This was capitalism, a beacon of hope for people who are smart, hardworking, and comfortable with risk, promising a greater share of the spoils to them than to those who are not.
Wrong. That’s not what capitalism is or means. Capitalism is an economic system in which private investors run the economy in search of personal profit, while those who lack capital rely on wage labor to survive. You can debate whether this is a good or moral system, but it’s important to get terminology right.
It seems incredibly hard to get right. On the other hand many countries seem to get it less wrong than the US, so maybe that's a good starting point.
One thing that immediately comes to mind is that first-past-the-post voting systems seem to produce pretty bad results, basically always devolving into a two party system which enables easy us-vs-them rhetoric. And while people love to debate which alternative system is the absolute best, there are many in use around the world that produce better results.
1. A violent revolution against capitalism that destroys it.
2. You slowly contain capitalism and wind it down, making the elite increasingly irrelevant, as it appeared the US and Europe might have been on track to do from 1933-73, until you’ve basically achieved socialism without necessarily calling it that.
3. Capitalism continues to corrode the restraints put in place to contain it until you have an oligarchic nightmare like the US.
3 is completely unacceptable; 1 is a bit better but still involves people getting killed. 2 is probably best if you can pull it off, but the problem is that it requires society to do the right thing for decades whereas an overthrow of capitalism can be done in weeks.
The only reason 2. happened anywhere on Earth for any period of time is because 1. happened in another. In other words, 1. is responsible for both 1. and 2.
Dual currencies. Denominate capital in USDC and keep USD for everything else. Make conversion from USDC to USD transparent/illegal/a-point-of-friction/technically-impossible/socially-impossible/whatever-else.
Actually, capitalism is simply an economic system where private citizens can own the means of production. In other words, people can own businesses, and shares in businesses That's it. Nothing else.
Contemporary capitalism also features limited liability, and fractional reserve banking, two policies that are not necessarily part of a generalized capitalism, but would be hard to decouple in any analysis of what is currently going on in capitalism.
"Cronyism" is the long-term result of capitalism. It will always result in this type of corruption, it's the nature of an economic system that rewards greed.
Cronyism is just another way to say "Late Stage Capitalism."
Cronyism is something that will always happen when free markets mix with democracy. In the USA, this started before the end of the first Presidential term. It isn’t new.
All governments suck, all economic systems suck, and it all sucks because people are flawed. We can always try for better, but so far every system that humans design, humans also corrupt and destroy.
I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.
It seems that the fundamental problem is actually humans. If we eliminate the humans, we can eliminate the problems. Maybe AI will accomplish this before long, after it reaches the same conclusion...
> I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.
Not having an economic system sounds impossible. In the absence of a planned system, there would be one that spontaneously emerges, in all likelihood one that's even easier to corrupt.
Not having a government would be more viable, but without a central power we would just revert to "might makes right", which is not so different from cronyism. Not to mention all the problems when infrastructure becomes profit driven or disappears, basic education has to be provided by private teachers, etc.
Cronyism is the end stage of everything. All political and economic systems ultimate tend towards dominance by a minority who refuse to lose, and warp the system to suit their interests until they are removed by one means or another. It's a concept so old it even as a word for it: Anacyclosis.[1]
I see comments like this and I wonder what do people actually learn in school. Adam Smith wrote extensively about this (surely people still learn about him). His premise were people are naturally greedy, and it is good to use a system that pits their greed against each other. A natural competition to provide goods and services to each other. And it has worked well for hundreds of years, pulling billions out of poverty in just the last few decades. But yeah, government corruption is a problem in any economic system and democracy was supposed to be the check against cronyism.
The problem with that naive viewpoint is that it assumes that greedy people that got successful playing the game won't use their power to mess with the rules.
Once the first set of greedy people gets powerful enough, they change the playing field and cement their lead.
75% of those billions pulled out of poverty were in China [0], which is explicitly not capitalist.
