There’s a lot of trouble with definitions regarding capitalism. (I’d call them intentional since muddying the waters serves the people who benefit from our current system.)
Pick any person who is complaining about “capitalism” right now.
If you proposed a system where everything was structured the same as it is right now, HOWEVER instead of shareholders and owners possessing companies, every, single company was a worker cooperative (owned and controlled by its workers) then I am 95% sure the anti-capitalist you picked would
Not consider that capitalism, and
Vastly prefer that over what we have right now
With some minor variation. (Tankies don’t think it’s possible to maintain such a system without monopolizing violence. Anarcho-communists wouldn’t be too happy about the scope and financial power of state and federal governments, and would seek to pare them down. Democratic socialists would think it was perfect. Little disagreements like that.)
But I think most other people (people who aren’t anti-capitalists) would think “that’s just a form of capitalism” if I described the above.
In fact, if I said,
A free market system, but ownership and control of the means of production is only allowed collectively and democratically. No shareholders allowed, no transferable individual ownership allowed.
Most ordinary people would consider that a form of capitalism. (Even though calling it capitalism is, technically, highly inaccurate). So it’s a difficult conversation to have. Because most “anti-capitalists” disagree with most “pro-capitalists” on the basic definition of what they are fighting or defending.
I’m actually convinced that a lot of “pro-capitalists” are more eager to defend the free market system than they are to defend transferable, stock-marketable, individual ownership of the means of production. I think they would compromise on the latter if they could safeguard the former.
That’s almost anarcho-syndicalism, which I am a proponent of some of the ideas of, but it leaves capital and government generally intact. That’s probably the easiest way we could transition away from capitalism as we know it and not collapse the system entirely. It sounds almost feasible.
Oh yeah, certainly. And one of the first steps in that direction – the corporate death sentence – is just common sense.
(The corporate death sentence is basically “any company that does more damage than it can reasonably repair gets converted into a co-op controlled by its workers / victims. The investors’ shares get dissolved.”)
I don’t think anyone would have a reasonable objection to allowing the voters of East Palestine, Ohio and the workers for Norfolk Southern to elect all of the company’s board members from here on out. And I don’t think anyone would weep for Norfolk Southern’s shareholders if their shares got dissolved.
Unregulated capitalism imo. I don’t buy the idea I’ve seen around here that capitalism itself is the problem and switching to communism would solve all the problems. Both are systems that have merit, but when left unchecked all the power and money will go to the few, like we have now.
If by “have merit” you mean “has some positive aspects”, sure. Every system has merit. Slavery had merit (slave owners got cheap cotton). The Holocaust had merit (antisemites felt better). The issue is weighing the merit against the negatives. You can’t just say two systems have positive aspects and call it a day.
Are you a fan of democracy or authoritarianism? Capitalism is a system where productive forces are driven undemocratically, in the name of profit instead of by worker democracy. The commodification of everything exists in a world of private property:
our bodies (labor power)
our thoughts (intellectual property)
the specific ordering of bits on a hard drive you own (digital media, DRM)
the means of production (which exist as a result of collective knowledge, infrastructure, and labor)
These things being commodified and privatized are ridiculous in any democratic, non-capitalist system.
However, these ridiculous conditions are absolutely necessary in a capitalist society. Without them the system falls apart. And as society continues to progress, the situation gets more and more ridiculous.
What about when AI “takes away” jobs for 50% of Americans (as in capitalists fire humans in favor of AI)? That’ll collapse our society. Less work would be a good thing in any reasonable system, but not in capitalism. Less work is an existential threat to our society.
If we ever have an AI that is as capable as humans are intellectually, the only work left for us will be manual labor. If that happens, and robots get to the point of matching our physical abilities, we won’t be employable anymore. The two classes will no longer be owners and workers, they’ll be owners and non-owners. At that point we better have dismantled capitalism, because if we don’t then we’ll just be starving in the street, along with the millions who die every year from starvation under the boot of global capitalism.
Everying in your comment can be solved with regulation. A capitalist society can enact socialist policies to take care of the lower class or unemployed. It’s not a “pick one” situation.
You’re arguing against the unregulated capitalism we live in, but also comparing capitalism as it exists today to fuckin slavery is just a ridiculous false equivalence.
I didn’t compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn’t demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren’t). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.
I don’t know if it’s emotion that’s clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it’s not, then this conversation isn’t worth having because you won’t understand half of what I’m saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.
A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact “social” policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it’s not socialism. It’s not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.
Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn’t fix them. It’s applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there’s a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.
Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.
IMO American style capitalism is completely broken, but that’s not the only way to run your economy and still call it capitalism. Particularly in the EU area companies don’t always have the upper hand. Consumers and employees have the kinds of rights Americans can only dream of.
Don’t really know much about communism, but clearly USSR didn’t survive, and that may have something to do with the system. ML-people here can probably tell me how China, Cuba and other communist countries are doing today.
And no I don’t mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now love and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our where, conscious knowledge. And it’s all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather…“free”.
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
There’s next to no difference in regards to payroll processing on a week by week basis. Companies want to push this to a fortnight or month so it’s easier on their finances. There’s very little reason it couldn’t be paid weekly.
The employer basically gets an interest-free loan for that extra week; whereas the employee might need to pay interest to a third party to make up for any shortfall on their end (e.g. credit cards, payday loans). Majority of people live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t cover an unexpected $1000 expense.
Technically every day you are not paid is an interest rate free loan to your employer. That said, being paid once a month is fine for me since all my fixed expenses are also paid on a monthly basis.
I don’t know if it’s so much a scam as it is banks and companies and such being stuck in the past.
You could be getting paid every week or even every day, it’s your money, you already earned it, why should you have to wait for it?
Especially in this day and age where everything is computerized. You punch in, you punch out, the computer knows how long you worked, somewhere in their payroll system they know how much you earned, what needs to be withheld, etc. It takes fractions of a second for a computer to do that math, they could send that transaction the moment you clock out.
When things were more manual, it made sense, you had to have someone adding things up, and doing math, computers were bigger, slower, less user friendly, more expensive, and not all hooked up to the Internet up to the Internet to talk to each other. It used to make a lot of sense to do things in big batches at the end of the day, every week, every 2 weeks, 2 or 3 times a month, whatever.
But now you could put in your 8 hours work, and walk out with your days wages already in your account ready to be used for whatever you need it for immediately, no more being broke until payday, payday is every day. But that’s not how it works because as far as the banks and such are concerned everything is working fine for them, so no real need to update their shit.
Couldn’t this be switched around too? I’m only paying some of my bills every other month or twice a year. Why shouldn’t I be paying those off every week or even every day?
Paying on your mortgage every week can drastically reduce your interest, depending on how your interest is calculated. Even if you pay the same amount at you would per month, paying it every week could save thousands of dollars.
It absolutely could, everyone manages their money in their own way. If that’s something that works for people I think they should have that option.
Personally when possible, I do like to do things that way. If I owe, say, $100/month on my car payment, I will tend to pay $50 with each paycheck instead of $100 once a month, and if I got paid every week, I would probably choose to pay $25 a week instead. For me and how my brain is wired, it’s just easier for me to mentally keep track of things when they’re in smaller, more frequent increments. I don’t know if I would quite break it down to ~$5 a day if I got paid every day, but i’d consider it.
Really? Is that a thing? Where I live getting paid per month is the norm. Some people get paid per 4 weeks instead of per month. But I don’t know of any trade where payment per week or twee weeks is the norm. Stuff like rent, mortgage, water, gas and electric etc. is all done per month. So it makes sense to match the income cycle to the bill cycle.
Puts living paycheck to paycheck in perspective. I can image not getting ends to meet on a monthly basis. But if you can’t afford the next week, you have basically nothing.
I know there is a lot of overhead with payroll where I live, so if companies would have to do it more often, that would be pretty expensive. There are a lot of rules and regulations, so it takes a lot of work to do it right.
Hell yeah, they’re recording my time by the second, they should pay me by the second. If I’m clocked in you can be depositing a penny every 6 seconds into my bank account. If we started charging interest for the time between your paycheck being earned and being paid out they would figure out how to make that happen.
In Germany and Austria being paid per month is the norm. All the laws are defined for that. So pretty much everyone who works gets paid just once a month, that’s it (Well, in Austria you get 14 salaries, so you get an extra salary every 6 months). It makes zero difference if you get your money one time a month or half your money two times a month, it’s the same amount in the end.
Getting paid more often would just complicate things, as it can depend on how much overtime you did in a month. Or how often you went into the office (you get lessened taxes based on how far the office is away and how often you have to drive there and if there is suitable public transport to get there).
How in the world is that a scam? I’ve been paid once a month to every day in my career and I far prefer the once a month situation but every 2 weeks is fine with me. Every day is just tedious. Once a week has the same problem but different scale. Once a month means I can actually plan out my bills easily.
