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Why are folks so anti-capitalist?
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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I don't see how that's obvious. Can you give me the rationale for this other system?
The rationale for capitalism is, essentially, the information problem. Basically, no one person has enough information to decide where a society's resources should be distributed. An analogy I've heard is: how should society decide whether they should build a bridge or a tunnel (one takes more wood, the other takes more steel)? The answer is extremely complicated, depending on society's capacity for producing wood and steel, people's desire for either a bridge or tunnel, and future expectations of the need for wood or steel. The answer is given by prices, which encode this information and incentivize making the right choice.
If wood is cheaper, it means there's more wood available and no one expects a huge need of wood to pop up soon. The same for steel, labor, land, and all the other resources that go into building a tunnel or bridge. Society is incentivized to build it for the lowest cost, which also happens to be the most efficient way to do it.
Is there a system which can do better? Would love to hear about it.
And also, I'm very scared when people suggest "down with capitalism!" because it's a pretty decent system and I worry about tearing society down unless we have very good reasons to believe it'll be better for it.
This is a great rationale for markets and prices, but it isn't a rationale for capitalism per se. It is possible for non-capitalist systems to use markets and prices.
I am not a Marxist.
There is a different philosophical rationale for what is wrong with capitalism and why an alternative is necessary. I can provide links to the comments in this thread where I try to explain it if you are interested. I am on Mastodon, so I have a character limit to deal with
Other than the decent system ruining our future, because a preventable catastrophe has been left to unfold because of corporate greed, the analogy is senseless from a pure logical sense. Of course you aren't just gonna pick the cheapest option when deciding to plan a tunnel or a bridge, you go with the option that makes the most sense. The information problem is of course more about how we knoe the desires to be fulfilled, but even there, don't you think, that most desires, that capitalism fullfills are nothing more but artificial. Nodoby would desire a bigger car, if a bigger car would not exist. And while it is true that former socialist countries had that problem, of not meeting peoples desires, new forms of socialism could utalize the internet to have a democratic edge on that for example. I would highly recommend you, to step out of your neoliberal bubble, and read Thomas Piketty's "A quick history of equality", and look up PlasticPills on Youtube, he has some really interresting videos on how capitalism forges us.