Communism does, in fact, exactly the opposite of what it was ostensibly is intended to do. So you have a clique of capitalists that control everything. You know what would really make that better? Taking the control away from that collection of tyrants, and give it to another collection of tyrants, except these tyrants represent the "community." That'll solve everything, sure.
The bottom line is that, in the end, someone is going to control the farms and factories and land. Some pipe dream of it being controlled by the "community" is completely misguided, as (a) completely equal community control is impractical for large projects and (b) implicit power structures will develop within supposedly "equal" groups of people. The trick is to keep the power split between many people. Make the clique compete against each other, and you empower those outside. On the other hand, coalescing literally all power into one entity is very dangerous, and ends up just like you would expect.
I mostly agree with this. So how do we stop power from coalescing into amoral hands?
Capitalism as a system encourages or even obligates people to build up and leverage power in order to acquire more power. This is called being an "entrepreneur", an actor of the free market. Competition is core to the system, and generally drives efficiency and competitively low prices. Unfortunately that efficiency often comes at the expense of workers and customers, through amoral business practices. Thankfully we have government regulation and oversight, providing disincentives for at least some of those practices.
Corporations are still profit-seeking algorithms with no built-in regard for humanity, running on humans. But that's fine (fascinating really) as long as we force them to act morally via effective regulation.
We're not regulating them properly at this point, in America, because our Congresscritters are allowed to profit from deregulation. They are allowed to take campaign money directly from these lobbying groups, considered "free speech", and that's just the most direct way they're compensated. They often become well-paid lobbyists or board members after leaving office, as payment for services rendered, but the direct campaign payments are the most obvious and egregious way the system is broken.
Whether "true" communism could ever avoid turning into a plutocracy is an interesting discussion, but I'm more worried that it's happening to our capitalism. Corporations aren't people, they're amazing genetic algorithms which optimize for whatever profit they can get away with. They can be useful, but letting them run rampant is madness. Letting them buy our government representatives is madness. I'd say "bribe" except it's
legal.
P.S. We can look to Europe for more effective campaign and regulation laws. There are solutions to these problems, we just need to move in that direction. Conservatives dismiss them as "socialism" but they're just reasonable safeguards for such powerful entities.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4206214 times)