I really don't understand how people can simultaneously believe that governments are corrupt and the private sector would support the public's interests. Guess who is corrupting government: the private sector who only support their own interests.
I know this is difficult to understand how it works, but the beauty of the free market is everyone benefits while selfishly working for their own self-interest.
Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.
> I know this is difficult to understand how it works
Are we going to pretend that free market capitalism and its magical benefits haven't been pounded into all of our heads from every angle from the moment we were being taught anything about how the world works? It's not difficult to understand, it's difficult to see in a world where companies commit crimes and collapse in mountains of debt, but no one goes to jail. Not a situation that Adam Smith would approve of.
The reason the benefits capitalism are spread out to any degree is because there are riots when they aren't, so you need to at least reward the people responsible for putting those riots down through violence, technology, and bureaucracy. Hence, the middle class.
> Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.
"Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine. Even capitalists are socialist amongst themselves when it comes to keeping out competition.
Are you really going to pretend -- to this audience -- you haven't enjoyed the (yes) magical benefits of profit-seeking innovation?
Progressivism conquered America a century ago. Antitrust law. Central bank. Income tax. Universal suffrage. Old age pensions. Public education, research grants. National parks. Interstate highways. Welfare, public housing. Equal opportunity employment. Disaster relief. Socialized medicine for the poor and elderly. Workplace safety. Automobile safety and emissions standards. Space shuttle.
Recently, a flirtation with Universal Basic Income.
People are (hopefully) concerned with growing inequality, wealth centralising into small pockets of society, the lawlessness in which multinational corporate entities operate, the damage being caused to the environment by heavily promoted consumerism..
> Are we going to pretend that free market capitalism and its magical benefits haven't been pounded into all of our heads from every angle from the moment we were being taught anything about how the world works?
My dad was a professor of finance in a midwestern college. He'd have students coming up to him saying "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"
> "Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine.
Both socialism and free markets require cooperation. The difference is that socialism requires forcible cooperation, and in free markets the cooperation is voluntary.
The driving force between market capitalism isn't selfishness Walter. It's competition.
People innately like to compete and will do so over the dumbest things, like who can get the little puck in the net with sticks the most, or who can correctly guess the sum of a pair of dice.
Market capitalism coopts this most basic of human instincts,not greed, and selfish greed is actually the root of many failures of capitalism endeavors, and human endeavors in general.
Because a socialist system is ran by the public. It is beholden to the public as its shareholders. Mcdonalds needs to taste tasty, but only to get you hooked enough to choose mcdonalds over other foods. You think the shareholders would rather their customers actually eat healthy which means limiting consumption of Mcdonalds? No, they are practically in the business of selling cigarettes but in the form of fats and sugars. They want you addicted. The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible.
Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation.
Those goalposts were just fine where they were, put them back and address the actual argument. Nobody was advocating for 'government run food production'.
Pleasing the customer is not always good for the customer. I'm sure nicotine addicts get a lot of pleasure from smoking a pack a day. In fact i think that is still Newport's slogan.
Plus your quip is a little bit dated honestly. The soviets had famines because they literally didn't support evolution for quite some time. They believed Lysenko and allowed him to execute his critics. Meanwhile today, look at China the past few decades when modern agricultural practices were finally well established around the world. Another 600 million people in 50 years. Huge population growth doesn't happen because of starvation.
> Pleasing the customer is not always good for the customer.
Ah, the arrogance of knowing what is best for others. (Of course, I know what's best for everyone else, too, but my arrogance stops at taking the next step of being entitled to force it on them.)
> The soviets
You can make excuses for the Soviets. But you gotta explain the starvation from every other communist country. The starvation in Jamestown when they tried communist agriculture. The starvation in the Pilgrims' first year when they tried communist food production. The failure of the Kibbutzen in Israel to feed themselves without government subsidy.
It goes on and on.
P.S. China stopped starving when the stopped collectivist agriculture.
Now for the flip side. Which was the first country to eliminate famine? The US, around 1800, with free market agriculture. Next, which free market agricultural system has suffered from a famine?
lol you misspelled "ran by corrupt authoritarian governments that don't give 2 shits about the public unless they can exploit them"
You can ding corporations... but the real world socialist examples are worse.
Corporations aren't perfect (and we don't live in pure capitalism anyways. Common sense controls exist for good reason). But they are better than socialist governments.
McDonalds is able to sell garbage food because most Americans are addicted to sugar. Your free-market evangelism is the economic equivalent of their junk food.
I enjoy a meal at McD's regularly. I just have a QP, I never buy shakes or soft drinks. The QP is healthy food.
Besides, the US under free market agriculture produced the tallest people in the world up until WW2. It's kinda hard to believe that Americans grew that tall from eating garbage.
Well, socialism isn't communism, and money still exists under socialism, so if the service center isn't doing their job, then, as you capitalists like to say, money talks.
Capitalism, like democracy, is the worst form of government, except for all the others. To believe that the US brand of capitalism can do no wrong is to be as deluded as the communists were. If the free market were perfectly efficient, there would be no such thing as conmen or MLM scams, and every consumer would be 100% informed and perfectly rational. That's ridiculous, so the government needs to step in at times, to promote a freer market than one without regulation.
Go eat at a restaurant in Times Square. They exist only because of their location, and the fact that tourists don't stay long. So their food is bad AND they don't need to try and harder because it doesn't hurt their business. They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.
My family owns a bunch of McDonalds. Success is tied to location mostly. The product is pretty meh at best. The only products that have maintained quality are fries, coffee and coke. The rest are worse by any measure.
There’s a reason why Five Guys, etc are everywhere. People who want a good burger go there.
it works like this. In a free market, you dont have to buy my services, but you will if it is better for you on the whole than not. I may consider you cattle to be exploited for profit, but you probably wont just give me your money if i try to sell you my grass offcuttings for $10k. If i somehow come up with a way to produce a great lawnmower that costs me $1 to make, and I sell it to you for $100, you would perhaps think this is a great thing, while I make out like a troll. win/win. If I offer you a shitty lawnmower for $100k, you simply decline.
Socialism would absolutely not require selfless people-it would simple require that workers control and own the companies they work in, and the knowledge that fixing other people’s problems makes everyone’s life better. Less theft, violence, better mental health, no more mass shootings, no more homeless encampments.
Imagine if that co-worker that doesn’t contribute or might even drag the team down can just quit and play PS5. Glorious.
How do I know people don’t need coercion or even pay to produce great products? Open source software. Windows is capitalism and Linux is socialism. Which do you prefer?
The politicians you vote for can regulate those companies, that is how the system is intended to work. If those politicians takes bribes to not regulate those companies, then the problem is corrupt politicians taking bribes, you don't fix that by giving those politicians more power you fix it by voting them out and voting in politicians who does what you want.
> Guess who is corrupting government
How are they corrupting the government? Is the private sector deciding who gets power in the government somehow? Sounds like your democracy doesn't work then. Giving all the power to politicians when the democracy doesn't work just leads to the same scenario as in Soviet.
Bribing the government isn't "corrupting" them, a politician who accepts bribes or tit for tat deals is already corrupt.
How about we have a national vote on what phone you get? Which car you get? Whether carrots or tomatoes get produced? What movies get produced? What clothes are produced? Which diseases get funding? What apartment you get? How many ounces of meat you get per week? What music you get to listen to?
Solution: Give more power to politicians! Lack of power corrupts, need to give them more until they stop being corrupt!
Not sure why anyone thinks that would work.