Did someone just discover objectivism?

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Not really the government but the one with most money. Banks and corporations in our time.

Then honest Abe wasn't as clairvoyant, as he was honest:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

These same banks and corporations have not only perverted this concept, but have convinced the public that their perversion defines government.

[Teleros]

As I thought about the question, Is Capitalism Moral?

I think it comes down to your moral preferences, basically.

I'm pretty right-wing, so personal liberty is very high on my list of morally good things. Equality I couldn't give a toss about, on the other hand. So for the record, I'll be going forward with these assumptions.

Second, it's important to get a good definition of capitalism.

First off, we need money - that is, a medium of exchange that has an agreed-upon value by society at large.
Second, we need to be able to save it, and loan it, preferably at interest. No capital = no capitalism.
Third, we need to be able to spend or save it as we will, with relatively few limits imposed (eg slavery).
Fourth, we need a legal system to protect private property and enforce contracts between parties.
Fifth, the legal system should try, at least, to achieve equality before the law.
Sixth, the legal system should protect, as much as possible, freedom of association. Hard to hire workers or form a company otherwise :P .

So, what can we derive from this? Well, the main thing is that people are free to use their money as they see fit, and can negotiate freely too. It's your choice, and your responsibility.

Important in this is the idea that both parties in a negotiation are winners. If I can persuade you to sell me that car for £500 less than you initially asked for, then we've both won. Remember, you were at no point obliged to sell me the car, and I was at no point forced to buy it - but we agreed, of our own free wills, to trade the car for a certain amount of money. You can't really say "I was forced to sell it to you!" when you chose to sell it, after all. At least not without some contrived scenario where I've got a gun to your head or something silly.

Can capitalism go wrong? Of course it can. Monopoly power is very hard to maintain without government backing - even the mighty Standard Oil was losing market share - before the trust-busters moved in to split it up. However, the very fact that government power can be used to reduce competition and ensure profits etc means that it will be in the interests of big businesses to corrupt politicians and get favours from them. This is typically called corporatism, crony capitalism, or crapitalism - and we see it an awful lot in the Western world today. Microsoft used to boast that it had no lobbyists in Washington DC - until it was very nearly torn apart by Congressmen & Senators in the pay of Microsoft's rivals, back in the 1990s. Now it has a huge lobbying effort in Washington DC, if only to protect itself from rival businesses. During the New Deal, 3/4 of the USA's cinemas were closed by new regulations - regulations written by people brought in from the big cinema chains, who sought to crush their independent rivals with red tape. Today, we see the big companies - those most able to absorb the costs and pass them on to the consumer - lobbying loudly for increased regulations, for the same reason.

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So, we've seen the ideal in terms of the free market and lack of compulsion, and the all-too-common end result, with corrupt politicians doing favours for their mates in big businesses (which should include the big labour unions, whilst we're at it - are they not akin to a (frequently monopolistic) business supplying a scarce resource?).

The question is, are there any better systems? It should be obvious that we can't achieve perfection, but can we at least find a better system?

Well, the main alternative to capitalism is one in which you are forced to buy or sell something - almost always by the government. You are probably not allowed to save or spend your money as you see fit - there were no private investment banks in the USSR, for example. At least under the crony capitalism of the modern USA, you still have a far greater degree of freedom than you do under a socialistic system.

Still, maybe a degree of compulsion is acceptable if it leads to a good enough outcome. And to be fair, all but the most ardent anarcho-capitalists accept this premise - we agree that buying and selling fellow humans should be illegal, for example. Now as it happens, we've got many examples from history, which we can use to compare with capitalism, or even crony capitalism.

USSR: 20 million dead, the holodomor, Stalin's purges, the gulags.
PRC: 65 million dead, the cultural revolution, etc etc etc.
Cambodia: 2 million (out of 6.5 million).

I could go on, but you get the idea. In brief, every attempt has resulted in an authoritarian, totalitarian reign of terror and bodies piled up in the millions. The least bad seems to have been Mussolini's fascist Italy, which (aside from its expansionist warfare) seems to have confined itself to killing mere thousands, including of course political prisoners and the like.

