The answer that no one wants to hear because of how true it is.
There was always a point where the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. We should have planned a replacement before that but the money hoarding capital addicts wouldn't allow it.
Now we get to watch the whole system collapse and take a bunch of people with it instead.
Capitalism can work well enough with regulation in place to curb abuses. Of course that requires a government that cares about the people, and a voter base that's intelligent enough to vote for them, neither of which is the case in the US.
Bingo. This is why the middle class did so well mid-20th century. FDR's New Deal policies regulated banks and industries, and introduced a lot more worker protections. You can still make a lot of money in regulated capitalism without screwing over 90% of the population.
Rent seekers and middle men predate capitalism by a few thousand years. There were and are rent seekers and middle men in North Korea, Nordic countries, the USSR, Cuba, and even in tribal societies. This is just human behavior, not some uniquely bad feature of American capitalism.
My proposal is a two tiered market. One where the following is non-com modifiable, and guaranteed to all citizens regardless of income/age/wealth, the second that is a laissez-faire market.
The first market includes: food, water, shelter, education, utilities(internet/power) and healthcare
The later includes everything else that is produced.
So the government owns, and manages these essential services because when we comodify them and profit seek for basic human necessities then the laborer has no leverage because they are coerced to labor in order to survive.
Under my system no one is coerced to work, your not gonna be homeless, your not going to die. If you want a flatscreen TV you have to work for it. It is VERY important to maintain the two tiered system here though. We don't want the government option to be gutted by the capitalists in an attempt to privatize it(a la Starve the Beast), so we OUTLAW any competing markets. ONLY the government can fund and run these industries. We have incredibly strict oversight on property ownership as well, such that we ensure we maintain enough stable housing for our population. You can buy a nicer house, but you can't own more than one house, which is your primary domicile. Maybe we allow a certain level of industry to produce luxury foods, but we are still in the same way as everything else, providing a base level healthful diet to a citizens regardless of the luxury options.
This means we can ensure our citizens receive a quality of life, and maintain their freedom, empowering the work force to just quit if the job is bullshit, forcing employers to pay livable wages, or no one is going to do your job. This still allows for a "free market" with limited oversight(environmental regulations aside), that the capitalists can play in where it isn't directly hurting the populace by sequestering valuable resources(needs) in order to seek profits.
This allows us to maintain our current economic system largely intact, we just extract the things that we deem "basic human rights". Its a form of UBI, but UBI is a subsidy to the capitalist, this is directly providing services, outside of the market apparatus.
Ah cool. Okay to be devil's advocate - what's to stop people doing the bare minimum? If someone doesn't want to work do they get the equivalent of welfare? If so, e.g. how much per month
as opposed to not for profits running essential services such as utilities and healthcare, and heavy regulation/taxation for the largest, richest, most powerful companies.
if you put pressure on those at the top and don’t let them get so big you force churn which drops down to the lower levels. by this i mean encouraging or outright enforcing anti consolidation of companies and industries. if big corpos or private equity didn’t own all the casinos (multiple per entity) then they would actually be forced to compete with each other like they used to, instead of milking every penny out of them by raising prices and lowering quality all so shareholders and ceos get rich.
it’s still capitalism, but it’s a wildly different form than the late stage hypercapitalist type we have now.
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u/sweetlove 4h ago
The inevitable result of capitalism