As an American I charge by the hour to service commercial and residential properties. My clients are mostly quite happy with my service. How is it that this is "cryonyism"?
That's called a laborer. Frequently they own their own tools.
"Capital", in this context, means the ownership of the means of production (classically factories, but in this century as much pointed to data, land, and regulatory capture). Specifically, the means of production that you do not operate.
If you must do labor for a living, you are not a capital owner. Stop identifying with the class of owners when you are a "working stiff" even if you're making mid six figures in tech or as the owner of a small business. In "Wall Street" Gordon Gekko was talking about "400k-a-year working wall street stiffs", and that's a million a year or better these days, after inflation.
Ownership of property and profit from labor are the foundations of Capitalism. Following capital as it trickles up is interesting but is only a part of the larger picture.
Moving the goalposts when the definitions don't fit your argument isn't going to change anything. Denying the lived experience of working men does not endear you to them. Try talking with working men instead of down to them next time.
I'll have to remember this trick - when I don't understand the meaning of something, just say that the meaning is wrong and that they're being condescending
I'll also have to remember that Capitalism is all about owning physical tools, not anything about making money from people doing work for you. So if I contract freelance kitchen staff to make and sell food for me, when they show up with their own knives, they are the capitalists, not me. Interesting!
We were discussing a self-employed man, not someone who has employees. You're moving the goalposts again. I have to ask: Do you actually own a business? Have you ever worked for yourself? This sort of condescension isn't the sort of thing common among working men, but is very common among the petit bourgeoisie who think they know better than everyone else. I'm just curious.
They asked about how their behavior is representative of capitalism, and learned it’s not. Your narrow description of capitalism would satisfy someone as radically anti capitalist as Bakunin
Yes and yes, I’m a laborer and I wouldn’t take profits off someone else’s work unless we are all sharing the returns aka anarcho syndicalism. I can but won’t subject workers to the exploitation and role based hierarchies I myself escaped. It’s not necessary.
Not so hard to do, being a working man myself. Are you not a working man? My lived experience is that I have more in common with people flipping burgers than flying in private jets, but maybe you disagree.
I am, and I do, and yet that still doesn't change that a man who works for himself is still a capital-owner, whatever class he may identify with. I'm all for independent business owners (including small family businesses) identifying with the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie, but pretending they're not bourgeoisie and sneering at people who disagree isn't going to incline anyone to listen to you.
I don't know that I'd put a guy who owns a truck, a leaf blower, a lawn mower, a collection of garden sheers/related tools, and has a client base; I wouldn't put him in the same category as a bank CEO who makes was $5 million a year. Maybe I should though because the guy with the truck's been sold this load about freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that a FANG engineer making $300k/yr didn't buy. Personally, the guy with a yacht, a jet, a summer and winter home, who has enough money to never work another day in his life if he doesn't want to; that guy is definitely burgeoise. The guy that's gonna go hungry and have trouble making rent if he's not outside in the heat of the summer midday sun to landscape most days, just because he owns the truck he drives? Feels like I have a lot more in common with him, which makes it hard to want to throw him against the wall when the revolution comes. Maybe joining the burgeoise should have a $1 million initiation fee, but includes a free subscription to Netjets.
I genuinely do not think that they are what Marx was describing as bourgeoisie.
Quoth wikipedia:
> In the 19th century, Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist: (i) the functional capitalists, who are business administrators of the means of production; and (ii) rentier capitalists whose livelihoods derive either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or both.
That is, managerial staff (low level managers better, these days, better fit the description of petit bourgeoisie, I think), and owners. Talking about a man who owns his own tools, employs himself but no others, you duck either category - perhaps you're thinking of someone who employs others and manages them, in which case, I agree, they've moved into the position of earning part of their income from management.
