It implies a central authority that has opinions on the wealth of private citizens (inappropriate) that also has the ability to act on it (dangerous) and that goes ahead and implements its utopian visions (has never not ended in utter catastrophe).
What practical difference is there in your life now that Musk is worth 200B versus when he had 100B or 0B? Probably your life is actually better because there is now Starlink and Tesla and you have more options.
Let's say we can push a button and grow the economy 10% in real terms, but some rich guy like Bill Gates gets his wealth not increased 10%, but 10x. Do we press it? Next time we press it, some other billionaire gets 10x-ed.
The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.
We simply don't know if a different system could produce the same, because the few attempts we had were either corrupted or actively sabotaged. I'd argue if we look at China we actually can see how something other than capitalism can improve people's lives: hundreds of millions raised out of poverty through basic planning.
Another aspect is that many of the issues with previous attempts at something other than capitalism happened without the technology we have today. This would change everything.
> The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.
Of course it would be if there were zero bad consequences from it. But every time you press that button more people starve, the planet dies faster, workers conditions deteriorate, more people go homeless and so on.
But the big issue with your entire premise is that growing the economy means we improve people's lives. That's exactly the issue with the wealth gap: it doesn't. The economy right now basically only grows for the rich, not for everyone else. It's always money being siphoned from the bottom into the top.
It's very easy to pretend that everything is alright when you are in a privileged position, but the main reason 1st world countries like the US "grow" is by exploiting the poorer countries. You get access to better living standards at the cost of child labor in another country, deforestation, workers without a living wage or all the other nastiness that we don't want to know about.
There's no free lunch. It's the same siphoning of wealth, at all levels.
Monkeys living in a cave could drastically improve their lives by banging rocks together and making simple tools. Another big improvement comes from fire. Again when the rocks are stacked into buildings. By having more rocks, and arranging them more intelligently, we can hugely improve life. This is economic growth.
Your arguments against growth fail: first you say “other systems” (they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned) can cause growth just as well as capitalism. Second you say growth is bad because the environment. Third you say that only rich people get the growth anyway. Fourth you say growth comes from siphoning wealth from the poor.
Well, I have news for you. The people who benefit most from growth are the poor. In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:
- the state left the farmer alone for five whole minutes and it turns out he managed to grow some actual food when he didn’t have to pay so many bribes, taxes, and obey 1000 regulations
- technology improved business and trade, so mom and dad can buy food now
- some guy named Bill Gates donated mosquito nets and medicine and genetically modified crops that have all the vitamins.
Your ideas are rooted in ancient, pre-growth economic models. Poor people simply aren’t a good source of wealth; otherwise why aren’t dictators who do seize their wealth from the poor indredibly rich & celebrated? Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.
> In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:
And that's great! But it's not a given, and global climate change also has a huge impact on geographies. And clearly, Mr. Beast was actually doing something when he paid for a bunch of wells to be built in Africa. The wells don't just come out from economic growth magically, unless maybe if you wait fifty years and more people die in the meantime. Mr. Beast is rich, which is why he could have wells built.
Saying that capitalism promotes economic growth may be true, and saying that economic growth lifts everyone up may be true, but the timescales and proportions don't match up to what many would consider fair, and our current model of capitalism isn't necessary for economic growth. That economic growth has benefitted them is less a boon of capitalism than of economic growth in general, so don't conflate the two. Also, should we talk about all the people in Africa and elsewhere who are employed at a pittance to make clothes, harvest crops, and sift through AI training data?
> Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.
https://scribe.rip/bc-digest/the-xerox-thieves-steve-jobs-bi...
Bill Gates (and Steve Jobs) profitting from the work of people at Xerox. Maybe not outright theft, but they're clearly not tech gods who somehow had everything planned out.
https://investinganswers.com/articles/how-did-bill-gates-bui...
Don't have a source for this right now, but Amazon has used many underhanded business practices involving driving other businesses out of town. It's also a thing Walmart was known for.
https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-fou...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
The details emerald mine stuff seem hard to discern, so take that with a grain of salt.
I'm not saying that Bezos, Musk, or Gates have done nothing useful and they're just lucky all the way. At least Bezos and Gates, I acknowledge that they did had an entrepreneurial spirit and could grasp their opportunities well. But people who have a lot of money or are in a wealthier country have an outsized proportion to people who don't, there are numerous instances of unscrupulous business practices, blah blah. To say that they are producers is right, but they aren't the pinnacle of human excellence. People who were oppressed and live in squalor, people whose inventions are taken without due credit, people who are expendable laborers. Bezos, Musk, Gates aren't merely a product of themselves and their wit. They were already placed above most due to the circumstances of society, and as they succeeded more they gained disproportionately more power to continue climbing up.
I suggest you read The Republic of Walmart [1]. Every big corporation in existence works with planned systems. Every. Single. One. That argument is a fantasy repeated by people that never truly thought/read about it.
Most people read somewhere that the USSR failed because of their planned economies, therefore it doesn't work. They had so much more going wrong that simplifying why they failed with "planned economy" is preposterous.
Not to mention capitalists conveniently forget all of the failed capitalist experiments. Perhaps because now the bigger capitalist countries benefit from exploiting those same countries.
From all the answers I've seen you give in this thread, it's clear you're very deep into the capitalist mindset. It really seems you don't even attempt to consider alternatives. You have your winner and everything is a confirmation of that. I would earnestly ask you to reconsider your position. Really read up on the subject.
There is no perfect solution, but the current one is absolutely unsustainable by definition. There is no infinite growth, and the pursuit of it has now reached the point where it only harms everyone that is not at the top. We could save the planet, we could house all the homeless, we could end famine, but we choose not to because it's not profitable. I personally can't look at that and think: that looks reasonable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
That’s right there in my premise! So what? It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot; and one or two get boosted to orbit for a generation or so.
Your arguments against Starlink are so silly I struggle to believe someone typed them into this site. Don’t you think one more internet option for most of the globe is a good thing? And yes, it directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors. It’sneven helping Ukraine defend itself against another totalitarian state right now.
None of which is relevant. It’s another internet option and therefore a good thing in and of itself. You don’t even have to like it or use it for it to make your life better.
No, it doesn't. It helps the people who are lucky enough to already have one foot in the race. But that's not remotely everyone.
> directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors.
Perhaps, although that's not really "directly". But then you're saying that we need to allow multi-billionaires in order to have things like Starlink. How about we stop ISPs from being stingy with their money and suddenly we don't need to rely on one rich person to save us from the other rich people? You seem to think that if the government takes some control/wealth out of the hands of these people, we're suddenly going to have stagnation. I don't see why it has to be all-or-nothing; we don't have to implement scary, spooky communism. You know what I think is even better than having Starlink? If we had Starlink and we didn't have exploitative, ruthless businesses that led to needing to have Starlink as it is now. It would just be the new technology that Comcast or Verizon made, without the weird "Elon Musk will save us all" fanfare.
Apart from land, Inheritance and seizing power, individual and community wealth comes from what you create and invest in