pro-capitalism, meh-capitalists.
Dec. 22nd, 2012 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupCapitalist is a weird word, because it can mean "pro-capitalism" or "an owner of capital". Neither communism nor feudalism have this problem, and I think it muddies up the waters quite a bit. I have no particular affinity for the owners of capital. I don't think it makes them* morally better than non-owners. Policies designed to give people with more money because they have money seem prima facia stupid to me.
What I do have an affinity for is markets. Markets are clearly neither feudalism nor communism, so we'll call them capitalist, but one of the things I like about them is their disregard for who has the capital. Centrally designed systems tend to pick a winner and stick with them, and this helps the rich get richer. Markets, in which ideas compete freely, are much more open to the latest good idea. IBM had a good idea, but it stopped, so it withered away. Markets do end up creating owners-of-capital, but I see that as a side effect of their actual point, which is to give people choices. Note that once people acquire capital, they often favor anti-market practices, like tariffs and overly restrictive licensing.
Side note: This is why privatizing government functions while retaining the monopoly is the stupidest possible plan. There's nothing magic about a private company, what I want is *competition* that lets people choose between multiple options, leading the lesser options to die or improve.
This is tangentially related to my latest book Hungry Ghosts, which is about the famine caused by China's Great Leap Forward. Without knowing much about the subject, I had assumed that the famine was caused by Communism's edict of "to each according to their needs" creating a tragedy of the commons, in which no one had an incentive to work. This is incorrect. The famine was primarily caused by the government taking all off the food. Initially people in the cities ate fine because they were given grain rations, but the government insisted that the peasants were hiding grain and thus took everything they could find. In later years the famine did spread to the city, not because the farmers were freeriding, but because many of them were dead of starvation or torture. The communists' belief that their ideological purity allowed them to improve agriculture in ways those bourgeois scientists and farmers could not did lower the crop yield, but if the crop had been good, they would have just stolen it and sold it overseas. Also, I have trouble taking seriously the idea of "according to their needs" when the government mandated abandoned children be left to starve, because it would only encourage people to abandon their children.
So ideological Communists? I'm officially allowing the argument that the Chinese were not practicing real Communism and thus don't count as a failure disproving Communism. I still think Communism is a terrible plan, but it's not the terrible plan the Chinese were following.
*As a net saver, technically I'm an owner-of-capital, although like many rich people, I don't feel rich.
What I do have an affinity for is markets. Markets are clearly neither feudalism nor communism, so we'll call them capitalist, but one of the things I like about them is their disregard for who has the capital. Centrally designed systems tend to pick a winner and stick with them, and this helps the rich get richer. Markets, in which ideas compete freely, are much more open to the latest good idea. IBM had a good idea, but it stopped, so it withered away. Markets do end up creating owners-of-capital, but I see that as a side effect of their actual point, which is to give people choices. Note that once people acquire capital, they often favor anti-market practices, like tariffs and overly restrictive licensing.
Side note: This is why privatizing government functions while retaining the monopoly is the stupidest possible plan. There's nothing magic about a private company, what I want is *competition* that lets people choose between multiple options, leading the lesser options to die or improve.
This is tangentially related to my latest book Hungry Ghosts, which is about the famine caused by China's Great Leap Forward. Without knowing much about the subject, I had assumed that the famine was caused by Communism's edict of "to each according to their needs" creating a tragedy of the commons, in which no one had an incentive to work. This is incorrect. The famine was primarily caused by the government taking all off the food. Initially people in the cities ate fine because they were given grain rations, but the government insisted that the peasants were hiding grain and thus took everything they could find. In later years the famine did spread to the city, not because the farmers were freeriding, but because many of them were dead of starvation or torture. The communists' belief that their ideological purity allowed them to improve agriculture in ways those bourgeois scientists and farmers could not did lower the crop yield, but if the crop had been good, they would have just stolen it and sold it overseas. Also, I have trouble taking seriously the idea of "according to their needs" when the government mandated abandoned children be left to starve, because it would only encourage people to abandon their children.
So ideological Communists? I'm officially allowing the argument that the Chinese were not practicing real Communism and thus don't count as a failure disproving Communism. I still think Communism is a terrible plan, but it's not the terrible plan the Chinese were following.
*As a net saver, technically I'm an owner-of-capital, although like many rich people, I don't feel rich.
