AIBU to not know the point of capitalism?

[TooBigForMyBoots]

OK, so I'm not an idiot. Did politics, economics, languages and other stuff. Got a degree and everything. I've studied ideologies/religions/philosophies and lived for 50 years. Paid close attention to the news/history along the way. Somehow though, I seem to have forgotten why Capitalism is a good thing. And the actual point of it.

Back in the day, I understood it as innovation and talent being exhalted by consumer demand for the goods/services in a competitive market. Hard work achieving rewards. Demand and supply (including supply of labour) balancing out.

But it seems it is just about very rich and super rich people getting richer while those who actually work, MC/WC whatever are expected to pay. Intelligence and hard work aren't important and won't necessarily get you ahead.

Being minted and connected to politicians certainly will. Is this Capitalism in 2022? Or AIBU and missing something?

Capitalism only works when it's done fairly. Sadly the human race doesn't do fair, and the smart arse who developed trickle down has a lot to answer for. Politics and voters make it worse by looking for sound bites and quick fixes. Politics now suffers from oppositional defiance disorder, so no matter what good idea or solution is proffered, it won't be carried through till it's stripped bare and/ or watered down. It's much easier to blame and accuse than resolve complex problems. Our systems could work, we just don't have the capacity to stop, think and look for the solutions.

Capitalism only works when it's done fairly. Sadly the human race doesn't do fair

It's like when you get Socialists where Socialism fails saying "well it wasn't real Socialism" or it wasn't done properly. That's essentially Capitalism in the 21st century. And there was nothing fair about Thatcher or Reaganomics.

How did they manage to sell it that privatising essential utilities was a good thing?

Communism is my idea of pure hell. Imagine if the Socialist Worker's Party seized power tomorrow. Imagine Britain in twenty year's time. Everyone lives on vast council estates, and because we have open borders with the developing world, the UK population has rocketed to 100 million. Most of the green belt has disappeared to make way for vast new estates. And thanks to loony lefties deciding we need to "foster a sense of community," all the estates contain communal dining halls and communal TV rooms. Pure hell. In a society like that, I'd take an overdose.

I want silence, space, privacy, natural beauty and a quiet house filled with books. Ideally, the nearest neighbours would be 200 yards away, and the UK population would be 20 million instead of 60 million, while the global population would be one billion instead of eight. The only society that is bearable is one in which every individual is as free as possible to live their life in a way that suits them.

We will always have people. Smart, talented, creative, skilled, hard working people.🥰

Unless the planet is made uninhabitable by the current system.😱

Actually not true at all. The least desirable jobs are also the worst paid.
And the less intervention in the economy the less those jobs are paid. Countries with more socialist governments have better paid bin men and cleaners than countries where it's a complete free for all

I guess the “ideals” of capitalism are individual freedom, fair reward and meritocracy.
but none of these work, unless everyone starts life on a perfectly even playing field. Inter generationally it is a very highly rigged game.

Would be awful but Capitalism as it is now is awful. And the population will always grow because Capitalism demands constant growth and enough of the green belt is being flattened as it is for soulless housing estates.

Oh my! There is a lot of counterfactual points to unpack here. This whole notion of inherited wealth is way less of a problem than many think. The majority of those with wealth did not inherit it, and in fact within 2 generations 90% of families will have consumed that wealth.

Capitalism and free markets are not perfect, nor are they fair, but in essence perfect fairness and equanimity are impossible targets. We are all born on different points across different axis. Some are more intelligent, some more attractive, others taller, some born into wealth.

What Capitalism and free markets do represent are more efficiency which in turn creates more opportunities for more people. However it’s pretty clear to see we aren’t living anywhere close to an efficient system, social mobility has stalled. Corruption is expanding, and the root of this is we live under a globalist crony capitalist system. Which is a rank perversion of free market principles.

This came about because we put our social safety net at the wrong end of society namely at the top end. With the idea of banks and institutions that were “too big to fail”. Rather than guarantee the savings of citizens who had their savings in a bank that that was about to fail, we bailed out the bank. Very bad move indeed. Furthermore fiat currency since we moved off the gold standard has meant with policies like quantitative easing, the rich (who gain access to the purchasing power of the billions created) gain the full purchasing power of that currency before it passes onto the likes of us once the value has been diluted.

