Notices by Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷 (truthsandwich@qoto.org), page 2

@lxo

Capitalism is working right now. It’s working better in places where it’s better regulated, worse in places that claim to be socialist.

We’ve had centuries of history showing that socialist never works. Not once. Not even a little. Not even for a little bit. Never.

We are way past the point where you can ask me to take seriously the claim that, unlike all the other times, this time will be different.

@lxo

Because economics is the softest of sciences and is full of crap. Whole sections of the field are just politics in disguise.

@lxo

“Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.”

@lxo

Again, this is literally not any part of capitalism. It exists only in Marxist criticism of capitalism.

@lxo

There are no alternatives. I keep explaining this and you keep avoiding the inevitable fact.

What you peddle is discredited. It has never worked, will never work.

And all this does it get in the way of more serious people who are busy working to make capitalism work for us. Demanding the impossible impedes the actual.

@lxo

Yes, yes, that’s Marx’s claim, but it’s nonsense. Capitalism does not, in fact, require infinite growth or whatever.

This is a lie. A boring, much-refuted lie.

@lxo

There are countries today which are socialist. Why are they all failures?

@lxo

There is no unregulated capitalism. Capitalism can’t exist without the regulations that make it possible.

There are people who believe in minimally regulating capitalism – that’s laissez-faire market fundamentalism – but practice has shown that this can’t work, and even theory reveals this.

There are specific criteria required for a market to do its job. To the extent that a real market approximates this ideal, it works. But without proper regulation, it quickly deviates from this goal and becomes mired in collusion.

I find your criticism of capitalism entirely unconvincing, because the response to any examples of capitalism having bad consequences is to replace it with better capitalism.

There is no alternative. There are no successful cases of socialism, where the initial command economy turns into a worker-coop paradise. They either fail, switch to a bad form of capitalism, or both.

I’m going to keep repeating this while ignoring every distraction about “techno-feudalism” or other such nonsense, because it is dishonest to criticize capitalism for traits you cannot improve upon.

@lxo

It’s a feature of initial socialist governments, because nobody knows how to make an economic system that’s based directly on the workers. We mostly imagine it in terms of coops, but there’s a reason why those don’t predominate.

You’re suggesting some form of anarcho-communism, which has never worked at any level, not even on the small scale. And, of course, you’re trying to explain this away with conspiracy theories about the powers-that-be allowing it.

As I pointed out in that blog post, if your desired system is so feeble that it can’t outcompete the previous one, what chance does it have?

You can’t say, “What I propose would work just fine, so long as none of the alternatives were allowed”. That’s admitting it can’t work.

@lxo

Seriously? Your IP was banned?

I have not banned any IP’s at all. Try a VPN, please.

@lxo

This is the Communist Gish Gallop.

1. Norway is a socialist success!

2. Ok, Norway’s not socialist, but socialism has never been tried.

3. Fine, it was tried in Cuba and failed, but that doesn’t count because the capitalist nations didn’t help communism succeed.

I addressed this in that blog post you didn’t read, where I included the cartoon at the bottom of this toot. Read the post for more.

Anyhow, it turns out that the answer to regulating international corporations is to control what they do on your soil. If they want to make money in your country, they have to follow your rules, and those rules can extend to other countries.

For example, America can reject imports that come from places with poor labor practice and bad pollution.

@lxo

Norway isn’t competition to capitalism, it’s capitalism done better than in some other places. The competition is Cuba.

Social programs are not “elements of socialism”. They’re elements of regulated capitalism. The point of regulation is to align the goals of private industry with societal goals. One way to do this is to tax them and use this money to create a social safety net.

America does it, too, just not as well, and there are specific reasons for this. I have another blog post about that, but the short version is that America is not a monoculture.

Marx claimed socialism was a transitional state towards communism, but nobody has ever transitioned. That’s why the USSR was run by the Communist Party but the country’s name identified it as socialist.

As I pointed out in that blog post, Marx never offered a recipe for communism, he merely described how it might be if anyone ever made it. Nobody has, nobody ever will.

So we need to compare apples to apples: actual capitalism vs. actual socialism. There is no actual communism, so it’s not in the running.