Specifically, compounding interest. I have no problem paying something extra back if I need to borrow a sum of money, but it should be a flat, fixed fee calculated as a percentage of the amount borrowed, up front.
Mortgages needing to be renewed every 5 years so that banks can jack the the interest rate. Cap residential mortgages at 25 years max and 2% interest for the duration.
Because it doesn’t matter the company. A bank creates money if you apply for credit. It just have to have a fraction - say 3% - real money to store at a central bank account. Then they literally type the numbers on your account. Money created!
So, for a bank, it doesn’t matter if you apply for 5.10.20 years. They get the interests anyway. May be there is some weird financial acrobatic behind the 5 years target. However, here in Germany it’s pretty common to get a 20 years credit.
Many people lock in interest rates for the life of the loan. Most often 30 years for mortgage loans. You don’t have to renew a mortgage’s interest rate unless you get an adjustable rate one.
This is the main reason why mortgage applications are down significantly right now. People with super low interest rates don’t want to move because they’d have to get a new loan to do so, and interest rates are much higher now. If they stay and they have a fixed-rate loan, nothing changes.
Is it normalized? I very rarely hear anyone taking homeopathic medicine or advocating for it. But I live in Norway, so maybe this is a thing elsewhere?
I agree that I never ear anyone I know tell me they use it, but they are sold in every drug store here in Canada so people must buy them, otherwise they would be bankrupt.
Maybe there’s better examples. Maybe glasses. Like 500$ for plastic. More people are buying online though these days.
Have you ever seen stuff like Occillococcinum or most things by company Boiron? They don’t advertise it as homeopathy, so even if you saw a homeopathic sugar pill you wouldn’t necessarily know. That’s a part of the scam
It is very normalized in the south of Germany, but generally Germany is very pro homeopathy so so it is even subsided by the public health care system.
In Germany, a lot of medicine can only be sold in very regulated apothecaries. Those stores are allowed to recommend and sell homeopathy. There’s even a state-exam for homeopath. Though for that you only have to demonstrate you won’t kill your patients, not that you can actually help.
401k plans are a scam not because of what they are, but what they replaced.
Companies used to offer pensions. These were retirement benefits that were handled by the company, and the company bore the risk of underperforming markets.
For a number of reasons, pensions were much better for workers. Now, only some unionized workers get them.
There’s so much inflation these days that pensions are impossible unless the pension money is invested to keep up with inflation. So it’s the same thing at best out a worse option.
So it’s the same thing at best out a worse option.
It’s not though. With a pension someone work that knowledge manages that investment. With a 401k, the employee is. Except most employees don’t have that kind of time or expertise. So, it’s “our fault” that we end up with a poorly managed retirement when… we could just do pensions.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m 70 and the company that pays my pension suddenly goes bankrupt, I don’t want to be caught with my pants down. I would rather not put all my eggs in one basket.
Like people don’t lose their saving in the market anyway? But when your 401k goes in the tank, your broker doesn’t have the legal obligation to fund your retirement.
If that happens to your 401k, that’s your fault. As you get older you are supposed to shift things to be more conservative… You can even put your money in things that are guaranteed to not go down. There are target date funds that do this for you without you having to think about it (although I think target date funds are a little too conservative from the start).
In my country, 401(k) is rare. My wife’s company is one of the few that offers it, and it’s way better than the government pension my dad is getting as a retiree.
I love the fact that they just print too! No more “inkjet cleaning test prints”, I’ve saved so much time, money, and frustrating switching to a brother black and white laser printer… For the average (?) “I just need to print official documents” kind of person, it’s a great buy.
National pension is a ponzi scheme and as our population declines it will be impossible to pay it back.
With private insurance, you are given worse options and they will do anything in their power not to pay it. For the average person, you will also have paid more in the long run with insurance than without it, even if you had an accident.
Chiropractors are harmful for your body even if your issue is spine-related. Go to an orthopedist.
I also just really hate the idea of applying financial logic to something like this. Like, are we just gonna go and label the entire human race as a Ponzi scheme? Grandpa’s not able to pull his weight lately so fuck him? That’s a rhetorical question, obviously. The reality is that old people are going to cost what they cost and everyone else just has to suck it up because the alternative is way uglier.
College. The learning is fine, the cost is freaking out of hand. I never went and have no regrets. My daughter is going now and I feel like I’m supporting a scam.
Anything you take out loans for is a scam. I doubt the cost of houses or college would be anything like it is today if people weren’t enabled to pay it by banks.
