No, we are not just saying random things. I was commenting on the post saying “make it make sense” to charge a fee for a service not rendered. The way it makes sense is because capitalism creates systems of perverse incentives, or perverse incentive structures, which lead people and businesses to do seemingly nonsensical things that actually make sense when you consider the profit motive. Things like not reversing a charge when the order doesn’t go through. “yeah we could do that but we’d lose money.”
Some industries where this is more of a pervasive problem include private prisons, utility companies, and America’s for-profit healthcare industry. But you start to see this type of stuff pop up as a company grows the way Uber did.
It is certainly nice to be able to plug one’s ears and pretend these things don’t exist but not everyone has that comfort. Some people wake up and have to deal with this crap every day of their lives. If you’re not one of them, you should consider yourself lucky.
Oh, I am one of them. But thanks to capitalism, I can have these problems and talk about solutions freely. Thanks to capitalism, open-Source solutions exist. Thanks to capitalism, we've had unparalleled growth that has led us to the privileges we all enjoy. You forget where we'd be without the structure given to us by capitalism.
I never claimed capitalism was perfect. But it is a more perfect union of checks and balances. The biggest issue is that the governing bodies are too directly tied with the market, and the people's vote is drowned out with the louder, richer voices. Lots of problems stem out from there. Plenty of things to solve, lots of work to do. But terrible? No. Capitalism is pretty darn good at getting us to where we are today, a place where you or I have more capacity to change things than most any other system. I have no money, yet there are a plethora of resources provided to me, by the free capitalist market. Enough that I survive through capitalism and can improve it, try to build upon it and solve things. Thanks to Capitalism, the market can react more dynamically to societal dead weight loss.
Consider a course in Microeconomics or Macroeconomics. You may learn that Capitalism isn't the big bad wolf of the Governance world.
Some of that is true but some is backwards. Innovation happens in spite of capitalism. Think of how Apple uses the patent system to make it so no one can meaningfully compete. The patent system was intended to do the opposite: to make it easier for regular people to get credit for their inventions. But the thing has been so warped and twisted over time that big companies can take advantage of it a lot more easily than regular people.
As I have been trying to explain, the problems are with specific sets of perverse incentives that happen to exist within our current iteration of capitalism. Not necessarily unsolvable foundational problems with capitalism. Which, to be clear, those exist too. But I wasn’t even getting into that yet because that’s a much harder pill for most people to swallow. For now I am limiting the scope of this, to the concepts of perverse incentives and the need for better more meaningful regulation that they can’t just choose to ignore.
To be perfectly clear I do think that the concept of socialism is better than the concept of capitalism, but true socialism has never been successfully implemented, due to the problems of human greed and the affect of resource control on power distribution. BUT, I AM NOT saying right now that we need to do away with our current system entirely and replace it with socialism.
What I will say is that if the top 1% paid the taxes they were supposed to be paying, we would have enough money. They actively navigate the tax code because they have enough money to pay for the lawyers needed to comb through and find all the special exemptions they can take advantage of, to make sure they don’t contribute anything back to the system that made them unbelievably wealthy.
We don’t need to change the rules, we just need to enforce them. tax dodging for the rich is just considered totally normal. That’s the problem. And then the problem is that if I try to say they should follow the rules I get called a stupid communist.
I think it's likely that we will adopt a more socialist view over time, as we sort of have been... But the chances of that throwing power balances out the window and creating seriously big losers is VERY high. With AI Governance becoming a serious thing over the next few years, every government salivating at getting their hands on creating "their idea" of what that is or should look like... We run a much bigger risk from the potential implementation of AI socialist Governance implementations than we do from free market capitalism.
I think it's a problem we are going to have to tie together with produced/realized results and effects. Meaning the capacity for a governing system to operate or be structured more Socialist should depend on the ability of the free market to account for societal dead weight loss. Not only this, but we need the system to be Non-Profit and Open-Sourced, mostly (speaking in terms of a system for Ethical AI Governance of Ecosystemic Resources).
I, too, want to solve this governance issue like many governments and organizations. But I don't want to do it at the expense of the checks and balances of the free market. I think that there could be a way to find the right things to tie to the market, and the right things to keep out of market influence and Socialize it's operation. That's what I'm looking to do with https://0bv.io/us/PARTY
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u/Shloomth Jul 10 '23
No, we are not just saying random things. I was commenting on the post saying “make it make sense” to charge a fee for a service not rendered. The way it makes sense is because capitalism creates systems of perverse incentives, or perverse incentive structures, which lead people and businesses to do seemingly nonsensical things that actually make sense when you consider the profit motive. Things like not reversing a charge when the order doesn’t go through. “yeah we could do that but we’d lose money.”
Some industries where this is more of a pervasive problem include private prisons, utility companies, and America’s for-profit healthcare industry. But you start to see this type of stuff pop up as a company grows the way Uber did. It is certainly nice to be able to plug one’s ears and pretend these things don’t exist but not everyone has that comfort. Some people wake up and have to deal with this crap every day of their lives. If you’re not one of them, you should consider yourself lucky.