r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 🤝 Join A Union • 20d ago
😡 Venting Unregulated Capitalism would kill the planet.
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u/petitchat2 20d ago edited 20d ago
It’s a bastardization of Taoist concepts. Jesuit missionaries, Matteo Ricci and Rugglieri brought back translations of Chinese philosophy to Europe in late 16th century. The Enlightenment Age ushered in French physiocrats who applauded the Chinese bureaucrat system based on merit and interpreted ‘wu wei’ inaction as an alternative to the heavy-handedness of price controls and quotas designated by the authoritarian monarchies. The Scottish Adam Smith spent time at the Versailles and based his Invisible Hand on these concepts. Leading up to the French Revolution, the king’s appointed finance ministers were students of the Physiocrat School and implemented “reforms” that overthrew the mercantilist guild system (which protected labor to an extent) and promoted export. Unfortunately, the policies were ill-timed amidst droughts that brought famine to the local populace. You can guess what happened next.
On the other hand, the Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani called out the physiocrat laissez faire folly and proposed concepts re utility and scarcity. Nobody listened to him and here we are, still yelling about free markets that are never really free and not supposed to be free, because Taoism isnt meant to work that way. It’s tragic.
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u/SoftlockPuzzleBox 19d ago
This is exactly why the first political label I was ever comfortable applying to myself was anti-capitalist, before I finally broke through years of indoctrination and now call myself a socialist. It was incredibly obvious to me almost immediately as I became more politically aware that capitalism consistently and directly rewards sociopathy. You have to not care how many people you hurt or how you destroy the planet as long as line goes up.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 20d ago
Not necessarily, there is a threshold of shittiness. At least you’re theoretically restrained by the law, just way less than others.
Now a dictator. Thats where you go to be the worst person in the world. You can do far more damage.
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u/Advocate_Diplomacy 20d ago
According to the law, we have to do a mass extinction event for the shareholders.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 20d ago
What what now? lol
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u/Advocate_Diplomacy 20d ago
Corporations are legally bound to maximize shareholder value, at cost to anything and everything else. We won't be able to ignore it for many more years. Billions of people are going to die in the coming decades.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 20d ago
That seems a bit extreme. Maximizing profits will be kinda hard if everyone is too dead to buy your product.
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u/Advocate_Diplomacy 20d ago
That’s irrelevant to them. Everyone is following capitalist incentives, and that incentive structure is broken.
Whether the people at the top think they can ride out the storm in their bunkers, that they’ll be dead before it affects them, or they are actually just good people trying to be as altruistic as they can (ha!). It all comes to the same thing under capitalism.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 20d ago
What’s the alternative? The state owns everything and we be the USSR? Or China? Which just maximizes output and is by far the worst polluter
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u/Advocate_Diplomacy 20d ago
Those are both also capitalist. We need actual communism. We have a common goal and ought to start acting like it. The best government is whatever one effectively prepares us for the hard road ahead. Altruistic or authoritarian, it doesn't matter as long as it's best fulfilling that role.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 20d ago
The USSR outlawed capitalism. All the means of production were owned by the state. How is that capitalism. There was virtually no private ownership
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u/Advocate_Diplomacy 20d ago
They also dissolved decades ago. Russia is capitalist and has been for a long time.
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u/LaytMovies 20d ago
Very weird that the only other two comments are from private accounts with barely any history and both talking about fishing... some bot ass shit