Another inevitable consequence of compulsion in the economic sphere of life is the idea of central planning. That is, the idea that an elite body of men can plan out the economy, either in whole or in part. Now I suppose it's conceivable that they can get things right sometimes - that they'll know how much stainless steel will be needed this year, or how many cars, or what design of car will be needed. But in practice, the amount of information required, and the limits of the human brain (and our computers) forbids us doing this well - and if it works, it's due to dumb luck, not design.

This of course leads to a big problem: what happens when these elite planners get it wrong, as they inevitably will? Well, in a capitalist system, the free market punishes those people, because they can't sell their product or service, and have to change it or go bust. The price of the goods or services in question acts like a vast deposit of information to the seller (and to everyone else in the market). If there's only demand for 100,000 widgets a year, producing 120,000 means I've got 20,000 I can't sell at the normal price, and perhaps not at all. But if there's no "price signal", as this is called, how do I know how many are needed? If I regularly produce 120,000 when only 100,000 are needed, I'm wasting resources - and if I produce 80,000 instead of 100,000, I'm causing a critical shortage. But thanks to the market, I can really quite quickly discover the actual amount in demand.

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One final thought. People often say, for some reason, that capitalism is heartless and cruel, or words to that effect. "Without a minimum wage, workers will starve!" or "without unemployment benefits, people will be homeless and dead on the streets!" and the like.

All good rhetoric I suppose, but not very accurate. The most capitalist countries also tend to be the most charitable and the ones with the most civic participation, and many of the great capitalists of history also donated vast amounts to goods works. Ever been into one of Andrew Carnegie's libraries in the USA? Or visited a British town with its brick houses put up for factory workers? Or heard of the innumerable "friendly societies" ("fraternal societies" in the USA) that used to exist in the days before socialised healthcare, and where one day's wages could buy one year of healthcare coverage for an ordinary worker? Heck, trade unions are a quintessentially capitalist thing - and you can be damn sure there weren't any factory workers' strikes under good old Uncle Joe and the NKVD...

What people forget when they look back at the 19th century (et cetera) is that today's wealth didn't exist back then. It had to be dug out and refined and smelted and worked by people for whom life was so bad that working in the factories and mines was preferable to working on the farms. Think about that for a minute. Abject, grinding poverty is the natural order of humanity - and wealth, however little, is the exception. The fact that things were very bad in the Victorian era and in the heyday of "robber barons" (much maligned fellows, I might add) hides the fact that things were also improving at a terrific rate thanks to the combination of capitalism, science, and industry.

What I think such remarks really say is that the person saying them is a bad, bad person. Think about it - "I'm a typical person, and I'm so selfish that unless I'm forced by government to help my fellow man, I won't!" is what they're saying in effect. To an extent they have a point - that is, the more government does, or claims to do, the more people are inclined to sit back and not intervene themselves (and of course, the more government taxes them to do this, the less they can physically spend on doing good). But on the whole I have a rather better view of people and their capacity to do good if left to their own devices.

Unless of course I'm wrong and you're all selfish b*st*rds who'd sell your own mothers and let people die on your doorstep. But I don't think you are .

[Selastan]

Its a sad, sad world we live in when people begin to question capitalism...

[derpkitteh]

no, full capitalism is amoral. it doesn't care for anyone.

it must be tempered with socialism.

[BannedForViews]

Yes, that is correct.... extreme capitalism. Glad to be able to answer your question.



Exactly .... why such vitriol if you agree with my sentiments ?

extreme capitalism isn't a thing. my god...

[Vash The Stampede]

Capitalism... is a love story. If the system is working as intended, then it's a great system. But it clearly isn't working as intended in America. It works when there's healthy competition, large amount of jobs available, and companies pay their fair share of taxes. Competition is a problem in the USA, cause there's a lot of oligopoly's. How many people were super excited to have AMD's RyZen compete with Intel? How many people wondered how AMD could afford to produce chips for such low prices? How about your ISP choices? How many Americans have more than one broadband ISP to choose from? How many people are aware that there's like 2-3 companies who produce chicken? I know there's only 3-5 manufacturers who make car batteries. You'd be surprised how many products you buy are just re-branded.

How many companies make their products in this country? Nearly everything is made outside of America. How many companies pay their fair share of taxes? Nearly $458 billion in unpaid taxes, and mostly from rich people and corporations. Here we are wondering how we're going to pay for things, when nothing is still being done about tax evasion.

