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Top-level
 @finner I think you have a very odd definition of capitalist. I'm not sure but I'm guessing in your definition somebody like Alisher Usmanov or Mikhail Fridman are also capitalists. They're not. Capitalists aspire towards a market with competition, where multiple players are forced to compete for the best price/service ratio to acquire and retain customers. Say a Jeff Bezos actively uses anti-market practices with Amazon that run counter to the foundations of capitalism. 11 comments
@finner Wanting to be rich and using that power to get richer and dominate society is not really related to the economic system. Look at Chavez, Xi Jinping, Putin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, they all had/have similar goals of amassing wealth and power for themselves in very different economic systems. Of course Marx famously suggested social class differentiation was the result of capitalism, but there really isn't much evidence for that in history, nor on the planet today 🙂. Capitalism as an economic system is the private ownership of the means of production and relies on the extraction of surplus value from the labor of others. A capitalist is a person who, within a capitalist society, has capital and owns or controls the means of production. Any owner, controlling partner, or executive in a major corporation in the US I feel should fit the definition of a capitalist. They own capital and control the means of production. @finner No. That is not what a capitalist is. And if it were it wouldn't me limited to a capitalist economic model. You can have capital in any economic model. But a capitalist is a supporter of the capitalist economic model. A poor person can be a capitalist, and a CEO of a Fortune 500 company can be a communist just fine. Also only the first part of your definition of capitalism is correct. 'Extracting value from the labour of others', is not accurate. @finner Just as to amass wealth in a Leninist society you don't need to be a Lenenist. You don't need to be a capitalist in a capitalist society to amass wealth. You can work to be 'successful' (or at least wealthy) within a system without actually caring much for that system. Often the best way to get wealthy is actually to subvert the system, use game theory to exploit the weaknesses of the system. Both in capitalist, socialist and communist societies do people do this. @Schouten_B I'm not sure we're going to get much further in this discussion. We seem to have some differing interpretations and definitions we're going by. I'm not an economist and probably not incredibly well read I suppose, but as far as the things I have read and the way my understanding of the definitions of these things, they don't seem to be jiving with yours. @finner Yeah. You're probably right. I'd personally go with the definitions of the proponents of different systems. I.e. when I think if socialism I think of the kind of idealistic utopian system Marx envisioned. Not the nightmares than Lenin, Mao and Castro created. Similarly when I think of capitalism, I think of the idealized versions envisioned by Adam Smith or Acemoglu and Robinson. It helps understand why some people believe in one specific system above others. @finner I myself am more of a pragmatist. Whatever, experiment with stuff from different systems and come up with a Frankenstein-system that actually works. The idealized systems aren't resilient in terms of game theory (as the US, China, Russia, Cuba, etc. have shown) anyway. Europe is a lot better at that than North America generally. Probably because far fewer of us identify strongly with a specific economic system. (Maybe because of the strif around them leading up to WWII) I'm not aware of capitalism requiring that the participants in capitalism shouldn't form a monopoly or need to maintain free markets. In order for capitalism to be sustainable for a long period of time, it requires an external force, like a government, to regulate it to keep it from destroying itself. In a capitalist economic system, the point of capital is to be used to amass more capital. @finner No. It could be hard to find an economist that holds that definition of capitalism. The wiki page actually has a pretty reasonable definition. @finner (but as with socialism or communism, this all isn't set in stone.. You could come up with all kinds of weird systems that by some definition would fit the mold of capitalism, socialism or communism. But for the sake of simplicity let's define capitalism as the system that most free marker countries attempt to practice, I.e. the wikipedia definition that considers monopolies bad for capitalism 🙂) |
Gregory's Server
@finner Essential to healthy capitalism (as opposed to some for of Laissez-Faire capitalism that no country is really doing), is authorities regulating the markets, preventing monopolies, ensuring companies don't control access to markets (say through an AppStore or a PlayStore).
The worst offenders in the US in power, say someone like Musk, is completely opposed to this. You could describe them as Laissez-Faire capitalists perhaps. Not many economists in that stream though.