But merely having the tools you need is not "the means of production" classically - that would be real estate and finance more than directly tools. You begin to cross that threshold when my hypothetical car repair or building maintenance guy also owns his shop (or building) and the land it's on - but even so, I think the distinguishing characteristic is not merely ownership of land and finances, but subsisting primarily on the rents and/or administration thereof. If my hypothetical car repair guy had retired, rented his shop out, and leased tools to people he employed, yes, obviously.
But I think you'll find that many of the people who identify as business owners are, in this analysis, tradesmen and working men first and foremost, rather than earning their income primarily as administrators, rentiers, landlords, bankers, or lenders. That is why I distinguish between the two, and you may disagree, but it's certainly not moving the goalposts or sneering.
It’s really more this current iteration of capitalism.
It’s not so much the cronyism itself but just how large of a chunk of the pie they took this time. See salary vs house price trends. The remainder is so small that basic structures of society are starting to collapse (can’t afford education, house, kids, healthcare etc)
Had it not been turned up to 11 this could keep going.
The administrative state as we now know it didn't exist yet so there was nothing for the robber barons to capture to cement their place.
Oligarchs depend on the administrative state for their security.
The oligarch pays (bribes, political donations, what have you) the state $5 so that the state will spend $10 screwing the competition and then the oligarch's business will make $10. Of course I made these numbers up but the system by which these people hold power doesn't work if there isn't an administrative state with the power to fairly capriciously regulate the oligarch's business. The whole game is predicated on being able to buy unfair access state muscle. If the state is sitting on its ass there's no advantage to buying favor.
Tammany Hall was part of a world which started with the Robber Barons and ended with the Bosses distributing the funds to the ward heelers. Jay Gould funded Tammany Hall. Sure, it was also self-perpetuating corruption, but it had linkage.
It didn't consist "of" robber barons. It was a tool they used when it suited them. I call that cronyism.
The term "robber baron" sounds so impossibly dated it's hard to take it seriously, and "oligarch" seems to be the favored term for when people have corrupt business relations in enemy states, so perhaps using "oligarch" is more illuminating for a modern audience.
You have Andrew Carnegie to thank for expensive marketing campaigns that retired that term in popular usage and rebranding robber barony under the philanthropist label. Now we have robber barons that look like they're trying to be nice.
It seems hard to call big us ceos oligarchs, I would find it hard to believe for example Sundar pichai interacts even say weekly with Joe Biden, if for no other reason that there are so many potentially "influential" CEOs in the US and (at least there is a perception) they generally have better things to do than try to influence the president.
Oligarch implies the government grants and helps enforce a monopoly to a single individual. There are few, if any, individuals in America that this can apply to. There’s definitely regulatory capture in the US, but oligarch is hyperbole and/or a lack of perspective. It tends to be people equating US billionaires with Russian ones who definitely do fit this definition.
The specifics may differ but I do not agree that leaders of big business have "better things to do" than try to influence the President; a lot of time and money is spent on government influence operations.
I guess on reflection my parent description is not quite right, but your comment brings up maybe the real distinction: if you were a true oligarch, you wouldn't have do that, you would just have government influence, or, at least have it 'quite easily' for some definition of easily.
If Jamie Dimon gives the President (or one of his aides or some other well-placed official) a call, is he going to be completely unable to find an audience who will at least hear what he has to say? Probably not.
It would completely disingenuous to say that there's no difference between the US and Russia but I think there's more in common than we'd like to admit.
It's not actually easy though. If someone airdropped you 100M and told you to spend it on some policy initiative, you, UtopiaPunk, would probably not be able to figure out how to move that money to a successful political end in DC.
Oligarchs usually have deep ties to top people in Government and they do each other favors. Some aspect of that probably happens at some level with some SV (and elsewhere) big-wigs and Government but not to the extent it becomes too shady. Of course there are whispers it does happen especially as it concerns family members of high gov officials seeming to have beneficial relationships and businesses getting a friendly ear. Or executives having a direct lines to gov officials.
I wouldn't be mad at Bernie if he called executives out for behaving like Oligarchs.
