I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.

  • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    I used to believe capitalism could work if it was just done right.

    • fizzle@quokk.au
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      5 hours ago

      This is an unpopular opinion around here but greed and the desire for power are the real problems and they exist in any economic system.

      Capitalism wouldn’t be that bad if wealth was distributed equitably - heavy wealth taxes et cetera supporting socialised human policies like education, healthcare, UBI, et cetera.

        • fizzle@quokk.au
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          3 hours ago

          This is the particularly unpopular part: Capitalism is not completely without virtue.

          For example, capitalism will find the most efficient means of production.

          The “happiest” nations in the world are capitalist with sococialised health and education.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            2 hours ago

            That is untrue. Capitalism will find the most profitable means of production. Profit is all that matters. Capitalism will happily abandon efficiency, safety, environmental protection, and happiness in general, all in the pursuit of more profit.

            If you don’t believe me, truly ask yourself whether you think Comcast is the most efficient ISP possible.

    • yermaw@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      I still believe that, but we also have to accept that it never actually will.

      It could work in a vacuum with a perfectly spherical populace, for instance.

      • Paragone@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        It absolutely can work, so long as it isn’t allowed to run the show: harnessed, constrained, controlled capitalism, with no concentration-of-wealth-archy machiavellianism, can work.

        But to do that, then you have to make the pay-ladder be proportionate to difficulty-to-replace, & not a means of “legal” embezzling, you have to make accounting unbreakable ( blockchain, ALL entries getting into an Algorand-type blockchain that all businesses in the economy & the gov’t all have servers participating in ), you have to make Human Capital Investment ( NOT consumable-human-resources: wrong model/paradigm! ) work properly, etc, etc, etc.

        A Japanese keiretsu is an example of a semi-autonomous-economy which proves that capitalism can work ( capitalism works within the keiretsu ), & Toyota is a vertical-keiretsu ( profit-efficient ) & Panasonic, Sony, etc, are horizontal-keiretsu ( marketsaturation efficient ).

        Another problem is that market-speculators, like those “candlesticks market-timing” people, enforce market-volatility, as a means of harvesting money from others, & that is an antipattern.

        Worker-owned-business is the bedrock of it, too…

        which unions & political-ideologues hate…

        Put ownership, accountability, responsibility, & authority, all unitary!

        Anyways, there are ways of making it work, but I think it’s just too … “Japanese” ( in terms of how thorough the management-paradigm has to be, to even understand the system ) … for any Western-mind to think of it properly.

        No matter: soon a not-for-profit will begin demonstrating how this all works, later this year, I think…

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