lolbertarians are some of the dumbest people on earth.
okay, let’s say it is “crony capitalism run by the state” (he doesn’t mean state capitalism, he doesn’t know what that means)
what else can capitalism become, especially without extremely strict regulation and wealth/income caps- all things these people are against? and to the extent that the state has its hand in the economy, is it not ONLY to benefit corporations? they’re not regulating these companies or anything to any meaningful degree. so if the government is bad because they only serve big business, even in their own completely nonsensical analysis, doesnt that still make capitalism the problem?
People can’t recognize the difference between capitalism and commerce. You don’t need to completely end private property and free enterprise in order to end capitalism. Hell, even the Soviet Union at times found keeping some small private businesses around made a lot of sense.
I don’t want a world where people can’t work for themselves, provide services directly to others, etc. Every restaurant and bar doesn’t need to be run by a central planning committee. But giant conglomerates that control the employment of tens of thousands? Maybe that’s the kind of thing the private market shouldn’t be running. We can let people operate their own modest independent businesses without also letting Walmart exist. We can let people earn enough modest profit from the fruits of their labor to make starting new businesses worthwhile, without also allowing people to hoard such vast fortunes that they become geopolitically dangerous. We can have commerce without capitalism. I want a world where people can work for themselves without having to work for someone else or for the government. That doesn’t mean I want a world where you can become a billionaire by playing labor arbitrage with the hard work of thousands of other human beings. We can let people own their own homes without also allowing industrial-scale landlording.
Commerce and capitalism are not the same thing. We can have commerce without capitalism. Commerce existed long, long before capitalism, and it will exist long after capitalism has been relegated to the history books.
wow i couldn’t disagree more. beheading small business tyrants for their crimes against the workers is going to be the best part of the revolution and it’d be better not to have one at all if we’re going to let “modest independent businesses” continue to earn “modest profit” afterwards
out of curiosity, how would employment look in a situation like that? if there’s a small privately owned business, is the owner expected to do all of the work themselves? does the entire amount of profit get divided evenly among the owner and all workers? if not then i have to disagree, because then you have exploitation happening. one person earning more than everybody else in other words means everybody else takes a paycut to pay for that one person to have more than everyone else. and even on a small scale that’s a very slippery slope and it comes with social implications that are in my opinion detrimental to society as well as bad for each person’s individual mental development in that it reinforces that relationship and normalizes the exploitation and competitive mindset at its core. there’s nothing inherently wrong with competition but society needs to be set up in a way that socializes people into a mindset of cooperation rather than competition. as the dialectics are in motion and socialism becomes more and more realized this should be the natural result. the same idea applies to what happens when private ownership is allowed. what that looks like evolves over time and people adapt to those conditions and we end up where we are now.
USSR had workers’ cooperatives, but didn’t allow full-fledged private businesses after NEP was ended.