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Are we the baddies?

(geohot.github.io)
692 points AndrewSwift | 3 comments | 06 Jul 25 05:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.619s | source
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xoralkindi ◴[06 Jul 25 08:14 UTC] No.44478794[source]▶
> Someday, people will have to realize we live in a society. What will it take?

Anarchism, socialism and communism can work perfect in a small village where everyone knows and trusts each other. But if you scale it up it does not work well because people can be corrupt. If you want to scale up to a Geo Global level that is trust-less the best way we know is to use Capitalism, but Capitalism ends up becoming more and more centralized.

Because Capitalism is inherently competitive there will always be winners and losers and these are not just businesses it's everyone in the system because capital is required to partake in the system. This competitiveness is also what leads to the lack of "morality".

What will it take?

I think you cannot have the benefits of capitalism without these side-effects.

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1. sothatsit ◴[06 Jul 25 08:50 UTC] No.44478977[source]▶
Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They just want constraints to be put on it. Higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, investing in social infrastructure, or passing laws that protect consumers don't prevent capitalism from working.

Australia has social healthcare and massive mining companies. They coexist just fine. There really is a lot of wiggle room between fully embracing socialism and going full anarcho-capitalist, and maybe the tradeoffs of shifting towards the socialism side of things are worth considering.

Although, George seems to just want to flip the table out of the belief that real reform that would impact most people positively will never get passed in a democracy. It would require too much change.

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2. xoralkindi ◴[06 Jul 25 09:01 UTC] No.44479014[source]▶
> Most people aren't looking to eliminate capitalism. They want sensible constraints to be put on it. Things like higher taxes on wealth, stricter antitrust enforcement, or investing in social infrastructure don't prevent capitalism from working.

In capitalism the capitalists end up being the government. They can choose who gets elected, the laws, they even start political parties.

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3. sothatsit ◴[06 Jul 25 09:41 UTC] No.44479215[source]▶
That's an oversimplification. Yes, wealthy individuals inevitably have more influence. But there are numerous countries whose governments regularly act against corporate interests. For example, as much as I dislike GDPR, it is a strong example of governments implementing a policy that is explicitly against corporate interests. Another example is the OECD global minimum corporate tax.

So, there are governments that oversee capitalist countries that are willing to implement policies that hurt corporate interests with the goal of helping consumers. I'd say the problem is that often these policies made with good intentions, like GDPR, end up being poorly implemented and therefore harming consumers as well as hurting corporations... but that's an entirely different problem.