Capitalism always was cronyism (so was feudalism, but with a different favored class.)
It hasn’t been replaced, some people are just realizing the things that have been pointed out since critics of capitalism coined the name “capitalism”, refelecting its favored-class orientation, for it.
Corruption, greed, and power dynamics are features of humanity. They are not the only features, but they have always existed, and be a challenge in any economic or political system.
You can witness the same problems people have with capitalism demonstrated by monkeys and most other animals. It’s really just nature, some will be driven to have resources and power.
However, no more. Modern-day capitalism in America is to flatten the risk curve for people who already have money by borrowing from future generations with debt-fueled bailouts for companies. We have consciously decided to reduce the downside for the wealthy, thereby limiting the upside for future generations.
That's modern-day America (and western countries in general), but massive government taxation and borrowing, and spending on bloated, inefficient, and corrupt programs to buy votes and scratch backs won't get more love from "capitalists" than it will from anybody else.
It's not capitalism that is going bad, it is government.
Again, the system of massive government regulation and taxation, borrowing, and spending programmes is not "capitalism". I don't know what "VCs show their ass", or people asking the government to help them has anything to do with it.
Government propping up special interests is pretty anti capitalistic, whether it's a corporation, an unemployed person, or a college student trying to default on their loans.
> Government propping up special interests is pretty anti capitalistic, whether it's a corporation, an unemployed person, or a college student trying to default on their loans.
So I am assuming a purely capitalistic system would let the elderly and the disabled die on the street begging for charity? Are you advocating for such a system? Because no thank you, I am good.
By some peoples' definition of a purely capitalistic system that could be the case. By others, where most people are happy to pay a small and reasonable amount of tax, donation, or general insurance to have some social systems in place, because they can see the benefit and recognize that society is improved for their benefit as well even if they never make use of them directly (and therefore it being somewhat close to if not exactly a voluntary exchange for mutual benefit), it would not necessarily be.
I wasn't advocating for anything in these posts by the way, so your rhetorical question is not an argument. Here is one for you though, do you believe that in communist China, Vietnam, USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, etc., that there were no homeless or beggars?
What makes you think that capitalism inspired reforms are responsible when the most capitalistic country has the most homeless people? Do you have any sources for that information?
As someone once said, there are no atheists in a foxhole, and no libertarians in a bank run.
I've seen this tired argument so many times in last year: you make millions pumping crypto, you're just a genius capitalist and not a regulatory arbitrageur. If you lose money falling for another person's pump and dump, it's the government's fault for not saving you or making you whole. For these people, government only exists to enrich them/save them from the downside, just what this article talks about.
> As someone once said, there are no atheists in a foxhole, and no libertarians in a bank run.
This isn't all that profound though. People can advocate for a policy or structure of society while also acting in their own interests in any given situation. And you will find countless examples of that in any position or belief, whether it is social housing advocates lobbying against cheap housing being built in their neighborhood or climate activists flying their private jets around, or government school and healthcare advocates sending their family to private schools and hospitals.
> People can advocate for a policy or structure of society while also acting in their own interests in any given situation.
And thus we should have a set of rules we agree that is enforced consistently to increase fairness in the system. We can even charge a group of people with that _governing_ duty, and call them something like _government_?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadEdit:
Even better: https://twitter.com/petercontibrown/status/16350760923390525...
Same with cronyism. Actors have every incentive to bend rules to benefit them. The solution is to fight against it.
Wrong. That’s not what capitalism is or means. Capitalism is an economic system in which private investors run the economy in search of personal profit, while those who lack capital rely on wage labor to survive. You can debate whether this is a good or moral system, but it’s important to get terminology right.
Asking for a friend.
Actually, a few billion friends, come to think of it.
One thing that immediately comes to mind is that first-past-the-post voting systems seem to produce pretty bad results, basically always devolving into a two party system which enables easy us-vs-them rhetoric. And while people love to debate which alternative system is the absolute best, there are many in use around the world that produce better results.
