the reason private industry doesn’t have the reputation for inefficiency that government has is nothing to do with private industry’s actual efficiency. It’s a combination of the fact that most of the decisions private companies make are behind closed doors whereas government stuff is public and something I call selective collectivism, which is to say that when government fucks up that’s a reflection on government as a whole but when private industry fucks up we only fault that individual company and not private industry as a whole.
It’s why so many people underestimate the deaths attributable to capitalism. We all know where the buck stopped under Stalin. In the contemporary US, who is responsible when people die in underregulated workplaces or the equivalent? Is it the state? The company? The industry? We can’t decide, but we don’t blame capitalism, even if that structure drives the suffering.
hell, if we’re gonna be historical about it why is the USSR and communism as a whole responsible for the Ukraine famine but capitalism isn’s responsible for the Irish or Bengali famines? About 5 million dead between the two of them, all due to decisions by capitalist-democratic-imperialist governments. But that just doesn’t count because we don’t talk about it.
the reason private industry doesn’t have the reputation for inefficiency that government has is nothing to do with private industry’s actual efficiency. It’s a combination of the fact that most of the decisions private companies make are behind closed doors whereas government stuff is public and something I call selective collectivism, which is to say that when government fucks up that’s a reflection on government as a whole but when private industry fucks up we only fault that individual company and not private industry as a whole.
It’s a magic feature of capitalism, the ability to convince people that any failure is limited to a single entity.
It’s why so many people underestimate the deaths attributable to capitalism. We all know where the buck stopped under Stalin. In the contemporary US, who is responsible when people die in underregulated workplaces or the equivalent? Is it the state? The company? The industry? We can’t decide, but we don’t blame capitalism, even if that structure drives the suffering.
hell, if we’re gonna be historical about it why is the USSR and communism as a whole responsible for the Ukraine famine but capitalism isn’s responsible for the Irish or Bengali famines? About 5 million dead between the two of them, all due to decisions by capitalist-democratic-imperialist governments. But that just doesn’t count because we don’t talk about it.
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