Capitalism is fundamentally, ideologically opposed to a good quality of life for virtually all human beings.
Except for the handful of sociopaths that get to live like kings while you struggle to stay alive.
That’s just the thing. It’s bad for the sociopaths also because we’re feeding into their delusions. Their hoarding is also an illness.
Even if we argue that the sociopaths benefit, billionaires are a vanishingly small slice of humanity.
Yeah. They’re not genuinely happy. They don’t really have friends, and are also isolated from their communities.
They also go to great lengths to further separate themselves from the masses geographically, such as Zuckerberg building a massive compound/bunker on Kauai and Peter Thiel’s Libertarian man-made islands project in International Waters
That’s not true at all. Capitalism has many flaws, but your claim is simply false.
I’m guessing you’re conflating capitalism with the deeply non-capitalist legal structures that have been erected on top of it in most of the world. One of the most common examples is corporate welfare, which is exactly as capitalist as welfare for private citizens. I’m not trying to attack or defend welfare with this statement, but I am emphasizing that that’s not how capitalism works.
States controlled by bourgeois interests are a consequence of Capitalism and an extension of it, not some random freak occurance.
Indeed. I like the idea of capitalism, but it rapidly becomes something else, something more sinister and harmful to all. It doesn’t just stay capitalism. It concentrates wealth and then the wealth makes the bottom fall out.
You dislike the middle class?
What is a “middle class?” Are you referring to the Petite Bourgeoisie, or well-paid Proletarians?
of or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes.
“a rich, bored, bourgeois family”
Bourgeois refers to Capitalists. Rich certainly doesn’t sound like a “middle” class, lol.
I’m open to learning. How does capitalism avoid the infinite concentration of wealth into the hands of one eventually?
Every system has flaws, to be sure - e.g. in Saudi Arabia, which is as anticapitalist as possible due to the government owning everything, all wealth is concentrated in the monarch - and capitalism is no exception. My answer to you has to be specific to certain types of goods, because for other types, capitalism will absolutely fail in the manner you describe and needs government regulation not to.
In this context, I will use “fail” to mean the failure you asked about, only 1 wealthy person.
Example where capitalism will generally not fail, and, in fact, has never failed in recorded history: restaurants. If our mysterious wealthy person attempts to own every restaurant simultaneously, someone else will open a rival restaurant and the plan will fail (and even if somehow no one could open a rival anywhere, people could choose to eat at home). No one in any country has ever managed to own every restaurant at once.
Example where capitalism will absolutely fail over time: oil. It is trivial, given enough time, for one person to eventually own all access to oil - Rockefeller is a great example of someone working hard at this, successfully.
I appreciate the thoughtful and intelligent response.
I will not move the goalposts and change 1 to some arbitrary small number. I will instead ask how do we prevent capitalism from concentrating wealth so much that, like a black hole, it overcomes degeneracy pressure and collapses, changing its own rules to benefit those at the very top and prevent the possibility of actual competition? This is the bastardization that we have today in the USA, and to me, this seems like the inevitable conclusion. It tends to concentrate wealth and power and to not be capitalism anymore. This extreme consolidation eventually warps its own mechanisms, becoming not very different from top-down, planned economy – just a badly-designed, ad-hoc, self-serving one.
The reality is that economic systems aren’t black and white. I don’t think we have true unregulated capitalism anywhere, and you admit there are areas (like healthcare) where capitalism is truly stupid or easily reaches critical mass to prevent competition (like oil).
This is a such a strawman.
If only 1.000 persons owns all restaurants its stupidly bad too.
But that’s not the question I was asked. Answering the question I was asked doesn’t make my answer a strawman.
Regulatory capture is actually a core feature of capitalism.
Corruption is no more likely in capitalism than in any other system.
I’m fine with billionaires going to space. I just have a problem with them coming back to Earth.
I think you are greatly overestimating the easiness of send cargo to the sun
With the trillions they steal from the rest of us we should be able to fund the project fairly easily.