Unfortunately communism/socialism are not the answer, not because they are bad systems they are actually rather good. The principle of each according to their need and the each according to their ability is a perfect principle for a family or small community. These systems however work atrociously at scale. As evidenced by each and every time they have been attempted at a nation scale.

The answer in my opinion (not that it will lead to a utopian ideal mind), is to follow this pattern: we figured out it was unwise for the government to also be the military as then we get warlords and conflict, we also hit upon separation of Church and state otherwise everyone fights to operate the levers of State power to favour their religion and repress others. The next great advance in human political theory will be the separation of state and economics, as this is the precise issue of wealth leveraging untoward influence over politics that produces the sort of crony capitalism as well as undermining democracy itself.

We are still a long way from figuring this out though, probably generations in fact, but the clues are there.

The point of today's corrupted version seems to be to enrich the already rich even more, and to have questions = politics of envy.

The 'point' of capitalism is that it is the only system that incentivises people to work and create value. It also theoretically ensures efficiency and matches supply to demand through market forces.

In my opinion our interpretation of capitalism falls over not because of any fundamental theoretical problem with capitalism but because of a combination of 2 factors, 1: Allowing housing to be used as an investment vehicle, and 2: inheritance.

Eh? Starting salaries for oil rig workers are 20,000 and for binmen 17,000. That's below the UK median and comparable to more pleasant unskilled alternatives such as postmen or supermarket work.
And binmen in Cuba are relatively well off compared to others in society. For a start all binmen in Cuba get free health care and their children get free education including university. Binmen in the US don't. Anyway Cuba is an extreme example as a communist state that has been under sanctions for decades.
Binmen in Europe where there is state intervention are well off enough to live a comparable life to other workers. In countries without minimum wage rules and employment rights such as in developing countries people doing those kind of jobs stay dirt poor while the middle classes earn many multiples of their salary.

I like capitalism. I see it as living in a society that has the freedom to make money and spend it as I / they choose.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Nationalise? Did you mean privatise?

...we put our safety net at the wrong end of society, namely at the top end.

I agree @Dervel. PPs have talked about a safety net at the bottom to ensure people don't starve, but the middle and working classes function as the massive, spongey safety net for those at the top.😕

It has also enabled you to make this comment on social media.

But this highlights the best problem with communism.

Given that many countries over the last 100 years tried to implement communism you would have to concede that it's not capable of implementation. Any social system has got to work in the real world. In the case of communism it's meant genocides, prison camps, forced indoctrination, purges and dictatorship. We have got well beyond sufficient evidence to say that trying communism simply hasn't worked and should not be tried again.

Compare it to free market liberalism / capitalism / call it what it will. It's pragmatic, malleable, and doesn't really encourage sterile arguments about what the 'perfect' society should look like.

Capitalism doesn't lend itself to totalitarianism. Which is why we should all be very suspicious of anyone who borrows from Marx's ideas in order to reform society whether economically or socially (as has been happening recently). It ends in tears.

It is odd to me that most people think there are only two options for organising economies and society - Capitalism or Socialism. After all these years has no one come up with any other systems?

So you know for a fact that Mumsnet would only have been possible under a capitalist system, this despite the fact that the communist Soviet Union was the first country to launch a satellite or send a man into space?

Plenty of world shattering inventions and ideas came from systems other than capitalism you know.

Nobody can really tell me how the industrial revolution made anybody happier. Marx and Engels are great to read on all of this if you can find a non-tedious translation and Orwells essays alongside Road to Wigan Pier.

The whole capitalist setup relies on there being a whole heap of very poor exploited people to feed a machine which is ruining the environment to get a few people more money than they ever need.

Everybody knows this but will pretend to not know about social democracy or mixed economies so we get the 'WOULD YOU RATHER WE HAVE COMMUNISM!!!!!?' Shite.

Good read on this is The Finance curse by Nicholas Shaxson.

It explains very well how the current version of capitalism is a highly finance serving one, especially in the UK.

Did I just read somebody non ironically claiming trickle down economics is actually a thing?

Yeah, to be honest, I think a historical comparison of the West v the Warsaw Pact countries completely bears this out.

The latter were technologically falling way behind and what innovations they did achieve came at enormous human cost.

I will give the USSR credit for clearing up Chernobyl. They worked like heroes, and that should be acknowledged much more. But the fact remains that it happened because the Soviets just weren't as good at designing and building stuff.