this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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That might be your framing of capitalism, but I'd argue it's one that takes into account the reality of greed and tries to harness it to run the system.
Government actors - kind of what I think of as a common alternative to capitalism - also act shady and like to hide who they are for many reasons not related to money but instead to power. They have just as much incentive, driven by a potentially similar base human desire, that are orthogonal at best to capitalism if not it's opposite. I suppose you can argue that non capitalist governments, or governments in non capitalist or capitalist societies do not have shady politicians, but that seems like a very difficult argument to make.
Of course I'm not saying greed and shadyness don't exist elsewhere, but that's ostensibly the purpose of governance is to try to create a system where that isn't happening, as much as you can try.
And if you really want to ignore how out of control the greed has gotten because of that, you do you, man. We're literally at a point where every major corporation has already fully captured the market, so to make any new lines of profit they're just finding ways to squeeze pennies out of consumers instead offering anything compelling. It's just nickel and diming us to death.
So yeah, it worked out fucking shitty and my framing is exactly because of the lived reality of fucking millions. Please stop acting like our lived reality is just a "framing."
No, it's our suffering under the thumb of capital. We suffer under it every day, motherfucker.
Yes, capitalism is shitty. I will not say it's a good system, just that it seems to be the least bad a large scale society has managed to implement. Large attempts to explicitly be anti-capitalist didn't work out better than current day late stage capitalism by any metric I'm aware of.
But all of that is irrelevant to the main point that saying there cannot be scammers because capitalism inherently makes all participants scammers is just incorrect.
Jesus, I hate these arguments so much.
The planet is dying, majority of people are hungry, and only the lucky few are living their own utopia, while the rest gets fucked.
And no, the 'current system' didn't help people out of poverty, instead it robbed every developing nations of their future. And everyone else, too.
I get that you said 'we got nothing better to happen', but why? US won the second war and pushed everyone to suck its dick. So like yeah, capitalism for everyone?
You're not engaging with my actual argument that I know plenty of Capitalists who I would not classify as "scammers". The whole thing that started this was someone claiming that anyone who buys into capitalism is inherently a scammer. Clearly there's a difference between a con-artist and a regular employee at a company. There's an obvious difference between a scammer and a self employed person. Right there are 2 pretty hard to argue examples that people who buy into capitalism aren't inherently scamming anyone.
No, no no no.
Employees are not capitalist, they are the victims and prisoners, but not 'proud capitalists'. They got 0 choice in the matter and can't escape it for their lives.
Just no.
Self-employed is also a very icky subject specially in current gig economy boom. Ask anyone participating in Amazon, Uber, Wolt etc how great it is to be self-employed. You might also be surprised.
We (as a society) like to pretend everything is going great, but even the on-the-surface rich people are on the verge of bankrupcy. And these are the top 10%. The 90% is just done, they will never own anything.
So the west (your employees and self-employed people) got scammed hard, the rest got walked over, and robbed for everything. That's capitalism.
Only the richest feel great, those who don't have to work every day for the fear of losing their roof and meals. But everyone else got scammed. And even the rich will find out, that you can't eat money.
You seem to be using a different definition of capitalist than I am familiar with. Maybe to you capitalist == con artist, which is an interesting definition but not one I've heard before.
Capitalist - someone who believes capital is the only measure of wealth and power. Also that capital is more important than people.