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@futurebird

Sorry, I didn’t see your toot in my notifications because I blocked sarfeo (for refusing to answer). I’ll respond now:

Yes, in fact there were various economic systems that predated capitalism, and none of them were communism, but they featured all the same flaws that are currently ascribed to capitalism.

That’s why I’m always saying that if you’re blaming capitalism for, say, greed or bigotry or environmental harm, you’re blaming the wrong thing.

The blame belongs with the root economic causes, which are universal issues, not an aspect of any single system. It’s the fault of resource scarcity combined with human nature.

So, for example, the colonialism that we’re still fighting the vestiges of happened under feudalism and mercantilism, not modern capitalism.

However, we’re not going back to any of these historical systems, and there are no viable modern alternatives to capitalism.

The USSR and China, for example, ran under a command economy and that was a huge failure.

What actually works, and what you actually find in the real world, are mixed economies, which is to say regulated capitalism.

Capitalism is terrible, but it’s better than everything else, so maybe it’s not so terrible. It’s the very best thing we’ve got for creating wealth. Of course, it needs some help with the distribution side, which is where taxation and regulation comes in.

But we’re way past the point where we can take the idea of communism seriously. It’s been tried and it’s always failed, with no sign that it will ever do anything but fail again. It never even came close to working, not even a little, not even for a little while.

If you’re curious, I wrote this blog post about the topic: https://truth-sandwich.com/2023/07/05/real-red-magic/