Thread by @caitoz

The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it's hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won't solve most of the world's problems.

In fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is TOO good at turning the gears of industry; our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things. We're choking our ecosystem to death because it's profitable.

Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes "let the markets decide" will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems.

The "invisible hand of the market" gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world's problems. In reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom; it can't solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and more profits.

When capitalism proponents say "you don't understand economics", what they really mean is "you don't understand that unregulated capitalism is the best system for generating profits." But that IS understood; it's just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient.

If lack of wealth is your major problem, then free markets can be a tool to address it; that's what China is temporarily doing to keep up economically with the western forces who wish to enslave it. But it won't solve ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring for the needful.

If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it's worthless, and other systems must be looked to.

Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can't. Capitalism can't do this.

These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from "Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems." And how is that solution working out? It's a joke.

The "Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us" solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there.

Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That's why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it's why looking to "philanthropy" as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke.

You can say "But communist regimes are authoritarian blah blah" all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that capitalism has zero answers for the most important problems facing our species. This still needs to be addressed, and moaning about Mao and Stalin isn't an answer.

Don't like the iterations of socialism we've seen so far? Okay. Then find another answer, and remember we've already established that capitalism is not an answer; it cannot address the problems we've discussed here. So we need to find an actual answer that does actually work.

Relevant thread:

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1528326657500758016

Strongly agree.

https://twitter.com/jeremylieberma4/status/1597015772135845888?s=20&t=4P3wRmSGhX5N2JoResIGVw