Basically, title, here is a link to the Reddit thread for people curious: https://archive.ph/6mObB
I’m quite surprised with the neutral to positive reactions, which also show that some people will probably never leave Reddit.
Basically, title, here is a link to the Reddit thread for people curious: https://archive.ph/6mObB
I’m quite surprised with the neutral to positive reactions, which also show that some people will probably never leave Reddit.
As a conservative (by Danish standards, in the US I would probably be centrist and probably vote for the Democrats) I would say that capitalism doesn’t work well for every case in a society. In the olden days, people would meet in the town square and use the village posters.
Those local communities has largely been replaced by the internet today, and whereas the old communities was run by itself with its people taking ownership and responsibility for it with the incentive to make the community as good as possible, today the communities are largely owned by companies with a profit drive. In these new communities the incentive for the owner (the company) is not to create the best possible community, but to extract the most money from it.
I would say that pure capitalism would be to the detriment to a society. Capitalism is more a product of liberalism (where I am not using the definition of liberalism that most Americans would, but the “correct” definition) than it is a product of conservatism.
I think there’s nothing liberal about this. I can decide not to attend a community anymore but the alternatives (as here) will always be shadowed by these capitals, advertising, bot factories, which make it difficult, if not impossible, to have a valid alternative, this is monopolization, that, forced by individuals, becomes fascism.
What I am arguing is that capitalism and (classic) liberalism goes more hand in hand than capitalism and classic conservatism. Also, liberalism does not guarantee nor guarantee the lack of monopolies. Monopolies are the result of economics and the industry’s fixed and variable costs.
That being said, I do agree that monopolism is generally bad for society, as it reduces economic welfare (look it up) by generally reducing consumer surplus while increasing monopolist profit by a lower amount, thus creating a dead weight gap.
As a last point, somewhat unrelated, I think that it is an insult to the victims of fascism to call anything you don’t like fascism. I know you are not alone with the comparison, but I wish people would stop sorting people as either people they like or fascists. I think that people sometimes forget that the world isn’t inhabited entirely by saints and fascists.
I hope you have a great Sunday evening though :)
IMHO, what most people call “conservatism” today is an amalgamation of neoliberal economics and conservative values.
In the olden days, it would have been the church and the local nobles calling the shots on the local community forum, staging a witch-hunt or a public hanging event to keep the topics within desired boundaries and squeezing money, engagement and thus community power towards certain projects and not others.
I agree with the idea of your post commenting on today’s situation in capitalism, but disagree with the imo romanticised idea of how a community forum in the past would have functioned more independent and self-organising