
Is It Time to Talk About Post-Capitalism in America? - forwardblog
https://forwardblog.substack.com/p/is-it-time-to-talk-about-post-capitalism?r=5iwv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=hackernews
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gmuslera
Change would had an opportunity to happen if by far most people could think by
themselves and not be easily manipulated. But both cognitive bias and bad
education systems (sometimes intended that way) goes against that possibility.

The system is fragile, but shaking it won't lead to an stable state (not in
the same conditions/number of participants that we are having now) but to an
unstable and/or fragile one.

And we are running out of time to make the big changes in global culture
needed to derive this into an antifragile state. The ball is already rolling
toward climate change, mass extinctions, ecosystems destruction and the world
becoming unsustainable for most of us, and we will not be able to stop it.

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RickJWagner
No, it's not time.

Before coronavirus, we had a roaring economy, record low unemployment, rising
wages, and a soaring stock market.

I think we can return to that state, let's not radically change things.
Coronavirus was a 'black swan'.

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taborj
In addition, the US economy is rebounding faster than anyone predicted,
indicating a strong foundation. Capitalism did that.

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eucryphia
Good idea, you won't be allowed to afterwards.

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sudosysgen
Hopefully that will be a short period.

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hexagone
"Millennials are the most informed..."

Millennials have least overlap with a living example of Communism. A turning
point in Orwell's life came when he visited USSR. There's no USSR for a
millennial to visit and validate his/her theories, College campus politics
doesn't challenge them enough.

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sudosysgen
Orwell was opposed to the USSR when he realized their imperialism, not when he
realized that socialism was a bad idea.

In any case, there are living examples of socialism right now. They are small
in scale, but seem to be better than capitalism. Millennial socialism is also
much closer to the socialism of George Orwell in any case, because it is much
more libertarian than that of the 1900s.

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akvadrako
Where are you talking about? Cuba, Venezuela?

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sudosysgen
Modern experiments would be Rojava, the Zapatistas, and so on.

Venezuela never got even close to socialism due to frankly stupid economic
policy, their share of private enterprise was even higher than France, and
Cuba while much better than comparable South American states is not modern,
nor an experiment.

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thinkingkong
If you find this interesting, the person you should be following is Yanis
Varouvakis.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis)

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jay_kyburz
It's not Capitalism that is failing. It's Democracy and Government. We can't
effectively identify problems and pass laws that fix them.

Our society is like a runaway train and we can try and apply the brakes here
and there, but everyday people don't have the power to say, "This is wrong,
lets do something different."

If it was just a case of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer then, yes
perhaps the problem is Capitalism, but there are a lot of other problems in
society that we seem unable to fix.

Police brutality, Medical Insurance, College Loans. Guns. The worlds on fire
and we are not moving quick enough to reduce CO2 emissions.

update: To clarify, what I was trying to say is that, if we had a functioning
Democracy, we would identify that there is a problem where some people are
very rich, and some very poor, and we would be able to make new laws that
solve the problem. (Like taxing rich people for example.)

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disparate_dan
You had me at 100% agreement until you said “mussel” :). But you hit the nail
on the head when you said “runaway train”, and no one is in control. These
problems definitely exist in other western counties, but there is something
about US society that seems to amplify the process massively, where European
counties for example seem to apply a dampening effect on the worst extremes.

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jay_kyburz
haha, sorry. I deleted that line. Now it sounds like there was some seafood
angle in my first draft.

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xnx
Capitalism seems like it could do an OK job if we priced in more externalities
like resource extraction (e.g. fee for taking oil out of the ground) and
pollution.

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sudosysgen
That would not fix the issues of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall,
exploitation, and so on. But it would be an improvement.

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xtiansimon
It's never _not been time_ to talk about post-Capitalism. (America is not a
political state like the former USSR). It's just always been a _short
discussion_.

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briefcomment
What about this alternative:

Capitalism where you can't amass more personal wealth than $100M.

The only reason I would think you would need more money than that is if you
wanted to push ideas that the population would not vote for.

I have much more faith in people closer to issues solving them with more good
faith and efficiency than unelected billionaires being effectively
philanthropic.

I would rather see more rich people relaxing with their wealth than trying to
outmaneuver every last civil liberty we have for an extra dollar. Even better
if they use their wealth to make their local community better. That way, there
are actual human interactions between those making suggestions and voters.

Makes a good environment for natural competition as well.

Would we have a worse quality of life because of this? Important question, but
my gut says no.

I'm all for civil liberties, but uber rich people can get away with weird
things because they can ignore all the "no's" and essentially bribe decision
makers.

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voisin
What if you started a company, grew it and went public and in the ensuing
years the markets pushed its value up such that your share was suddenly, and
temporarily, worth more than $100m? Are you forced to sell the excess and be
forced to pay a capital gains tax and reduce your control over your company?

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briefcomment
I think the increased competition would limit huge valuations, but maybe any
overflow could go to other employees. Beyond that though, it's hard to see
what would make the most sense. My guess is that we would have a system
different than owning stock in a random company. There's probably no reason we
need to be tied to what we currently do.

