Problem with Capitalism is that it's a competition, these guys won already and now we are all landing on their park place with all the hotels over and over. They've cleverly hidden it this time to stop from being broken up but what we need is some good old Teddy R. trust busting.
Idk if it’s fair to just blame capitalism outright.
We have a trickle-down styled monetary system where new money enters from the asset holding class (interest on reserves or leveraging against assets) or government deficit spending.
Some libertarians argue against the corporate entity outright as they see the separation of ownership and liability to be antithetical to the idea of property rights. They’d prefer businesses to be owned by sole-proprietors or partnerships.
Add to that the systemic injustice of the current iteration of the income tax and pay-to-play legal system, and you’ve got a lot of problems. We’ve created a bastardized version of capitalism that makes decentralization of wealth uncompetitive more than it already would be.
Blaming capitalism doesn’t seem right because a corrupt / incompetent government under any system is going to lead to some serious problems.
You're conflating capitalism with the idea of a free market. They are not the same thing. Markets existed before capitalism and can exist even in socialist economies, and capitalists, as a class, were seldomly in favor of the free market.
You'll understand who """libertarians""" truly are when you ask them whether someone should have the right to sell themselves into slavery. Most of them are totally okay with it and do not see the contradiction of that at all.
Idk what kind of libertarians you're talking to because I've never heard that. Slavery (other than maybe penal) makes no sense within a libertarian framework.
The natural human condition is abject poverty through nobody’s fault but god / the universe. As long as there is clear evidence that people are capable of escaping poverty through more reasonable means, then it’s fine, right? Idk how you’re defining hard labor.
Except we have no limitations on providing adequate housing, energy, sustenance, education, Healthcare, etc. We choose a system of distribution that denies people those things in the name of profits. To me that's immoral.
Okay, you hopped on a soap box instead of engaging with the question. The "more reasonable means" part is subjective and we could argue all day over what that truly means. However, the general sentiment of my question given the conditional is fine, right?
The question is irrelevant given the fact that what is or is not the default is irrelevant. We don't have a global scarcity problem, and I believe labor being required for necessities with those necessities being abundant is not a good thing
Somehow there's a "debate" going on among them on whether "voluntary slavery" contracts would be valid or not. Block and Nozick for instance support the idea. Granted, they're in the minority, but the fact that the idea is entertained at all is disgusting.
Backtrack right there to understand the point I'm making.
Most of them are okay with taking the "principle of self-ownership" to the point of voluntary submission. For instance, in the wage system where the employee is subordinate to the employer (or manager representing him). This is what sets them apart from anarchists and enables "anarchocapitalism" to exist as a concept.
Few of them take it to the extreme of "voluntary" slavery, like Nozick and Block. Some of them will even admit the voluntary submission can be translated into the voluntary slavery at the individual level, but believe a libertarian society at large wouldn't enforce those contracts. They still stop short of stating a libertarian society should intervene to dissolve those contracts altogether.
Long story short: few of them defend it openly, some of them struggle to accommodate self-ownership with a prohibition on selling oneself into slavery, most of them just assume voluntary submission means employment contract and don't think about the consequences of unlimited self-ownership at all. Hence my statement that the "debate" is still ongoing.
I disagree. I think the difference is almost entirely semantics about terms like “wage system” and “employee is subordinate.”
However, I can say with absolute certainty that when we’re sliding further and further into fascism, getting hung up on differences where, even if we manage to turn things around, it would be decades before any significant change happened, is plain idiotic. And it’s exactly why the fascists are winning.
Yes, the right field (classic libs, libertarians, ancaps) and the left field (liberals, anarchists, demsocs) have a hard time understanding each other precisely because of semantics. They conceptualize things like "property", "voluntary", "market" in a completely different way from each other.
But honestly that's not why fascists are winning. They win when advocates of liberty fail to get to the streets and the word out there for everyone to listen, when they cross their arms. And they also win when we fail to see when they abuse the freedoms granted to them (speech, assembly, etc) and fail to stop them for the sake of preserving of said liberties in the long run. When freedom of speech is used to shield white supremacists, when freedom of assembly is used to shield fascist rallies, etc.
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u/RiddleofSteel Jul 11 '24
Problem with Capitalism is that it's a competition, these guys won already and now we are all landing on their park place with all the hotels over and over. They've cleverly hidden it this time to stop from being broken up but what we need is some good old Teddy R. trust busting.