When your ship is going to the Sun, it has to cancel out nearly all of the orbital motion it inherited from Earth. In order to have the ship drop straight down towards the Sun on a one-way collision course, the ship would have to leave Earth’s sphere of influence at a relative velocity of 30 km/s.
But remember, Earth’s gravity will try to pull the ship along with it, so in reality you’d have to depart from Earth at a relative velocity of about 31.6 km/s (70,700 mph). That’s nearly twice as fast as the ship would have to go in order to escape from the Sun.
The parker solar probe cost was about 1.5 billions. A fully manned one way Mars mission would cost about 20 billions going by the cheaper estimate.
The same one way mission going to the sun would be 10k times more expensive.
About 2 hundred trillions USD
By 2022, total earth GDP was about 100 trillions.
Yeah it’s not happening anytime soon
Couldn’t you just go for a slow, spiralling course instead of the direct route? Much less correction needed from Earth’s course, just a constant deceleration relative to the orbit path.
I mean at this point it’s cheaper to focus on building the future instead of whatever the original question proposal was
Ok, listen tough guy, you make that a two or even three way trip or whatever you need, do the math while the rest of us catch the rich and plunder their physical vaults full of gold coins which we will use to buy the rocket, and then we meet up again to discuss how to shove 'em up there kay
You are greatly overestimating the amount of actual wealth rich people have.
I’ve read Donald Duck comics back when I was a kid so I would say that my understanding of how the rich operate is pretty much perfect representation of reality, thank you.
Bro hate to break it to you but no one swims in piles of coins… anymore
To be completely honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk or Bezos had a pool of coins somewhere in their homes “just to see if it works” or “to have this experience”, it’s the least wasteful thing I would expect of them.
The billionaires don’t have to be intact on their flight.
You can use earths, moons, or any others gravity to aim the rocket.
Out of the solar system yes
Stupid question: do asteroids hit the sun, or do they get pushed away by the sun and melt?
If you have pretty much any lateral velocity, you’ll end up in a highly elliptical orbit and miss the sun
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g&pp=ygUYaG93IHRvIGZhbGwgaW50byB0aGUgc3Vu
I know the punchline is good as it is but i like to point out that it is actually easier to launch billionaries out of the solar system than into the sun
And leave that trash in space? Litterbug!
But then they might come back?
Not if we superglue and then tie them to the seat. And give them no controls on the inside. And just play a loop of “nah, nah, nah, nah. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Hey, hey, hey. Goodbye.” Not even the whole song. Just that part, on infinite loop.
And so was born the unfortunately named Epstein drive
What about deep down in the ocean? I heard of some recent tests…
Just blow up the ship ffs
What’s wrong with an orbit that’ll decay into the sun? That’ll take even less energy.
Lemmy is as bad as Reddit for these stupid pop-sci talking points.
Missing the artist! First Dog On The Moon! https://firstdogonthemoon.com.au/
I think people should reevaluate doing that to billionaires. I just learned that it would take more energy to fire something into the Sun than it would to shoot it out of the Solar System. We could get more done aiming in the other direction.
You don’t need to hit the sun dead center to incinerate something in the sun, just get it within the orbit of mercury and it’ll take care of itself.
Also what’s wrong with firing it into an orbit that’ll decay into the sun? You don’t need to 1 shot these things.
Technically we’re all on a slowly decaying orbit into the sun 🌞
Pretty sure that is not true
Well it’s either that or we’re slowly falling out of orbit, no? The Sun will die and consume us before we spiral into it though, I think?
Orbits are stable until affected by some force. Earth orbit is table as long as we can forecast it but in the long run other planets might change them one way or another
I bet good ol’ guillotines are much cheaper
Err, no wrong, bad physics.
Also, the guillotine requires no such bullshit.
I say fire pit roasted, like a pig bbq.
It’s difficult, but I try to remember this and enjoy the absurdity of it all. So, thanks for the reminder.
Sounds impractical the system always ends up with a 1% that had most of the wealth
frightened that you will […] die old
What’s the problem?
You can’t be entirely capitalist but you can’t be entirely socialist as well.
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
