the awkward thing is that functional capitalism is more or less inseparable from representative democracy. capitalism requires markets, legally binding contracts, and a functional judicial system to work best. this is a real reason why capitalism is different from colonialism and mercantilism, etc
These people don’t want an actual market economy, they’re quite content with state-supported kleptocracy in the Russian style. They figure they’ll get to keep extracting wealth protected from competition in return for supporting the regime, who needs democracy *or* free markets?
If anything, capitalists have, when push came to shove, happily sided with “strong leaders” who do away with pesky democratic hindrances like trade unions, labour laws and elections.
Absolutely, but it's not really about expanding capitalism that those with a record concentration of capital want. It's the power to protect themselves permanently from any accountability for corruption and to solve our existential problems only for themselves. At all cost.
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the awkward thing is that functional capitalism is more or less inseparable from representative democracy. capitalism requires markets, legally binding contracts, and a functional judicial system to work best. this is a real reason why capitalism is different from colonialism and mercantilism, etc
Functional capitalism exists to subvert representative democracy. Capitalism requires rent seeking and exploitation to exist. It inevitably creates a corrupt political system that exists to serve the interests of capital.
The mechanisms really just need the basic adjustment of banning large individual fortunes, which make actual capitalist enterprises less stable and constantly assail representative democracy.
No. Keep private property. Just tax 100% over something like $20M and distribute equity from large successful firms into general funds shared by all, instead of private equity.
I think that would be the Chinese Revolution, but it was up there. With such a track record of success surely this remained a bedrock of Western policy
Trump’s biggest grift is convincing all these rich dudes that when they give him all this power, they’ll be granted billions like putin’s pals but somehow get them to forget how many of putin’s pals end up falling out of windows.
Seems to me capitalism developed pretty well under Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Louis-Napoléon. I'm afraid you can have a legal system that works perfectly well (for the bourgeoisie, anyhow) without a working democracy.
You do not need democracy for those things. The world is like 70% authoritarian now and it’s all capitalist. The idea that markets and democracy are tightly linked was the 1990s delusion. It proved itself to be wrong.
Oh yeah, money and markets are so well established they may seem like natural phenomenon but these are manufactured and maintained, at great expense, by the State!
