Well, selfish capitalism has lifted countless people out of poverty, brought wealth that was unimaginable a hundred years ago, extended life-expectancy and so much more. Meanwhile many, if not most, atrocities at scale have been driven by some misguided sense of moral virtue. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, even Hitler were all driven by misguided values or misguided solutions driven by a derailed moralistic system. Then of course we have all the terrible stuff done in the name of religion to appease some higher power. While capitalism of course isn't perfect and causes harm at times, it's sanity impossible to commit atrocities on the scale that "doing good" will frequently do.

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talldayo 7 months ago | parent [-]

Capitalism didn't do that. The beginnings of free trade were entirely imperial, at a time when capitalism was considered a radical and unsafe belief. Globalism would follow the expansionist policy of colonial powers which created interdependent trade networks along most of the routes sailors traveled regularly. Again - this modernization all happened during a time when imperial power struggles were the only respected way to rule. Capitalism is a post-globalist policy that was only enabled by socialized, government-commissioned expeditions.

What we know today as "capitalism" isn't even a pure or strongly-defined form of it. Laissez-faire policy wasn't able to survive without government intervention, so modern capitalism settled on being a moderate form of socialist republic. You cannot have an American economy without government intervention - the diametric comparison of communist economies to "capitalist" ones is a faux-pas that even first-year political science students don't make. Both forms of government rely on both private and socialized wealth, and neither of them can righteously claim direct heritage to the colonial expansionism that made their governments possible in the first place.

The conversation today is asking what the government's role is here. In the wake of Europe's Digital Market Act, it's plainly apparent that America's entrenched lobbyists have been hemming up serious antitrust proceedings for decades. Capitalist countries can and do regularly disagree over how capitalism instantiates itself and controls the conditions of a free market.

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ajmurmann 7 months ago | parent [-]

The trade companies were in fact companies. They were licensed by their respective governments, but they were companies. The Dutch East India company was in fact the first stock company.

However, that's not what I am referring to when I am saying capitalism lifted people out of poverty. We don't have to go that far back. Simply look at any chart of life expectancy, infant mortality or any other indicator of quality of life during Soviet times and after. It starts going up after they got rid of communism. Same in China after it opened itself to market forces and now that Xi is messing with it they growth is running into issues. Every country that has made the jump from low to middle-income country has done so by initially doing cheap, low-value-add manufacturing. At that initial stage everyone is whining about "exploitation" but subsistence farmers are happy to take the factory jobs and over time they wages rise and if the government doe sit right, their kids get better education and eventually the country becomes high-income. Take a look at the Asian tiger states for more recent examples of this. (the big exception are of course tiny tax havens or oil countries which are not reproducible or scalable.). Which country is seeing the biggest growth in Africa? Botswana which took the approach of liberalizing its economy.

Of course, anarcho-capitalism doesn't work either. I agree that the free market must be protected from manipulation by players in that market as well. I am also in favor of wealth-redistribution that avoids dead-weight-loss.

However, none of that changes the fact that trying to do "good" has done incredible amounts of harm directly and indirectly, especially if it involves punishing individuals or groups or trying to suppress the free market.

If an existing company sucks, start a competitor! Their suck is your opportunity

	▲	throwaway14356 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		If the goal is one thing there might be nice side effects but they are never the goal. The moment the goal can be accomplished better by getting rid of the nice things the nice things should be disposed of. For a while we had people creating nice products that also happened to make very good money. Most things arguably start out trying to make something good. Im getting a picture of a horse pulling a cart up hill. When at good height to keep moving you don't need the horse anymore?