The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism

By the government providing those services.

Those services may be competing with private concerns, and maybe those private concerns outcompete the social-run enterprises; I don't remember a single time someone saying 'I assure you' have I ever felt assured. How are these small local chains going to outcompete a locally-run (not government-run, but government-assisted) concern that has network effects and buying power.

And, in any case, it doesn't need to be run for a profit. It just needs to cater to the needs of the people.

Whether we go extra-legal or these big companies just give up their power, I don't know and don't care too much. If you think it would break our legal system to hold these gigantic companies to account, then yeah, it's going to be bloodshed on at least 10x the scale. What you're saying is that the legal appetite for such a thing isn't there, and you may be right, but neither is the political attitude for these solutions. I can't change the legal nor political appetite for these solutions, I can only offer the solutions. As to whether the people will trust a government that broke it's corporations in order to ensure the people had their needs met, yeah, I think they'll be okay with the law being broken, when the law today is a product of these corporations lobbying.

'No longer have the legal procedures'

Just because we have to enact new law in order to nationalise these corporations doesn't break the institution of the law.

For sure, but it needs to be sustainable, not environmentally, but economically. The US post office, despite it's monopoly, operates at an insane deficit each year and depends on billions in subsidies to stay in business - which is the taxpayers first, then the printing press, which boosts inflation.

There is also a bunch of practical matters here that Im not going to get into but if some unauthorized, non publicly supported entity somehow gets to decide which company gets to be nationalized, you'd most certainly destroy any domestic and foreign investment there. Like, British cola was nationalized after ww2 but the inefficiency and lack of investment caused it to fail whcih led to it being privatized later. The same thing would likely happen again, but maybe this time it will all work out!

Again, its like this...

...govt run busineeses don't outperform the private biz

...profits don't matter as long as the service is able to be provided (which is everything) and the profits is the opportunity to redisperse - in short, that's the whole enchilada here to success and it's what we are correctly leading into.

You're arguing with good intentions with ideas that would help most people. But again, the answers to this magic land of prosperity is going to be found in michael parenti youtube videos and elementary communist takes. But as of now, your suggestions, as you admit, don't get public approval (for good reason) and seem to fail under the basic laws of economic supply and demand, the legal measures, all on a whim that it might work despite it really never working in the past for reasons that we now know.

Usually in the UK it was private companies whining they couldn't compete with socialised ones. And the public had a very high approval rating for the BBC, the Post Office, The NHS etc

That was before we let the private sector in. They have generally failed spectacularly. Even the ones that are monopolies like water are an epic diasaster The public even want British Rail back.

But it's all a canard imo. Capitalism as we have known it had strengths as well as weaknesses but that phase is over. Like all the previous ages it's not an option for the future.

I think the role of AI makes the strong case against capitalism and one for socialism. I mean it slowly eats away at the labor needs and any model focused on labor extraction is going to become increasingly unsustainable. Then inequality gets worse because more of the money is funneled to the AI technology increasing the demand for redistribution.

Wait, why the "even"? It's exactly the true monopolies that you shouldn't expect to improve with privatization while the rest does.

The private sectors works structurally better because the profit motive in competition drives improvement in quality, given if you don't improve you lose customers and ultimately your invested capital. So you fire bad employees, select for good ones and not necessarily relatives or political friends and so on (or if you do you lose to those that don't).

But with actual monopolies that disappears

It makes a stronger case for redistribution not for socialism. You still want different companies competing with each other for profits, and not gargantuan public companies, offering products and services in all sectors.

But if a growing portion of the population cannot have any income because their work is entirely worthless as machines can do everything they can do better than them, that's when redistribution makes more sense.

It doesn't change the model but it's like half or more the population became disabled in some sense.

That is, if the trajectory is as described by some people, and only when it happens, we are currently very far from it and It might never happen.

It's simply untrue that publicly owned companies didn't innovate well verses privately owned ones. It's even worse to privatise efective monopolies

This is where I'm coming from. It's not just AI. Robotics, quantum computing, 3d printing (I think that is underated as job value destroying revolutionary tech), neural implants etc etc are all emerging fast.

I dont think a redistribution model will cut it. We could go into why but it concludes with ownership being the key issue. In a world where there is increasing abundance but we lack the ability to exchange labour for increased wealth then we need to share the ownership. The alternative is going to be to lose democracy. Either way democratic capitalism as we have known is collasing as it's runs out of fuel (my prosaic attempt to compare to a star burning through it's hydrogen).

There are countries where 30% + of the population doesn't work yet it gets money from the state and consumes. They are called retirees under public pension systems.

Working age people with disability are also a record high as a % of the working age population and growing, in many first world countries.

Why would anything meaningful be different if the % of people taking IRS or equivalent checks grew even more? it already works that way structurally in our societies for ever-growing percentages of the population.

It gets worse. Maybe 30% is sustainable when they're mostly old with very different expectations to young people starting out.

We're just at the begining of the automation era and it's not exactly going well. People are still desperately grasping on to the denial that new jobs will somehow keep pace with AI/etc that will do what we can.

You may approve of how things are going but from where I'm coming the rise of the far right etc is indicative of what is going to happen if we dont get ahead of the capitalist death throws.

You really think 33y old live a better life working in slaughter houses or as waiters today vs getting the same or higher amount of real resources available from government? did you ever read what low-skill, menial job workers who got 100% of their salary in covid relief thought at the time? for the vast majority of them it was the best thing that ever happened to them yet.

