When trying to achieve equality, it takes far less work to drag one group down than to lift another group up to an equal level.
This is the crux of why Communism typically achieved worse outcomes than other systems.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Yes, eliminating hyper greed will result is less hoarded wealth. So uh yeah, one guy won't own 7 mansions.
Yeah, that's the part that hasn't happened historically. Usually it turns into eat the middle class.
Because with capitalism we have such a large middle class now.
Middle class is not a thing.
Uhh, OK.
Did I mention I love living in a European country, where education and healthcare is free?
That's not socialism, that's a country with social services. I've seen multiple time when people from Scandinavia were offended when their country was called "socialist" - they are not. The economy is capitalist but the country offers strong social services.
Another funny thing - when reading about the us you realizer that it's just a broken market and snowballed problems. For example - the government invests more than any other country (per capita) in the health sector. The thing is it got out of hand.
I remember watching an economic professor saying that we will never achieve pure capitalism because it's just to measure how far we are into the capitalism. Maybe that also goes with socialism.
There's a dissonance between allowing complete freedom without intervention and keeping the market truly free - if an organisation can simply buy all it's competition and expand forever, that's just a monopoly which is a closed market.
As for socialism - I grew up in a kibbutz, which is one of the only examples a successful socialist system (imo). And this too, is time limited. My reasoning being having a small group where everyone know each other and decide to join of their own volition. Most kibbutzim failed after the 3rd generation - people did not want to share anymore (and took some very bad financial decisions).
It's a broken market because it's a rigged market. For all my endless harping, I don't think capitalism is pure evil. I think crony capitalism, and I believe that is what it means when we talk about "late stage capitalism," certain winners are allowed to buy the rule makers, which concentrates wealth, which allows more spending on rule makers, etc etc.
If we had guardrails, capitalism could do what it's supposed to - See a need/want, meet that need/want, make a reasonable amount of money which gets spent on other needs/wants.
Capitalism is based around the possibility of financial and social mobility and uncontrolled market. The concentration we see today goes against this idea. I'm about to respond my original conclusion about socialism in another comment, but I start to think we went too large scale here too, and some balancing is needed.