memes

Sometimes I get mad about how we in practice have basic income for the rich. If you have a few million dollars, you can park it in zero or low risk investments (eg: high yield savings, bonds) and get free money. Then you can just fuck off and pursue your dreams. No risk. Lots of reward.

But if you're poor? Well you better take any job for any salary or you're just a parasite blah blah blah. All pain, some risk, little reward.

We hit a tipping point though, where 99% of people do not have any capital to risk

When do you think this tipping point was? Because as far as I can tell this was around the French revolution.

Capitalism, since its inception, has been 99% of people having no capital.

And then uses his immense wealth and contacts to make frivolous lawsuits against smaller bakers trying to make their own machine, knowing full well they will not win in court but will financially ruin the smaller baker and tie them up in litigation for years, then forcing them to an unfair arbitration where they make a shit offer to buy out the competition

Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.

Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.

A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.

Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.

And don't forget how one bakery could pay their employees only the bare minimum, cut corners where they can and use the profit to undercut the 'good' bakery until the 'good' bakery goes bankrupt and the 'bad' bakery can simply be a local monopoly and raise prices as they like.

Uh... This is coming from the folks who said "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" during a famine so... uh... yeah, that's not the flex you think it is.

Edit: And in case anyone is wondering, this gets worse with context.

And those were obviously 100% kept 🤡

Luckily, the Soviet union treated homosexuals to a similar standard. /s

Stalin 1936 constitution. Holidays for "enemies of the people" were unpaid and in a quite cold climate of Siberia. They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food. And if you didn't like it, you get a free ride in a black car to the place of final rest.

The maximum hours you can work did not apply to everyone as my former boss has stories of working 12+ hours in the gulag he was sent to for reasons he does not know.

the only way to make more money than someone else is to work more hours regardless of profession

Workers aren't capitalists. The whole point of Capitalism is to ensure the ruling class never has to do the actual work. Capitalists make their money by exploiting workers, not working themselves.

Capitalists are people who own the means of production. Working in a capitalist system you will never earn enough to buy the factory. Inheritance is one of the main ways to become a capitalist. Sure some people get lucky but with few exceptions if you are rich the way you got rich was by exploiting other people .

Copyright was a halfway decent idea when it first came out. Give a chance for an artist or inventor to profit from their work for a few years and then it becomes public property. Thanks to corporations like Disney, that has all been twisted, and now it's used as a cudgel to keep others from competing and it takes almost 100 years for something to go out of copyright now (thanks congress).

A system where you do the work and get paid for your value is closer to Socialism than capitalism.

Under true capitalism, everyone starts at 0 regardless of their birth

Then true capitalism will never exist. At best, it's a Platonic Ideal.

A society where no one has capital and the only way to get ahead is to provide more labour? And you call them steamed hams despite the fact they're obviously grilled?

Oh, so uouve never gone on a spirit journey, cutting your way through dense pneuma with an enchanted cgainsaw to get ideas?

I bet thats why you're poor, and i thought of ’bank but on computer', 'music but on computer' and 'books but computer', so get 50% of all thevworlds resources.

It's about incentivising people to share their ideas by ensuring they'll be rewarded for it. Without IP laws it's beneficial to keep new ideas a secret so you can profit off of them. It's a social contract that promises creators compensation for creating. Everyone benefits from the system the problem has been its exploitation due to weakening public institutions.

In that case literally every court also shows a complete misunderstabding of patent law

So...

I understand what you are saying but i hope you never invent something that can solve a current day crisis.

We are already behind schedule to solve things like climate change. If someone invents breakthrough tech then we need that today and open so other minds can quickly iterate and improve. Not after 20 years of stalling on a bureaucratic advantage.

If it wasn’t for capitalism chaining survival to productivity there would be no reason for this system to exist and we can move on to teach that “all good ideas should be copied” And “the same ideas can emerge in multiple different minds”

This comment shows a complete misunderstanding of patent practice. Patents exist not for inventors, but for companies. Destin, from Smarter Every Day, has a recent video trying to make a grill scrubber in which he talks with many people about how Amazon for example constantly avoids patent claims from small inventors.

Humanity progressed from hunter-gatherers to the industrial revolution without the need for a judge to determine whether I can arrange atoms in a given way or not without giving a canon to someone else who decided to arrange atoms like that before me.

If it were a misunderstanding, why do we always see a spike in innovation once a patent expires? According to capitalist ideology, isn't competition the best that could happen, instead of having an unlimited monopoly for 20 years?

Then patent law is better than intellectual property law, I think it's 50 years after the creator dies and there are loopholes for companies