this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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That's not socialism, that's a country with social services. I've seen multiple time when people from Scandinavia were offended when their country was called "socialist" - they are not. The economy is capitalist but the country offers strong social services.
Another funny thing - when reading about the us you realizer that it's just a broken market and snowballed problems. For example - the government invests more than any other country (per capita) in the health sector. The thing is it got out of hand.
It's a broken market because it's a rigged market. For all my endless harping, I don't think capitalism is pure evil. I think crony capitalism, and I believe that is what it means when we talk about "late stage capitalism," certain winners are allowed to buy the rule makers, which concentrates wealth, which allows more spending on rule makers, etc etc.
If we had guardrails, capitalism could do what it's supposed to - See a need/want, meet that need/want, make a reasonable amount of money which gets spent on other needs/wants.
How is crony capitalism different from regular capitalism?
Capitalism is based around the possibility of financial and social mobility and uncontrolled market. The concentration we see today goes against this idea. I'm about to respond my original conclusion about socialism in another comment, but I start to think we went too large scale here too, and some balancing is needed.
I remember watching an economic professor saying that we will never achieve pure capitalism because it's just to measure how far we are into the capitalism. Maybe that also goes with socialism.
There's a dissonance between allowing complete freedom without intervention and keeping the market truly free - if an organisation can simply buy all it's competition and expand forever, that's just a monopoly which is a closed market.
As for socialism - I grew up in a kibbutz, which is one of the only examples a successful socialist system (imo). And this too, is time limited. My reasoning being having a small group where everyone know each other and decide to join of their own volition. Most kibbutzim failed after the 3rd generation - people did not want to share anymore (and took some very bad financial decisions).