Trickle up economics
It’s hardly a trickle either.
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you know what’s funny? you still wouldn’t be close to the rich rich people
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That’s a great idea to lift everyone out of poverty! If we all gave each other a penny we’d all be rich.
I caught myself mid laugh before realizing the reality of that statement.
More like a firehose
I’d say it’s more like disguised feudalism. We’re all peasants for the few kings and queens that have all the money at the top.
I don’t think people actually agree on the definition of capitalism itself, I just looked it up and was a little surprised how definitive it is:
an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
If you asked whether capitalism is a political system, at least in my random polling, 2 out of 9 respondents said No.
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Capitalism is an economic system with as little government intervention possible.
Doesn’t the bolded part make it a political system then?
I’d say no. It doesn’t really describe how a political system works other than commenting on the regulation part.
Same as any other economic political system.
You’re just describing a political system.
It is one policy of a larger system.
What do you mean by one policy?
Capitalism influences many areas of government directly.
It’s not just economics. It’s foreign policy, company regulations, individual protections, land ownership rights, etc. It’s an ongoing list. Even cultural rights are directly impacted by Capitalism.
It is one policy of a larger system.
Right, it’s an economic system that directly influences many parts of government.
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Lobbiest that work for companies do that constantly because of Capitalism. It’s an entire field of work.
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most socialist systems participated in the capitalist economic system. The USSR, for example, attempted to create the capitalist mode of production that was almost entirely lacking when the revolution overthrew the czarist regime. They had to, according to their marxist theories, in order to develop a proletariat with a revolutionary consciousness. Similarly China was faced with an economic system that was the shambles left over from the long degeneration and colonial exploitation of the ancient regime, and proceeded to attempt to build a modern capitalist economy under the control of the party, as the USSR was doing. In both the USSR (except for the brief period of the NEP) and the initial attempt during Mao’s lifetime, the market exchange was not used to set prices or drive production and planning, but instead top down ‘5 year plans’ were used. They didn’t work well, why is a complicated discussion, they actually might work a lot better now using the vast compute, information and communication tech available. The USSR under Gorbachev attempted to reform both their political and economic systems and collapsed. China looked at that and reformed their economic system, allowing much of the economy to be market based rather than planned, while keeping political control under the party. Their reform has been spectacularly successful in modernizing their economy, so successful that the USA at this point is determined to sabotage their system and, if necessary, destroy them militarily rather than allow them to dominate the global system.
Government intervention goes the other way: capitalists like intervening into government.
that is the ideology of classic liberal and neoliberal governments in the history of capitalism, capitalism itself is simply investing ‘money’ (aka capital) to produce commodities that are then exchanged for more money that is then fed right back into the loop to produce even more commodities to make even more money. The term commodity can refer to things that are intangible, like financial instruments - stocks, bonds, derivatives of stocks and bonds, derivatives of derivatives of stocks and bonds etc. Capitalism is the core of the global economic system. It is not an ideology. There are many countries (but fewer than there used to be) that are either socialist or social democracies where capitalism is highly regulated.
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But it does describe the control of resources and to an extent force, which is “political” in addition to economic.
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Now it’s the owners of the holding companies who own the owners of all the rest doing the controlling.
Capitalism is now playing 3D chess
Honestly one of the reasons I fell for a pyramid scheme coming out of high school.
A friend invited me and I went to shit on it and get him out, but the main guy’s whole thing was “everything is a pyramid scheme, at least here you have the chance to build a pyramid beneath you.”
Obviously there were other reasons as old as time, but the argument of “so what, your ‘regular job’ is already a pyramid scheme you can’t win” was pretty rattling to a teenager in 2011.
The difference between a pyramid scheme and a good business is where your money comes from, in a pyramid scheme it comes from the people at the bottom of the pyramid, in a business it comes from selling goods and/or services, that’s not saying I agree with big business, but one is profiting off of legitimate customers, the other is profiting off it’s own “employees”. I nearly got caught into one a few years ago too, until I realized what it was, at that point they had only taken a couple $100 for the interview and sign up stage, i had to block my card for them to never get access again, because even though i didnt complete sign up, thwy kept charging me monthly
What about the stock market? They seem to be pricing companies way higher than they are worth.
Imagine you own a goose that lays golden eggs. It lays one golden egg per year. How much would you sell it for? Probably not one golden egg, but definitely you’d sell if for a million gold eggs. You’d probably settle for maybe 5? 10? 15? Something like that.
