- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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… when was the last time capitalism led to mass starvation and death? Every famine I’m aware of since 1950 has been the cause of either war, recurring environmental issues that have resulted in famines across multiple economic systems, or government mismanagement.
The rest is correct, but the mass starvation and death is a very curious insertion.
Also curious that it’s not really a cycle, since the ‘free’ market is never disestablished or interrupted in the cycle despite being ‘established’ again at the top of the cycle.
In addition to my already present uh, biographies…
I would nitpick this actual meme on one point:
Broadly, monopolies and colluding oligopolies do not collude to artificially increase demand.
They collude to artificially increase prices, and that artificially high chunk of prices is also called a monopolist rent.
…
Monopolists grow till there are no alternatives to them, often by first offering a price discount as compared to other competitors…
… then, when they have driven their competition out of business, or just purchased them…
Then they raise prices to the max the consumer can bare.
…
Monopolists notably maximize their own profit often to the point that it actually reduces overall demand.
They can do this because they still have enough people who now just have no alternative, and they can extract so much monopolist remt… maybe we’d call that greedflation in more modern lingo… that they don’t care if they lose a few customers, the astounding margins more than make up for it.
(until the entire system collapses sometime later, because OOPS, turns out everyone was going into debt and gambling on wildass longshot investments to be be able to pay those higher prices.)
(but of course then the monopolist just lays off employees to reduce overhead, and hey, now you understand why and how recessions and depressions happen, and why capitalism is fundamentally inequitable and unstable!)
Who’s the frump with the technicolor bowtie?
Milton Friedman, basically the modern godfather of globalist, neoliberal capitalism… aka, the ‘Chicago School’ of economics, strongly rejected both Marx and Keynes.
Also, pioneered the shock doctrine of massive austerity, union crackdowns and removal of workers rights for the greater population of Chile, by personally advising and greatly influencing the economic policies of Augusto Pinichet, who had just come into power after executing a very violent and bloody right-wing, military junta style coup.
Oh, and Friedman’s underlying monetary theory he uses as the basis for his understanding of economics has been pretty much thoroughly refuted, but all the idiot ‘free market’ conservatives or turbolibs (cough they have almost no differences economically cough) you’ve ever met who tell you that you are the one who doesn’t understand economics … well they haven’t read any of those thorough and well evidenced refutations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Just uh, ctrl+f ‘criticism of published works’ and you can see that basically every kind of economist from all kinds of different economic schools and political ideologies, US economists, non-US economists, have criticized Friedman at essentially every single point of his theory.
…
EDIT:
Wait, no, fuck, that’s not Friedman, that’s a different right wing ghoul economist, damnit!
Sorry, I do literally get them confused.
This is Murray Rothbard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
Even more right wing and more bonkers, belonging to the ‘anarcho capitalist’ Austrian School of economics.
I am so tired, so very tired.
Rothbard was a foundational figure of both the CATO and Mises Institutes, who are somehow even more extremist in their advocacy of no holds barred, free market competition than Friedman, yet they largely fail to have any kind of useful solution to the problem of … a free market, in capitalism, always tends toward oligopoly and monopoly over time… but they hate the idea of something like an anti trust law that would prevent this, because government bad… but also the mythical perfectly comepetive free market is good and desirable… they just… won’t actually advocate anything that could possibly maintain even a semblance of what they claim to love.
(Anarcho Capitalism is extremely confusing in the sense of it not making any practical sense in the vast majority of real world economic cases, it seems mostly to just exist a a sort of self fulfilling virtue signalling ideology?)
The Austrian School also has a very, very strange philosophical basis in what they call ‘praxeology’, which more or less eschews using actual empirical data and falsifiable theories to understand economics, and instead focuses on using word games to define their economic worldview into existence, and also deride all others as ‘internally contradictory’.
…
For whatever reason, a lot of right wing US based economists not only happen to be old bald dudes with glasses… but they love bowties.
Thats probably why Tucker Carlson used to wear one back in the late 90s / early 00s, before Jon Stewart roasted him so badly, on his own show, that I don’t think Tucker has worn a bowtie since.
Yucky!
Sorry I may have edited my post since you read it, I quite genuienly mixed up two 20th century right wing ghoul economists.
Monopolies don’t generally artificially increase demand. They sometimes artificially restrict supply. But mostly they just control price, because monopolies don’t have to compete, and competition is the fundamental assumption that drives the law of supply and demand.
I am pretty sure that Europe is often described as having free market, also it is often considered to be working pretty good, beside occasional shortcamings, definitely nothing like mass poverty. Altho I wonder what you you mean by capitalism, and why did you put quotes around free, do you think those markets aren’t free, or what?
Europe’s markets generally more resemble ‘free markets’ (which really means: competetive markets) because they are more heavily and properly regulated.
So, they’re more like ‘fair markets’ than they are ‘free markets’.
You cannot naturally maintain competetive markets over time without some kind of system for counteracting the natural tendency of such markets to consolidate over time.
‘Free markets’ don’t exist, as that phrase is an intentionally vague and confusing propaganda term, that means whatever to uneducated and naive person wants it to mean.
Are they free as in free beer, free lunch?
Are they free as in, free to enter, free to leave?
‘Free’ is a word that has many different, distinct meanings, and it is a hallmark of con artists and cult leaders to use such words and switch from one definition/meaning of the same word, from sentence to sentence, sometimes even within the same sentence.
Look at how quantum mystic type gurus use ‘energy’ to waffle between and conflate the actual, physics definition of ‘energy’ and the colloquial ‘overall emotional disposition’ meaning of ‘energy’.
Its the same thing with ‘free market’ peddlers.
Monopolies is the wrong word. The correct word is “trust”. Monopolies are just one kind of trust, and any kind of trust, even weak ones, are a deadly cancer to a free market.
No, that’s completely meaningless as a working definition, and also just broadly false.
Monopolistic companies often rank high in public polls of ‘most hated / least trusted’ companies.
Monopolies are more accurately described as using and abusing trust, by building up a reputation, and then betraying that trusted reputation once they’ve grown to become actual monopolies.
Enshittification can basically be described as the latter half of that process.
Its a slow motion bait and switch.
True capitalism has never been achieved
According to ancaps, unironically yes, rofl
