zlacker

> capitalism is that it isn't a thing at all. It's the absence of a thing. It's a positive freedom.

This is very wrong. Capitalism fundamentally requires abstract property rights (i.e. someone can own a thing they have never even held or seen, much less used), and it requires a state to provide very strong protections for those abstract rights.

In the absence of the state imposing such a property right regimen, you wouldn't have capitalism, since it'd be impossible to accumulate capital if the only way to own property is to physically use and/or occupy it.

Importantly, capitalism is not the same as free markets! Humanity has had free markets in one form or another for most of its history, but capitalism is very recent historically speaking.

The notion that socialism is always anti-individualistic is also wrong. Left-wing libertarianism is a thing, and goes back to the earliest anarchist writers (who literally invented the term "libertarian" as a political label - and they didn't have the likes of Ayn Rand in mind when they did that). There's even free-market left-wing anarchism.

>>int_19+(OP)
We're talking about two views of "capitalism". I think you're talking about the kind in textbooks on economics and Marxism etc. I'm talking about the lawless, insane festival of destruction and human misery we see today. To my mind, it is a an absence; the absence of law and reason.

>>nonran+Tc6
We're talking about the same thing, actually. To be clear, I'm not pro-capitalism, quite the opposite. But the "festival of destruction and human misery" that you're talking about is caused by massive for-profit entities that only exist because the property rights system in capitalism allows and even encourages unbounded accumulation of capital (hence the name!), and with that, economic and eventually political power. That power is why megacorps can bend the law, and why their ignorance of reason does not lead to their immediate demise (as it would be in an actually free market, meaning the one with numerous meaningfully competing actors). Capitalism taken to its logical conclusion is the absence of free market because everything is monopolized.

>>int_19+7ya
I like your ideas and suspect we're far more on the same page than not.

Nonetheless I compare what we call "capitalism" to chameleon music artists like David Bowie (no disrespect intended to that wonderful artist), who change radically with time, constantly shapeshifting and reinventing. Our grandfather's "capitalism" is unrecognisable from its namesake today.

People often level the accusation against communism that "it has never actually been tried in practice", and I think the same is also true of capitalism. Maybe in the years before just before 1929.

Anyway, what I see today is not a recognisable ideology. It's just a bunch of criminals getting away with it and an effectively lawless USA.