1. A violent revolution against capitalism that destroys it.
2. You slowly contain capitalism and wind it down, making the elite increasingly irrelevant, as it appeared the US and Europe might have been on track to do from 1933-73, until you’ve basically achieved socialism without necessarily calling it that.
3. Capitalism continues to corrode the restraints put in place to contain it until you have an oligarchic nightmare like the US.
3 is completely unacceptable; 1 is a bit better but still involves people getting killed. 2 is probably best if you can pull it off, but the problem is that it requires society to do the right thing for decades whereas an overthrow of capitalism can be done in weeks.
https://redsails.org/concessions/
Cronyism is just another way to say "Late Stage Capitalism."
All governments suck, all economic systems suck, and it all sucks because people are flawed. We can always try for better, but so far every system that humans design, humans also corrupt and destroy.
I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.
Not having an economic system sounds impossible. In the absence of a planned system, there would be one that spontaneously emerges, in all likelihood one that's even easier to corrupt.
Not having a government would be more viable, but without a central power we would just revert to "might makes right", which is not so different from cronyism. Not to mention all the problems when infrastructure becomes profit driven or disappears, basic education has to be provided by private teachers, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#Polybius
Once the first set of greedy people gets powerful enough, they change the playing field and cement their lead.
75% of those billions pulled out of poverty were in China [0], which is explicitly not capitalist.
[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Capitalism and democracy are older than the PRC, and the billions aided by it include the entire modern western world.
The "last few decades" are around what I would call the last 40 years, wouldn't you agree?
The entire modern western world got rich not through some capitalist miracle, but by brutal imperialism and subjugation of the third world.
Communist have been claiming to be able to predict the future for the past two centuries. Certainly this time you will get it right?
"Capital", in this context, means the ownership of the means of production (classically factories, but in this century as much pointed to data, land, and regulatory capture). Specifically, the means of production that you do not operate.
If you must do labor for a living, you are not a capital owner. Stop identifying with the class of owners when you are a "working stiff" even if you're making mid six figures in tech or as the owner of a small business. In "Wall Street" Gordon Gekko was talking about "400k-a-year working wall street stiffs", and that's a million a year or better these days, after inflation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqjQxs9l5fg
I'll also have to remember that Capitalism is all about owning physical tools, not anything about making money from people doing work for you. So if I contract freelance kitchen staff to make and sell food for me, when they show up with their own knives, they are the capitalists, not me. Interesting!
Yes and yes, I’m a laborer and I wouldn’t take profits off someone else’s work unless we are all sharing the returns aka anarcho syndicalism. I can but won’t subject workers to the exploitation and role based hierarchies I myself escaped. It’s not necessary.
I don't know that I'd put a guy who owns a truck, a leaf blower, a lawn mower, a collection of garden sheers/related tools, and has a client base; I wouldn't put him in the same category as a bank CEO who makes was $5 million a year. Maybe I should though because the guy with the truck's been sold this load about freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that a FANG engineer making $300k/yr didn't buy. Personally, the guy with a yacht, a jet, a summer and winter home, who has enough money to never work another day in his life if he doesn't want to; that guy is definitely burgeoise. The guy that's gonna go hungry and have trouble making rent if he's not outside in the heat of the summer midday sun to landscape most days, just because he owns the truck he drives? Feels like I have a lot more in common with him, which makes it hard to want to throw him against the wall when the revolution comes. Maybe joining the burgeoise should have a $1 million initiation fee, but includes a free subscription to Netjets.
Quoth wikipedia:
> In the 19th century, Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist: (i) the functional capitalists, who are business administrators of the means of production; and (ii) rentier capitalists whose livelihoods derive either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or both.
That is, managerial staff (low level managers better, these days, better fit the description of petit bourgeoisie, I think), and owners. Talking about a man who owns his own tools, employs himself but no others, you duck either category - perhaps you're thinking of someone who employs others and manages them, in which case, I agree, they've moved into the position of earning part of their income from management.
