I agree. Especially with the issue of regulatory capture, which allows business to use regulation as a weapon against their competitors, and/or kick out the ladder.
Election 2020 Election 2020: It's (almost) over! (maybe...possibly...ahh who are we kidding, it's 2020!)
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I agree. Especially with the issue of regulatory capture, which allows business to use regulation as a weapon against their competitors, and/or kick out the ladder.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
Oddly enough, it seems that one of the best ways to control capitalism is by not controlling it. You usually end up accidentally creating these abusive monopolies in the process because the economy is too bloody complicated to regulate for the most part.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
The purpose of populism was to put our current elites into power. Now it gets in the way of thier unlimited exercise of power.
Goldstein is that you?
The correct approach, I think, is to just try to steer the boat called "economy" down the rapid river flow as best you can, correcting quickly in real time whenever it looks like it's going to run ashore. You certainly cannot fucking preplan every bit of it.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
Don't know if this is the thread to put it , but Trump delivered more remarks today (mainly about Drug price reforms) which should be godsend for a lot of people.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
I assure you, shipping our industries overseas, ceding our sovereignty to shadowy business men and flooding the land with immigrants is not a very popular sentiment.
Huh, did a 1984 reference just whoosh over everyone's head? To get the reference I was making towards Noodles, open up the book and get to the part about Goldstein's Book. Because it sounds exactly like it.
I was calling you Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 as a joke of sorts.
who?
I am an old old former Spacebattler who was purged back in '17
I was calling you Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 as a joke of sorts.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
ah! haha. I r dumb.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
Popular sentiment is irrelevant when it cant mobilise.
Nah, it was rather oblique. But I think you probably remember what I mean about it. Since your statement about populism sounds exactly like the middle class-upper class relationship described in that part of the book.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
What we have now is less capitalism than corporatism, and I think it's the inability to distinguish the two that has led us into our current predicament.
Yes, that would be part of the problem. But capitalism has its own problems that I think are inherent to it, since as the unlimited pursuit of wealth.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
I think that's human nature more than anything else. We love accumulating stuff and have always done, from the chieftains of stone age tribes and the Pharaoh's of Egypt, to the business tycoons of today. Capitalism (which essentially is a posh word we've given to an evolved form of bartering) attempts to harness that for productive purposes.
Then, maybe I am atypical. Things are nice, but there seems that there is an "enough" for me. And that afterwards I want to look for other things other meaningful things, and since I don't have religion I must turn to the love of knowledge itself, to introspection, self-actualization and the such.
It might be that I am more like certain eminent men than I have thought, if I actually have a conception of "enough" and that the unending search for stuff is hollow.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
So you're accumulating knowledge or "meaningful" things? That's still accumulation of a stripe.
You can't accumulate meaning, self-betterment or the such. And those are the end goal of any proper endeavor, to live a proper life is the end goal. If it is accumulation, it is far different. There is an actual end in sight, rather than filling an unfillable hole. And things like knowledge and purpose will last all the way to the end, and something that tells you your life was not in vain.
Things are a mean to an end, and not an end in themselves.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Capitalism does not have huge problems, because capitalism, unlike socialism or many other economic systems, it isn't also trying to be a moral system.
Capitalism is just an economic system. How well or how poorly it serves you, will depend upon how good or bad your culture's moral system is.
Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. That doesn't make it a bad tool, it makes it a tool rather than a moral force.
This touches on it well. Capitalism is a means to an end. If your end is 'enough wealth and prosperity to live well,' and then you set aside your economic life to go and do other things, that's great. If your end is 'accumulate maximum possible wealth,' and you make that wealth accumulation your god, well, that's not so great.
Capitalism is just an economic system. How well or how poorly it serves you, will depend upon how good or bad your culture's moral system is.
Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. That doesn't make it a bad tool, it makes it a tool rather than a moral force.
This touches on it well. Capitalism is a means to an end. If your end is 'enough wealth and prosperity to live well,' and then you set aside your economic life to go and do other things, that's great. If your end is 'accumulate maximum possible wealth,' and you make that wealth accumulation your god, well, that's not so great.
Navarro
Well-known member
Which would explain why Trump also saw gains with African-Americans, non-Cuban hispanics, Jews and even Muslims?
Now, we actually saw that following the 2016 election all the WNs started ranting about Trump being a Jewish puppet or sell-out and such. Richard Spencer, the face of the pitiable "movement", even voted Biden!
It's not even that - we can see this in the fact that the further-out wing of the Left has openly listed a set of quite normative middle-class values which are very necessary for any kind of civilised society as being "whiteness" and hence nebulously Bad. What it boils down to with those folks, as clear as day, is not even a paternalistic racism but what the USSR and CPUSA started doing in the 30s - the advancement of the implementation of communism under the guise of anti-racism.
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