We could talk about how easy it is for nations to regulate international organizations, but it’s pointless because any such criticism ignores the alternative.

@lxo

It translates that word to “inhumanity”, which sounds about right.

@lxo

This is radically out of touch with reality.

You brought up the example of Norway as a success story for socialism, but got quiet about it as soon as I pointed out that it’s capitalist. Capitalism, when regulated as it is under Nordic social democracy, works pretty well. It works somewhat less well in America, but it at least works.

In contrast, there are zero examples of socialism working. No socialist nation has ever come close to this supposed “radical democracy of a worker-controlled economy”, so by their own measure, they are failures. There is no reason to believe that this goal is achievable.

It’s not even close. Capitalism, when poorly regulated, yields bad results. But even these are better than the best that socialism has ever achieved. And there’s no reason at all why we should allow capitalism to be poorly-regulated.

The example you brought up is in my favor: it shows the American government regulating Amazon.

I wrote a blog post about the fact that socialism has never worked: https://truth-sandwich.com/2023/07/05/real-red-magic/

@lxo

Google Translate is magic.

@lxo

(Your English is better than my Portuguese, so we’re switching.)

As I pointed out, consumers do have leverage under capitalism, due to competition. If one company chooses to raise prices or reduce production, others can swoop in to take advantage of this, and will be rewarded by the market for doing so. They can undercut the overpriced or fulfill underserved markets.

This happens all the time. A core goal of government is to enable this by preventing collusion. Capitalism is not perfectly self-regulating and laissez-faire capitalism cannot work, even in theory. But well-regulated capitalism can and does work; you brought up the example of Norway.

Under a command economy, all this is impossible because there is no competition. There can’t be: all means of production were confiscated by the state. If the state does not want to produce something, it will not be produced. If you don’t like it, sucks to be you because you have no power.

A single-party communist government is authoritarian. Your vote doesn’t matter. You can’t get the government to care about your needs.

In terms of human rights, Cuba is a grand failure. In terms of medical care, it is not one bit better than first-world nations with UHC systems. We don’t need to give up basic human rights just to get medicine.

@lxo

Não exatamente. Uma economia comandada não se parece em nada com uma economia capitalista. Todas as decisões são tomadas centralmente e não há feedback corretivo que recompense ou puna essas decisões.

Como resultado, você recebe muitos anúncios do tipo “Por demanda popular, não haverá comida disponível esta semana”.

É claro que, embora digam que é por exigência popular, na verdade é por decisão unilateral da burocracia, não da população.

Este sistema é surpreendentemente indiferente ao que as pessoas desejam; pelo menos o capitalismo dá aos consumidores alguma vantagem.

De qualquer forma, a Noruega não é socialista! Eles funcionam com base em um capitalismo bem regulamentado. Cuba é socialista e é um inferno.

@lxo

Não, começa com uma economia comandada, que é o estado que tenta tomar diretamente todas as decisões refinadas sobre o que produzir e onde. Isto é tecnicamente inviável, por isso entra em colapso rapidamente.

O objectivo do capitalismo é que a decisão sobre onde investir e produzir seja distribuída, sendo aqueles que tomam as melhores decisões recompensados pelos retornos.

Uma economia comandada não se qualifica como comunismo, mas pelo menos é distinta do capitalismo. Em contraste, o capitalismo de estado pelo qual a economia comandada é substituída é um tipo de capitalismo, mas não um bom tipo.

Sob o capitalismo de Estado, as condições para os trabalhadores são terríveis, o nível de vida é baixo e a poluição é galopante. Como o governo consiste num único partido comunista, também há autoritarismo e falta de direitos humanos e civis. É por isso que chamo isso de o pior dos dois mundos.

@lxo

Este é o padrão histórico padrão do comunismo. Primeiro, assume o controle de toda a indústria e estabelece uma economia de comando. Quando isso invariavelmente falha, muda para o capitalismo de Estado. Em nenhum momento proporciona o paraíso dos trabalhadores que Marx prometeu, porque isso é impossível.

@nadanovonofront

Como sempre, isso não tem nada a ver com capitalismo.