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Last week I made an argument on here that while capitalism was excellent at generating wealth, I agreed with @DBR that it was horribly unfair in many ways, and that negative externalities abounded which made the rich less than a shining standard of moral virtue. Unfortunately I felt I wasn't able to give the argument the weight it deserved, and many people made strong points against it. I'd like to quote Brink Lindsey here, who has a more nuanced take on the matter:
Essentially I'm arguing against the standard sort of lazy defense of capitalism I see on here. I am not a redistributivist, or a Marxist, but I'm also not a full throated defender of capitalism and markets. I certainly don't buy that without government and regulation, in a sort of anarcho-capitalist state, we would all be better off. Mainly because I don't think we're anywhere near having efficient markets that actually track negative externalities, or have close to perfect information.
It seems clear to me that while Marxism failed as a revolt against Capitalism, there do need to be major changes. However I'm quite unhappy with the proposed systems, as Socialism, the best contender, has quite easily fallen to social virtue signaling as opposed to actual economic change. I briefly flirted with Georgism, but the total disregard for the history of land and people's lives being tied into their property and houses going back generations ultimately turned me off of a land value tax as an optimal way to distribute wealth.
What are some more off the beaten path solutions that have been put forward to the negatives of Capitalism? Ideally we would use markets as a tool within a greater value structure, and keep some things sacred and safely away from money. But in reality, at least in a pluralistic society, that greater value structure seems to be a pipe dream. Capital will find its way into the cracks and mercilessly drive differences in the name of profit.
Does anyone know of inventive, big ideas as to how to plug some of the gaps our rampant focus on wealth has created in our society? To keep the benefits of capitalism while sanding off the rougher edges?
I feel like capitalism with a strong UBI paid for with progressive taxes to keep wealth inequality flatter could solve a lot of problems. Not enough to permanently solve the contradictions of capitalism, but enough to push the reckoning down the line another century.
I also like the idea of having the government allow people to vote on which post-scarcity good it should buy out and publicize. Enough people need a specific expensive medication, the government buys the patent and produces it for pennies a pill. Enough people love a new video game, the government licenses it and makes it free to every citizen. Etc. Obviously a lot of details to work out but I think it's one possible solution to artificial scarcity, which I think is one of the biggest problems with capitalism as we move towards an increasingly post-scarcity and information-based economy.
The only way I see UBI solving problems, is if you see the vast majority of humanity as a problem, and are looking for ways to depopulate the Earth.
I always wanted to know this one, can you name one or two contradictions within capitalism?
Sure!
A classic contradiction is that strong bargaining power by the capitalist class over the working class tends to lead to increased production and corporate profits at the same time it leads to decreased wages for consumers and a drop in demand for goods and services, creating a cyclical crisis that tends to drives productive capability away from consumer goods and services and into things like financialization and speculation, which leads to bubble bursts and depressions.
One of the contradictions I was trying to point out here is that capitalism is great at increasing productivity so that valuable goods and services become less scarce, but also relies on scarcity to set prices and cannot natively incentivize the production and distribution of post-need goods. This contradiction becomes more and more relevant to our everyday lives as capitaisms's successes drive more and more things into the post-scarcity category, with effects such as a marginal additional pill that costs 3 cents to make costing hundreds of dollars to buy, or governments being pressured into making and rabidly enforcing IP laws.
Aside from living through a few recessions at this point and usually seeing people's wages drop after one starts, rather than before, that strikes me as a very unusual usage of the word "contradiction". If that's a contradiction, then a recovery from a recessions is another one.
Isn't the cyclical crisis the part that clears out finacialization and speculation?
That's an even worse example. Yes, capitalism will help me figure out whether the vest way to produce more grain under current conditions is with a horse plow or a tractor, and thus make grain less scarce. Yes, it will stop being useful once we reach post-scarcity of factors of production. That is not a contradiction in any way.
Cases were something costs 3 cents to make, and 100 dollars to buy, usually aren't separate from external interventions like IP laws, but stem directly from them. Seems like the solution is stop trying to fix what's not broken.
That's what I would call the collapse, with the crisis being the part where capitalists realize they can't make enough money trying to sell real things to actual people and have to dump everything into financialization instead.
Yes, the collapse is what then clears all that out, restarting the cycle.
We could argue about what to call each part of the cycle, but that's just semantics. My point is that the cycle itself is a contradiction of capitalism, where having it succeed in its natural processes leaves it unable to function properly, until it goes nuts for awhile and suffers a collapse and loses much of those gains.
A non-contradictory process would be one that doesn't suffer from its own success in this way, and has a virtuous cycle that simply turns success into more success instead.
What you are missing is the part where grain becomes so plentiful that its price at market drops below the cost to bring it to market, farmers are forced to leave it rotting in fields, and everyone starves. Again, that's why it's a contradiction, the success of the system leaves the world in a new state which the system was not built for and can't accommodate, and the whole thing collapses briefly until the problems it was good at solving exists again.
And that's what happens if you 'don't fix what's not broken': when an excess of abundance drives the price of something too low, no one is incentivized to produce or sell it anymore, and it paradoxically becomes more difficult to find.