To be fair, capitalism works fine, but our government does not. What we have is crony capitalism. Companies pay big money to influence laws. Hillary Clinton didn't win her election cause of it, and many people thought Trump was above all that. Same corrupt system, just sporting a new face. A very orange face.

[May90]

Everything is moral from a certain standpoint; morality is inherently subjective. The real question is: "Is capitalism effective?" It certainly proved more effective than anything else that so far has been tried.

[Forogil]

Around 10% of nations have a state expense to GDP above 50%. So if that group grows and prospers over the long term it would be a good sign for socialism, bad for capitalism.

Bad for capitalism if that happens - but:
having state expense above 50% of GDP doesn't necessarily indicate socialism (unless you use socialism as a code-word for any government action - which some on the far non-alt-right do), but obviously socialism would have state (and possibly cooperatives) expenses far above 50% of GDP.

First and foremost transfer payments are not an indication of socialism - since it refers to redistributing money, not controlling the means of production.
Similarly the government expenditure on e.g. a new fighter jet isn't socialism - since the jet is built by a private company for profit.
And a state-owned enterprise might not be an indication of socialism - especially not for-profit ones; but even ignoring that the government part of GDP is 10%-20% lower by limiting it to government owned means of production.

Obviously high government expenditure isn't laissez-faire capitalism; it's statist or big government - but not necessarily socialism.
BTW: Many east Asian nations managed to be successful with state-owned capitalism until about a decade ago.

[Celista]

The big flaw in capitalism is that wealth begets wealth; it is far more difficult for a man to escape poverty than for the wealthy to become even more wealthy. After a few generations of this the gap in income and opportunity between the rich and the poor can become enormous. When coupled with a system that systematically pushes down wages and quality of life for employees, the many downsides of capitalism as an economic system become apparent.

[kamuimac]

Capitalism - an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

As I thought about the question, Is Capitalism Moral? I reviewed what DOES make it a moral form of economic policy.



I found a great video from a world renown economist named Walter Williams, who is a professor at George Mason University. Basically he explains why Capitalism IS moral, and I think he makes great points as to why it is.

It also can be used to explain why a UBI is immoral, (which I think it is). Basically what has created an environment where "Universal Basic Income" can be seen as "necessary" is Government Intervention and Red Tape.

Think about a system where the government can and will not bail out failing businesses. Think about a system where the government doesn't interfere with setting standard minimum wages. Think about a system where the free market decides whether a business succeeds or not based on the quality of goods and services that business provides.

Do we really think that businesses would try to push so hard for automation if they were not forced to do certain things from government intervention?

capitalism may be a shitty system but all alternatives are much much shittier so there is currently no working alternative for it.

[Deleted]

No idea, but I love it.
It offers "the common man" chances in life to acquire riches and fortune.

It has always worked for me and I see it work out great for others that accept the reality of the world we live in.

[Dezerte]

It is not, hence the birth & success of Socialism in the early 20th century and later. Capitalism, when tempered with Socialism (to varying degrees) humanizes Capitalism and makes things more fair.

[Deleted]

No idea, but I love it.
It offers "the common man" chances in life to acquire riches and fortune.

It has always worked for me and I see it work out great for others that accept the reality of the world we live in.

That has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism does not mean people get equal chance. It does not mean work hard and you will succeed. Capitalism means private ownership and wealth shifting to the owner. Words have meaning.

[kamuimac]

That has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism does not mean people get equal chance. It does not mean work hard and you will succeed. Capitalism means private ownership and wealth shifting to the owner. Words have meaning.

thing is in most countries of west people do have equal chances - they just refuse to take them - dont blame capitalism for people beling lazy and stupid. siting in front of tv with beer in hand will be always nicer/prefered alternative to spending this time working/learning - its people's choice what they make with hteir lives.

[Deleted]

thing is in most countries of west people do have equal chances - they just refuse to take them - dont blame capitalism for people beling lazy and stupid. siting in front of tv with beer in hand will be always nicer/prefered alternative to spending this time working/learning - its people's choice what they make with hteir lives.

Holy shit you are retarded. This has literally nothing to do with what I said.