In Australia you get a loan for university, but the loan is an interest-free loan with the government (it’s just indexed for inflation once per year), you don’t have to pay it off until you’re earning over around AU$55k/year, and the government heavily subsidises the cost for citizens and permanent residents.
Definitely not true in all of Europe. We pay in the Netherlands. In fact, I decided to go to school here since I never got to in the US, and found out I can’t even take out a student loan because I’m over 35.
Depends on the degree. Internet made colleges much more obsolete than what society care to admit. This is an oversimplification of course. Education is a complex subject.
The stock market and publicly traded companies. The idea that a business that is making consistent profits isn’t good unless those profits are increased each quarter is asinine. This system of shortsighted hyper focus on short term quarterly growth for the sake of growth is the cause of so much pain and suffering in the world. Even companies with amazing financials will work to push workers compensation down, cut corners and exploit loopholes to make sure their profits are always growing. Consistent large profits aren’t good enough.
They have 2 (3?) types of shares, and the one most people buy ($GOOG) is a class C share which comes with no voting rights and doesn’t give you a share of the company profits.
While class A shares ($GOOGL) come with voting rights, class B shares which are held by Google’s founders and insiders get 10x voting power and so they still hold the majority vote. Class A also does not pay dividends.
Google’s shares are divided into two types, Class A and Class C. Class A shares, traded as GOOGL, confer one vote per share as a typical stock would. Class C shares, traded as GOOG, confers no voting privileges. This dual shares system was done to raise more money selling less useful Class C shares (intended for mutual funds and the like) while keeping control of the company in the hands of those held on to Class A shares (i.e. longtime executives).
Ah, thanks for the info. That’s actually what I suspect is happening with the new fractional shares thing, but the brokerage is the one retaining control.
This type of thing might be more common than just the famous Google example - apparently lots of valuations reported in media just assume that all shares in a company are equal (fungible, interchangeable).
If you invest in the stock market and expect companies to be making large profits all the time then you’re going to be very disappointed. That’s not how it works. There are financial reports, market regulators, analysts. History tells us that awful companies with shady practices would always get caught in the end, no matter how big they are.
Everyone should invest, but investors should always do their research.
Instapot. Instapot made too good of a product, most people buy one and its good for years. That’s good for consumers but terrible for investors. The company that bought them out and took them public saddled them with a ton of debt from other sectors and now they’re bankrupt.
Diamond Sports is suing Sinclair for doing the same, minus the “good product” part.
Sinclair bought up the Fox RSNs a few years back, renaming the company as Diamond Sports and the channels as Bally Sports. Not too long afterwards, they went bankrupt. Diamond is claiming that Sinclair has saddled them with massive debts and extraordinarily high management fees. Sinclair also kept the funds from the sponsorship agreement with Bally.
The lawsuit accuses Sinclair of receiving about $1.5 billion as a result of alleged misconduct, including fraudulent transfers of assets, unlawful distributions and payments, breaches of contracts, unjust enrichment and breaches of fiduciary duties.
“Diamond Sports Group is seeking to vindicate its rights and protect the value of the Diamond bankruptcy estate, including by recovering value from Sinclair Broadcast Group that was improperly transferred from Diamond prior to its filing for bankruptcy in March 2023,” a spokesperson for Diamond said in a statement.
I don’t know if it is quite as simple as that. Most recently the bank failures were because those banks got upside down on bond holdings due to rate increases. If everyone chilled out and took their money out in appropriate time, then the bank would have had all the money. They just couldn’t get all the money immediately due to the duration of their bond holdings.
My bank wanted my to pay to have an account. I asked why and the answer was some bullshit about having access to their expertise on growing wealth. I told them, I would be growing wealth more quickly if I didn’t have to pay monthly fees, canceled my account and took my money to a bank that doesn’t charge for a basic money dump account.
It’s ridiculous, banks make money by investing the trusted money of their customers. Why would I need to pay them in order to let them make money. They should pay me.
Car dealerships. They are awful on purpose. In many places car manufacturers are not legally allowed to sell their cars directly to customers, in order to create was is essentially legally mandated car dealerships, which all suck.
My younger coworker was just super stoaked that he only paid $3000 over MSRP for his new car. They gave him a year of oil changes and undercoat for free though!
Everything I’ve read said it had very little to do with concern for the consumer. As I understand it, car dealerships lobbied for these laws because, accorudng to them, the manufacturers were being anti-competative and squeezing car dealers out of business. So the laws were passed to protect “small” dealers from big car manufacturers, not to protect the consumers.
But now they use that ubiquity to get higher prices through shady tactics. It needs changed again, this time in favor of the consumer.
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