Or it’s almost like allowing greedy people to have all the power results in everyone else suffering. The “extremes” aren’t necessarily the problem, the failure to mitigate powers that want everything for themselves is the problem.
Personally, I think capitalism relies on self interest, competition, and rational and informed consumers. Self interest leads to anticompetitive practices, regulatory capture, and monopolies. Informed consumers cannot exist because there is too much information for everyone to know enough about everything. I can’t be an expert in the latest computer technology, modern medicine and medical practices, and most effective and efficient farming techniques and still have enough time to make a living… and I’d still be ignorant about sustainable fishing, transportation, and so on. There are entire industries out there that are supposed to help people makes informed decisions and so many of them have been corrupted themselves.
Socialism (at least most of its forms) focuses on democracy and quality of life. It can still be susceptible to concentrations of power in the hands of people who don’t value those things… so we’d need to create checks and balances against that. Honestly, I’d be fairly confident that even the US checks and balances (which are failing catastrophically right now) would work better if no individual or organization was allowed to exploit others so much that they could accumulate a billion+ dollars. With that, they could spend hundreds of millions on elections, bribe voters, and threaten politicians with million+ dollar opposition campaigns of they don’t submit… which sounds kind of familiar.
Or it’s almost like allowing greedy people to have all the power results in everyone else suffering. The “extremes” aren’t necessarily the problem, the failure to mitigate powers that want everything for themselves is the problem.
Personally, I think capitalism relies on self interest, competition, and rational and informed consumers. Self interest leads to anticompetitive practices, regulatory capture, and monopolies. Informed consumers cannot exist because there is too much information for everyone to know enough about everything. I can’t be an expert in the latest computer technology, modern medicine and medical practices, and most effective and efficient farming techniques and still have enough time to make a living… and I’d still be ignorant about sustainable fishing, transportation, and so on. There are entire industries out there that are supposed to help people makes informed decisions and so many of them have been corrupted themselves.
Socialism (at least most of its forms) focuses on democracy and quality of life. It can still be susceptible to concentrations of power in the hands of people who don’t value those things… so we’d need to create checks and balances against that. Honestly, I’d be fairly confident that even the US checks and balances (which are failing catastrophically right now) would work better if no individual or organization was allowed to exploit others so much that they could accumulate a billion+ dollars. With that, they could spend hundreds of millions on elections, bribe voters, and threaten politicians with million+ dollar opposition campaigns of they don’t submit… which sounds kind of familiar.