this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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I didn’t say anywhere that regulation will make it work or make it better, I just meant that it will certainly not change without some form of regulation.
I’m also not claiming that capitalism is perfect or even good, all economic theories are idealized, I actually don’t think there is a magical system with a simple set of rules that will actually work. The real world is complicated and messy and has exceptions all over the place.
I think there probably is some mixture of free market and socialist ideas that do work, and most countries work like this today.
It really frustrates me when people talk about "mixing capitalism and socialism." Whatever thing you're talking about is not what socialism is. Socialism is not when the government does stuff. Socialism is not when the government uses taxpayer money to fund social services or welfare. Socialism is the workers controlling the means of production.
Eclecticism doesn't work, it imagines that it can pick out the best of everything, but in reality it ends up either being fundamentally dysfunctional because you can't just decontextualize things from their theoretical framework and have it all work out, or they just end up being one thing with a partial veneer of other things. Almost every country you thought of when you wrote that comment unambiguously has nothing to do with socialism, they're just versions of liberalism that believe in some level of welfare, etc.
It really frustrates me when people talk in absolutes, is there no room for nuance and grey area? I didn’t claim what socialism or what capitalism is, but it’s definitely true that today's economies do borrow ideas from various economic theories. How is that a controversial statement at all?
Some things aren't compatible, and trying to combine them results in having one with the skin of the other. Liberal democracy, for instance, is incompatible with monarchy, and we can see in the UK for instance how the liberals kept on gaining ground until the monarchy became totally symbolic (a very expensive symbol, but a symbol nonetheless). If the workers having democratic control of the means of production precludes capitalists having plutocratic control, it's very simple. Put in the same environment, these two forces would bear what Marxists call "class antagonisms" towards each other and struggle until one was subordinated to the other.
The US (we'll use that example because I know it the best) does borrow ideas from various economic theories, those being various sects of classical liberalism, Keynesianism, and the odd bit of Austrian School or Christo-fascist policy. That is to say, different sects of capitalist ideology. You do not see policies based on Marxian economics or anything of the sort, it's just empirically not how US policy gets written, and that shouldn't surprise you.