this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Centrism doesn't mean that you can't choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can't do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.
What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It's a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn't matter who.
The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can't decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn't automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.
Ugh, market socialism exists.
Not all socialism has planned economies. That's communism. A specific subset of socialism.
Capitalism doesn't have a monopoly on market economies. badumtssh
Right, but I see market socialism as an ideological compromise rather than inherent socialism. Im from scandinavia, and my country is a capitalist country with a strong welfare state.
You have “welfare capitalism” as they define it so that they get to still try to keep people tethered to capitalism. Capitalism is not just having money, it’s a system that prioritizes said money. Capitalism seeks to reduce regulation and separate the worker and owner class and basically by definition you don’t get to have a say if you don’t have money. Scandinavian countries are not finding a balance but are resisting capitalism while keeping its name and to make people not be afraid of not having it(for some fuckin’ reason people really want it I don’t get it).
If you have strong regulations, a government focused on taking care of people instead of relying on businesses to do it, and the people have fair power then you don’t have capitalism, just a system where private ownership exists but is not jerked-off at every turn like in the states. It was literally made up so the merchant class could keep all their money as monarchies were falling. It’s a not something you want to even associate with. Even the states hasn’t gone full capitalism because they know(knew) that it’s not a truly viable system.
I also want system with some level of private ownership, but I also don’t think private, for-profit power generation should be a thing and if a company under “capitalism” is too big to fail then at least a large part of it should be sold to the government, and at least have it’s executive board purged, not handed a bunch of money as they hold their employees’ jobs hostage.
Capitalism goes through different waves and has grown to accept government involvement insofar as to reduce market failures of which monopolies and externalities are some important ones. Unions are justified in capitalism by solving the market failure of asymmetric information.