So that portion of the demographics , i am confident we can say would dramatically improve their life vs today. Like, DRAMATICALLY, like it's hard to think anything else realistic could ever come close to make their lives better than to stop working those disgusting jobs they hate (or maybe even 2 of them) and still have enough real resources to live decently.

Keep in mind we are talking a massive, historically unprecedented and rapid increase in overall productivity (that's when growing numbers of people will have no way to contribute to production), so giving them more than what we gave them under covid would cost a far smaller fraction of overall gdp than what workers covid relief costed in the USA.

Now, the people who actually find pleasure, meaning, sense in their jobs, what about them? well if we reach a point only 5-10% of the working age population has any use for production, we are talking what, 10x, 20x, 50x the current per capita gdp? you sure people would be sad and without meaning if they could live a life that now costs 200k/year, without ever working a single day of their life anymore?

Or is the fear that they will be low status as the ex-menial worker was and that would create problems?

Maybe it's because i am an italian but i really never bought the idea about your job being the most important source of meaning in your life, for the vast majority of people. Here the vast majority of people start thinking about retirement 10-15 years after they are in a job path. And their happiest years (as per surveys) are those immediatly following retirement, when they are still healthy enough to enjoy life and don't have to work anymore.

The raise of the far right is mostly predicated on the obscene violent invasion of low skilled , criminally propense criminals, in the EU. That's proven by denmark, where the left became as strict about immigration as the far right is, the far right evaporated.

That's basically it, everyone knows it, yet the pro-immigrationist, multi-cultural members of the elite have too much at stake on that to pivot completly and entirely and credibly (yet?).

They went allin on a disastrous path without ever having the will of the people on their side and they aren't willing to admit they made the worst policy mistake in generations.

Again i am talking europe here not the USA, where the issue looks similar but instead is completly and utterly different.

You yourself chezlaw are talking about how soon enough a growing amount of workers is going to be useless for production, how the hell is that compatible with ANY immigration that isn't of exceptional quality !!!!

ESPECIALLY if you believe jobs will become scarcer soon enough the literal last thing that makes sense to do is to import what will soon be more mouths to feed and keep calm to avoid social unrest.

So i will only believe "doomers" like you if they become exceptionally strict on immigration, like completly removing the possibility for any foreigner who doesn't earn a lot more than median wage to ever get a residence permit. And to start kicking out those who are already in. Exactly to prepare to the soon-to-come job scarcity.

I'm not a doomer

The future wil be awesome if we make it - I think we probably will. Even so change can be very painful and we could try to avoid the worst of it

well, job-doomer, you are fairly convinced many/most jobs will evaporate soon.

if you are, how are you not advocating from stopping all immigration right now?

I dont worship jobs.

The same thing ending jobs is bringing abundance. Immigration isn't the problem, ownership of the wealth is. I advocate for starting to tackle that right now.

I can. I do.

If you mean that the far right is in the ascendency at the moment then I have to agree

I mean that no matter what the "far right" does, you aren't going to get wealth more distributed and taxed and oppressed than it already is in europe. If anything, it will be less so, now that europe needs to stand on its own leg because it feels american left it to it's own destiny.

You see the conversation right now, it's all about europe trying to become a destination for foreign investment, to open trade up even more and so on. You think that's conducive to even more taxes on wealth? even more redistribution?

Normal, median centrists already admit that europe if anything regulates, taxes, and redistributes too much. That because of that growth is stagnant, and the most important companies in the world invest elsewhere.

If the far right is kept back in check it won't be by radical leftist redistributionist. You see what happens in Germany, is the normal center-right that is the check to the far right. In denmark it's the normal, technocratic centerleft that keeps corporate taxation at 22% , and allows 108% of R&D to be deducted from income, that does.

Currently we agree is that the (far) right is in the ascendency. It's definite;ly going very badly imo

A very bad reason to give up.

I want to point you to left-of-center governments that didn't redistribute wealth, to clarify that there is 0 scope for that kind of approach in europe, and that doesn't depend on the right or far right.

It's because supermajorities of people know it just backfires, kinda horribly. Especially if you are a small country doing it (that includes the UK).

I can list a lot of examples, but i would limit it to a few.

Portugal was used as a beacon of hope by leftists for a while as an example of a succesful turnaround in public finances without austerity, and an example of good governance by the left. It never introduced a wealth tax. Property taxes for real estate do increase if you own more (capped at 1%) but there is no taxation on net wealth otherwise. Corporate income tax rate is 21%. They are cutting it to 20% this year.

Denmark i already told you, 22%, wealth tax abolished in the 90s.

sweden tried a significant inheritance tax, lost revenue because rich people moved out (including IKEA founder), abolished it admitting it doesn't raise revenue on net.

Now the USA are huge, and keep taxing people even if they move overseas, so it MIGHT be different for them, but for europe? what i want you to understand is that even leftists dropped the idea that taxing wealth makes sense.

We agree. The so called left has been awful for decades. Mostly center right in reality. The electoral strategy of being not quite as bad was as successful as it is disasterous

The (far) right are the beneficeries

Another area where we agree a bit is on redistribution. I'm very much in favour but we have to recognsie that prising wealth from the very rich/powerful is not going to cut it.

That's why we need ownership as the core of the solution rather than relying on redistribution.

Colorado became the 34th state to start offering socialist residential property insurance.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/insuranc...

Fair Plan:

Many states provide last-resort FAIR plan insurance for high-risk homes and homeowners.

High-risk homes are often located in areas prone to frequent natural disasters.

FAIR plan insurance typically costs more than traditional home insurance.

FAIR plan insurance generally supplies less coverage than traditional home insurance.

I started this thread just in time to watch Trump speed dial it into existence.