That's why we use things like IP laws and price fixing and paying farmers to not grow crops and etc. etc. etc., to prevent that type of collapse and dysfunction when capitalism succeeds in creating a situation it cannot itself function in.
But that type of artificial scarcity and restrictive regulation is, again, it's own type of contradiction: the success of capitalism necessitates and inevitably produces imposed limiters that evaporate much of the potential gain from capitalist innovations.
My point is that it's a very unusual usage of "contradiction". What you're describing is a self-correcting mechanism.
No, I'm not. If that happens, but there are other scarce good, the capitalist system directs investment into those goods instead, stopping short of pushing a particular good to post scarcity before it makes sense. Goods going to waste was more often a feature of centrally planned systems, rather than capitalism.
When all factors of production, and therefore all consumer goods are no longer scarce, capitalism stops making sense. That's not a contradiction, that's the system's explicitly acknowledged limit.
I don't think you established that it cannot function in those situations. Calling a corrective phase something dramatic like "the collapse" doesn't prove that the system ceased to function. Further, your own logic clearly showed that these "preventive" measures caused the very things that are supposed to be "contradictions" of capitalism.
Regarding semantics, I don't know what to tell you, this is a standard academic example for 'the contradictions of capitalism.' Maybe whoever translated Marx originally should have used a different word, I don't know, I don't think that's very important.
But importantly, I do think 'self-correcting mechanism' is way too charitable, and has connotations that miss the point here.
In the case where marginally lower employment leads to marginally lower resource prices leads to marginally higher investment in manufacturing leads back to marginally higher employment again, that's a self-correcting mechanism.
In the case where marginally lower employment leads to disinvestment in manufacturing and investment in financialization and speculation instead, and this process creates a feedback loop that drives more and more of the economy into those sectors until the bubble bursts and there's a large-scale recession, that's not really describing minor course corrections anymore. It's describing a cyclical failure where capitalism cannot function under it's own success, which I think is reasonably described as a contradiction.
It feels like we agree on the mechanisms here, and disagree about what to call them or how society reacts to them, or something?
Like, yeah, Marx acknowledged that capitalism inherently produces conditions under which it can no longer function successfully, and needs to be replaced with new systems which can successfully manage the abundance it produced. That's the cliff notes version of one section of his historical materialism.
Capitalists don't explicitly acknowledge that! Standard capitalist rhetoric is, as far as I can tell, that capitalism is just permanently and forever the best way to run an economy, under any circumstances, and any attempts to interfere with or subvert or replace it will only cause suffering and dysfunction.
It's not the case that capitalists are keeping a list of sectors of teh economy where capitalism has succeeded in creating post-scarcity and is no longer needed in that sector and that sector can be handed off to central planning or w/e because capitalism can't handle it anymore. They think capitalism can and should handle everything, and the cases where they insist on that even though they're wrong create the contradiction.
>During World War I, farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock. When prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes and living expenses. In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Some farm families began burning corn rather than coal in their stoves because corn was cheaper. Sometimes the countryside smelled like popcorn from all the corn burning in the kitchen stoves.
Sadly, no, goods do go to waste or cease being produced under unregulated capitalism; that's one of the reasons we have so many regulations today, which avoid the worst of these tragedies while also capping the amount of benefit capitalism can accrue to society.
Again, this is a contradiction: capitalism is so good at making goods cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive, or else capitalism can't properly distribute them anymore and no one can get enough of them.
Typically the most productive way to push these kind of conversations forward is to go back to definitions, to make sure if the difference of opinion stems from people merely using different definitions.
The reference to academia is a bit troubling, you make it sound like you don't really believe these arguments yourself, just relaying someone else's thoughts.
Why? By your own logic, the failure is cyclical, which means it is followed by a recovery. The general trajectory of capitalism, even taking these periodic crashes into account, is clearly that of growth. If you compare it to the results of systems that were supposed to be an alternative to capitalism, the contrast is even more stark. So I just don't see anything contradictory in it, and it does indeed look like a self-correcting system.
Then it looks like you're just completely unfamiliar with capitalist theory. They go to great lengths to point out that the entire purpose of the system is "rational allocation of scarce resources". That statement alone is at least double-redundant by my count, which shows how much they wanted to hammer the point home.
3 times cheaper than nowadays is indeed a good deal, but hardly post-scarcity. The fact that they were burning it instead of coal, is just a statement about the relative availability of coal, and we do it too nowadays (never heard of bio-fuels)? In fact, if anything this is probably an example of the rationality of capitalism relative to other systems. A central planner insisting "corn is for eating, not for heating" would be wasting coal, while letting an abundant resource go to waste. Also, the 1930's cannot be in any reasonable way be described as an example of unregulated capitalism.
The WWI example is even worse. War, especially in the past, has always been a time of great uncertainty, so it's not surprising people ended up producing too much or too little of something, because they were expecting the war to go a certain way, that didn't come to pass. None of this is an example of capitalism making goods so cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive. To show that, you'd need to show that the producers refused to correct production afterwards. Otherwise, it's not a contradiction at all.
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