> Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?
That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:
1.
I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.
This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.
Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.
2.
Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.
Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.
These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.
"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.
Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.
OR you can say "PART of Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part."
It's nice that capitalism has some really efficient features. But it also has some really horrible ones.
If we're talking about functioning efficient systems, you really have to show that the bad parts of capitalism do not form an obstacle against having a functioning, efficient system.
So far in history we have only seen that the good parts of capitalism can work really well.
That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:
1.
I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.
This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.
Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.
2.
Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.
Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.
These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.
"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.
Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.