Suppose the goose only lays one egg per year now (or none at all!) but it’s still young and most people expect it to start laying four or five or even ten or twenty eggs per year in a few years from now. It’s impossible to tell for sure how many it’ll lay over its life, or when that will happen, or if it will happen at all. NOW how much do you sell it for?
That’s the stock market.
A bunch of investors think a bunch of gooses will start laying a ton more golden eggs soon, and they’re willing to pay big bucks now in exchange for the possibility of that in the future. This isn’t a pyramid scheme or a zero sum game or anything like that. It’s just a prediction of the future which may or may not be correct, and only time will tell.
That’s the description of the very basics of the stock market.
Now do the derivatives, and let’s see why it’s gone to hell.
It fundamentally is NOT a pyramid scheme. In a pyramid scheme there is no actual product or service of value and simply extracts wealth from the people in lower tiers. Value, or wealth, is simply the byproduct of an equitable transaction between two or more parties.
Transactions are often not equitable, and most wealth bubbles up to the people on the top tiers.
Markets are not always fair or efficient but that doesn’t mean capitalism is a pyramid scheme. It is still very much the opposite.
Unregulated capitalism places all of the power in the hands of the wealthy. Even with the amount of regulation in place, the last 4 decades has irrefutably proven that. The transfer of wealth from the bottom 95% to the top 5% has has been insane.
The only reason we need so much regulation is because people are garbage and if they can gain something for nothing, they will. You cannot consider the pure idea of capitalism without also considering the reality of human nature, that it is inherently going to create a pyramid scheme like situation where the top transfer power and wealth to themselves in the largest quantities they can, in spite of pesky things like laws and taxes.
Yes that is true, and you can view wealth distribution as pyramid shaped, but that is not what a pyramid scheme means. As noted the system is very good at producing massive amounts of commodities, distributing them all over the planet, and exchanging them for your labor. If capitalism did nothing useful it would have disappeared long ago.
Global south would like a word.
Like every proponent of capitalism ignores the cheap labor and blatant theft of natural resources the rich nations need to make the line go up.
It’s not the virtue of capitalism that makes our lives so luxurious. It’s the suffering of the rest of the world.
I don’t disagree. Although it is still not a pyramid scheme.
So the first developed countries destroyed the environment just to get extra virtual numbers shown somewhere, and the rest, even though they directly or indirectly participated, got pollution, slavery, famine, but that is not a pyramid scheme?
So, a reverse funnel system? 🙂
Except that you’re describing commerce, not capitalism. Capitalism is the idea that the commerce has value, and that one can own the value of the commercial activity. Further, the value of the business is tied to it’s growth.
Further, products and services are never exchanged in an equitable transaction between two parties, because capitalism necessitates a third party, the capitalist. The capitalist must acquire products and services from employees for less than their true value, and then sell them to consumers for more than their true value.
And because capitalism demands growth, one or both of those two margins must continue to expand. This means workers must be pressured to work for less and less, which is why the capitalist opposes social services, universal healthcare, and affordable housing. This also means the capitalism opposes consumer protections, environmental protections, and taxes that provide a functioning society that might interfere with their growth.
Now what happens when every producer and consumer is fighting for the same margins, the same advantages, and the same growth? Then the capitalist seeks new avenues for new capital and new capitalists. Building business on ensuring the growth of business for other capitalists. Selling the idea that you, too, can join us at the top of the pyramid, all the while kicking down ladders they climbed to get there.
So no, the system itself isn’t a pyramid scheme. It’s just an idea that encourages pyramid schemes because it relies on impossible growth, like a cancer eating away at society.
No, fractional reserve banking demands endless growth because debts can’t be paid off with interest since the extra money to pay the interest didn’t initially exist. Therefore, banks have to lend out more money they don’t have so the prior debts can be paid off but in the process they create more debt. This leads to the insatiable need for more growth in the economy.
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This is a bot isn’t it?
To be more specific, fractional-reserve banking system creates this giant pyramid scheme, not capitalism per se.
Please explain, how exactly is fractional-reserve banking a pyramid scheme?
Because it allows banks to lend out money they don’t have and when the banks lobby hard enough to completely remove whats left of the gold standard, the sky’s the limit for lending out money. Creating money out of thin air increases inflation. However, in a weird way it impoverishes the lower classes while inriching the elite class because the latter tends to better connected and therefor closer to the “monetary spigot”. This allows the elite class to buy up everything(land, companies, lobby/bribe governments)from the top down like a game of pacman.