But merely having the tools you need is not "the means of production" classically - that would be real estate and finance more than directly tools. You begin to cross that threshold when my hypothetical car repair or building maintenance guy also owns his shop (or building) and the land it's on - but even so, I think the distinguishing characteristic is not merely ownership of land and finances, but subsisting primarily on the rents and/or administration thereof. If my hypothetical car repair guy had retired, rented his shop out, and leased tools to people he employed, yes, obviously.
But I think you'll find that many of the people who identify as business owners are, in this analysis, tradesmen and working men first and foremost, rather than earning their income primarily as administrators, rentiers, landlords, bankers, or lenders. That is why I distinguish between the two, and you may disagree, but it's certainly not moving the goalposts or sneering.
It’s not so much the cronyism itself but just how large of a chunk of the pie they took this time. See salary vs house price trends. The remainder is so small that basic structures of society are starting to collapse (can’t afford education, house, kids, healthcare etc)
Had it not been turned up to 11 this could keep going.
Wait, what happened to the robber barons? I guess they didn't have PACs.
Oligarchs depend on the administrative state for their security.
The oligarch pays (bribes, political donations, what have you) the state $5 so that the state will spend $10 screwing the competition and then the oligarch's business will make $10. Of course I made these numbers up but the system by which these people hold power doesn't work if there isn't an administrative state with the power to fairly capriciously regulate the oligarch's business. The whole game is predicated on being able to buy unfair access state muscle. If the state is sitting on its ass there's no advantage to buying favor.
It didn't consist "of" robber barons. It was a tool they used when it suited them. I call that cronyism.
I guess on reflection my parent description is not quite right, but your comment brings up maybe the real distinction: if you were a true oligarch, you wouldn't have do that, you would just have government influence, or, at least have it 'quite easily' for some definition of easily.
It would completely disingenuous to say that there's no difference between the US and Russia but I think there's more in common than we'd like to admit.
I wouldn't be mad at Bernie if he called executives out for behaving like Oligarchs.
It hasn’t been replaced, some people are just realizing the things that have been pointed out since critics of capitalism coined the name “capitalism”, refelecting its favored-class orientation, for it.
That's modern-day America (and western countries in general), but massive government taxation and borrowing, and spending on bloated, inefficient, and corrupt programs to buy votes and scratch backs won't get more love from "capitalists" than it will from anybody else.
It's not capitalism that is going bad, it is government.
It's capitalism, not the government.
Government propping up special interests is pretty anti capitalistic, whether it's a corporation, an unemployed person, or a college student trying to default on their loans.
So I am assuming a purely capitalistic system would let the elderly and the disabled die on the street begging for charity? Are you advocating for such a system? Because no thank you, I am good.
I wasn't advocating for anything in these posts by the way, so your rhetorical question is not an argument. Here is one for you though, do you believe that in communist China, Vietnam, USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, etc., that there were no homeless or beggars?
Your effort at deflecting is adorable
I've seen this tired argument so many times in last year: you make millions pumping crypto, you're just a genius capitalist and not a regulatory arbitrageur. If you lose money falling for another person's pump and dump, it's the government's fault for not saving you or making you whole. For these people, government only exists to enrich them/save them from the downside, just what this article talks about.
This isn't all that profound though. People can advocate for a policy or structure of society while also acting in their own interests in any given situation. And you will find countless examples of that in any position or belief, whether it is social housing advocates lobbying against cheap housing being built in their neighborhood or climate activists flying their private jets around, or government school and healthcare advocates sending their family to private schools and hospitals.
And thus we should have a set of rules we agree that is enforced consistently to increase fairness in the system. We can even charge a group of people with that _governing_ duty, and call them something like _government_?
I don't agree that follows from my statement though, no.
America lead the world 100 year