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That’s a valid point, though I still wouldn’t call it a pyramid scheme.
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Pyramid schemes don’t have to be zero-sum. All you need are assholes at the top trying to suck up as many resources as they can. Imagine the shape that makes.
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Except people are getting fewer goods and services while paying more money. For some, they’re already at starvation wages even when working full-time and they have to dip deeply into credit just to survive.
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Yet costs for the masses are increasing beyond the official inflation numbers.
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If we take into consideration the destruction of the ecosystems necessary to sustain human life, capitalism is a net-negative.
They draw the box around the part that is a net positive.
The destruction of the Commons is not accounted for.
The impacts outside their box are not accounted for.
This is true but not a necessity of capitalism. Pigouvian can put the destruction of the commons back in that box.
Before Capitalism Humanity drove mammoths into exctintion, and that was a hunter-gatherer society.
https://www.earth.com/news/humans-drove-woolly-mammoths-to-extinction/
What I mean with this is that the effect of humanity in the environment is an human issue independent to the economic system issue the humans use.
That’s the tragedy of the commons, and you’ll find it’s true for basically every possible societal organization.
the tragedy of the commons was a bit of British aristocrat propaganda to take the land peasants worked…
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Capitalism means always looking for more profits. Endless efforts of private owners to expand and increase their profits leads to the perpetual circle of suproduction and overconsumption which destroy ressources and ecosystems.
This particular system is the main reason it’s happening.
Do you honestly think a communist or socialist society which is wealthy would be any healthier for the environment than a capitalist one that is also wealthy?
We have been destroying the planet long before economy was a concept.
A socialist or communist society could be healthier. Not saying it automatically would be. The only people theorizing a sustainable economy are on the (far) left though.
And the last 50 years proved that sustainability is impossible in a capitalist system. It hinders profits, and the basis of capitalism is: always more profits.
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Well… no. It never was. Even the USA is highly intrusive and protectionnist. Also, state capitalism ? In you other responses you talk about China like it’s not a capitalist country. China is the main example of state capitalism.
I think you are confusing capitalism with something else.
The wikipedia article is a good start if you are interested.
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A socialist society would be better for the environment because all the people would starve /s
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I think you can say is a pyramid scheme in the way you can’t really make money if you aren’t making money for someone upper on the ladder, even if are an independent business owner, you still have loans to pay or equipment that is sold by a corporation.
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Everywhere around you, you can see work that need to be done, from streets that need to be fixed or land that could be cultivated, and all those work keep undone, because nobody up the ladder would get money from it.
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Generally the idea is that both parties need to benefit from any transaction if it is voluntary.
When you have to eat and the means to feed ourselves is held by few, no transaction is voluntary.
Of course it’s voluntary. You choose what you buy, when you do it, how much and from whom.
If someone held you on gunpoint and told you to buy their product, that would be involuntary.
You can choose what, when, how much, and from whom, but you are still are still forced to do so. Choosing which person puts me at gunpoint doesn’t make it voluntary
You can also feed yourself by growing food or hunting. Neither of those are banned, just more inconvenient and you probably have some other skills to sell and buy food instead
I can only do so on land that I purchased. Or on someone else’s land I purchased the right to do so on
You are forced to buy food, shelter, healthcare, a vehicle (US). You are forced therefore to have a job to pay for these things. Employers know this, and suppress wages with those together, the proverbial gun.
Generally speaking, slavery is also benefitial to both parties, you’re either a slave out you get killed. While technically voluntary (because a slave can still choose stand up to the oppressor, even if it’s guaranteed to fail) we don’t consider slavery voluntary. We can say that in this day and age our work is voluntary, but it’s debatable.
You can look to this year how “voluntary” it is when the Hollywood execs literally said they will wait for the protesters to starve so they’d get back to work. When there’s such a severe power dynamic it becomes almost no different to slavery, because you, individually, can be effectively forced back to work. The only reason Hollywood protests have any chance to have impact is because they collectively oppose the oppression. The power dynamic is being balanced (or dipped in the favor of labor) by sheer number of protestors / workers.
If anything this understates the problem.
True, because it’s also a giant Ponzi scheme. We pick up new debt today to pay off debt from yesterday, and we hope expanding GDP and inflation will always offset the difference.
You’re not forced to take on that debt though, nor is the debt unpayable unless you take on more debt. Some people put themselves into a ponzi-like situation either through poor financial decision making or circumstances so shit that they can’t do any better, but the average person doesn’t need to take out a loan on a freaking pair of nikes or even a car or house. It’s a cultural norm to get a mortgage, but if you do the math it often doesn’t make sense to and isn’t anywhere close to mandatory. At most you could argue that the US government debt works that way, but even that’s iffy and depends on your geopolitical outlook.
I think the point isn’t debt my man,l’m thinking OP means capitalism sells you the “if you work hard and play by the rules you too can be rich” as your buy-in. That’s the scam.
Exactly. I’m thinking of dying for a few years so I can save up enough to get on the property ladder. Just waiting for a decent grave to come up on the outskirts of town where the rents aren’t too high.
Is there a difference between a pyramid and a ponzi scheme?
Yes, but most people using the term don’t know their defitition, so knowing the correct definition is of limited usefulness.
Ponzi is for Investments that offer high returns, by marking the principal as gains. Pyramid schemes sell stuff, through a pyramid of salesmen. Each one earns a percentage of the revenue of his underlings and is encouraged to recruit more underlings.
It’s used so interchangeably these days that I’m inclined to say no, but an oversimplication is that a ponzi scheme is always illegal and is more detailed in its mechanics (as named after conman Charles Ponzi). Wheras a pyramid scheme (or more commonly known: MLM) can actually be legal depending on how it’s constructed.
A ponzi scheme involves a conman who scams his customers by taking massive profits from their investors and requires a constant stream of new investors to pay off the old ones. This is fraud.
A pyramid scheme usually involves some type of product and pays huge bonuses to the recruiters at the top for bringing in more people below them from the investment of new people below them. This is taxing uneducated people but can be legal.
TLDR: capitalism is more akin to a pyramid scheme and not at all like a ponzi scheme.
DAE Capitalism bad?
omg me
Yes!
I’ve seen several thought experiments about capitalism, and letting it run to its extreme conclusion.
- Attempt one, with the theoretical best starting conditions, devolved into feudalism
- Attempt two, which assumed people knew how attempt one ended up and where they wanted to do everything they could to prevent that from happening again, concluded towards theocracy, since capitalism ignores religion, which can become a coercive power structure, separate from capitalism or government.
- Attempt three, where everyone knew how the previous two experiments went, did away with money, and replaced it with an economy based on service contracts, evolved into communism.
Sounds like interesting reading, could you please add a link or reference?
More likely viewing. I’ll update the previous post in a minute.
And I’ll have to stress: it’s specifically about anarcho-capitalism, with the explicit removal of any government. You’ll keep hearing far-right conservatives insist that the best way to run the market is to keep the government out of it. Anarcho-capitalsim is that thing’s platonic ideal, no need to wonder about the government being involved if there’s no government involved.
As you’ll see, at best that causes way more problems than a governed system causes. At worst, it creates a load of problems that a governed system prevents.
Thanks for the links!
Literally as soon as a society calls itself communist or socialist it turns into a perfect utopia
It can call itself whatever it likes, doesn’t mean it actually is that thing.
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I would say this about the stock market
would you sign up to my pyramid scheme if I was a cat?? 🥺
We see your handle, bear.
Yes
This is the ideal shower thought imo. Concise, absolutely true, and something you wouldn’t realize on a daily basis (at least not in these terms)
Yes, but you’re going to find the same thing with Communism.
Too many shitty greedy people at the top, too many plebs with fuck all at the bottom.
And while you may be thinking “I could live on a commune, spend an hour a day growing our own food and have all that time left for whatever else I want”, you’ll quickly find you can’t grow your own 65" OLED television or whatever other comforts you’ve become accustomed to.
The billionaires need reining in, and better distribution of wealth all around the bottom, but capitalism ain’t going anywhere.
Communism isn’t the same as a tech-less agrarian society
You don’t need a 65" OLED TV because you know it’s bad for the environment.
So are PCs and smartphones, yet here you are.
Yes it’s a hard question how to deal with this. Practically all the consumer goods somehow harm the environment.
We have been consolidating electronics and making them smaller by volume for a couple decades now. Things are getting significantly better at an individual unit level. Reusing and recycling are also good options and should be made more effective. Lowering global populations soon should also help.
Communism doesn’t mean there isn’t commerce, it just means you communally own the means to produce it, and the profits from it
and with a disappointing lack of giant pyramids, no less!
Capitalism is anarchism for shitty people.
Anarchism is capitalism for based people!
