capitalism questions and discussion

Resources are expensive, so the fewer you need to produce a good, the cheaper the good. Thus capitalism naturally strives to use as little as possible.

Efficiency here is more dollars out per dollar put in, but because resources such as land, raw goods, time, and labor (especially unpleasant labor, since it costs more) all cost money, it ends up pushing for using as little as those as possible.

There's another positive outcomes of this drive toward efficiency as well though, it encourages recycling. Garbage is an extremely cheap resource, since not many people want it, and if you can figure out a way to utilize it, you're making a product from very cheap resources, and can make a cheap product.

In one episode of Community, the study group took over the supply of deep-fried chicken (in a mafia movie parody), and Abed was in charge of distributing it to the rest of the school. When told to stop, and that the mafia movie was over, he replied "I'm not doing a mafia movie. In fact, I don't need movies or tv shows to talk to people anymore. Before I only needed them because the day to day world made no sense to me, but now everyone's speaking the same language, chicken. I understand people, and they finally understand me."

Everyone has different terminal goals. Some people want to cure cancer, some want to win a race, some want to eat spaghetti, and some want to meet new people. This should make it very difficult for two people to interact and exchange goods or services, since they want different things and have no way of knowing what the other wants (short of directly asking). However, in capitalism, everyone shares one convergent instrumental goal, money.

Completing your terminal goal, whatever it is, is probably exceedingly difficult without money. This means that everyone needs money for one reason or another. This may seem bad (since not everyone can necessarily get money) but it means that everyone understands what everyone else wants, and it opens the door to interaction, cooperation, and trade.

Everyone understands the language of money. Just as making a friend with someone who doesn't speak your language is more difficult, trading with someone who is entirely uninterested in what you have to offer (or if you are entirely uninterested in what they are offering) is much more difficult.

If you produce lots of honey, and all you want is goats, then if I want some of your honey I've got to find goats from somewhere (figuring out what the goat guy wants in the process). Probably this ends up with you having only honey and no goats, and me having no honey. However, if I had money, and you could be assured that the guy with the goats wants money, then we can trade. All of a sudden trade becomes possible, I get honey, you get goats, and everyone's happier. Trade could only really happen when we both spoke the language of money.

Furthermore, when you meet someone in a capitalist society, that person represents an opportunity for fair, mutually beneficial trade, and should thus be treated kindly. On the contrary, when you meet someone in a world without money, where you're supplied with resources free of charge, that person represents a potential drain on your resources, and is thus a threat.

Capitalism unites people. It gives everyone one incentive, one goal, that everyone works together to strive toward. It doesn't matter that Joe wants blankets and Bob wants beef wellington, they both want money, and they both know that the other can help them get it.

This doesn't mean there wouldn't be crime, or incredible acts of immorality. There will always be people who choose evil, but in capitalism there are avenues for cruel people to get what they want in mutually beneficial ways. Some will decide that these avenues aren't economically favorable to illegal or cruel methods, but these passageways exist for the many who do decide that they are favorable.

It's good to want workers to be paid more, better working conditions, cheaper medications, affordable housing. Those are all important and it's very hard to go without them.

However, government intervention is not a good way to deliver these. Price controls are a good example of this.

The market forces incentivizing people to provide goods, services, or employment dictate the price, and directly interfering with that price greatly effects the incentive to provide it.

This can be seen on supply and demand charts. In the case of a price ceiling, there is a much higher demand at that price (since people exceedingly find the low cost to be worth it), but a much lower supply at that price (since it's much more challenging to sell at a profit). The result is a shortage. In the case of a price floor, there is much more supply, but there's much less demand since no one can afford it, it is as though there is a shortage.

Price ceilings cause either shortages, low quality products, or both. Shortages happen because it isn't as economically viable to sell, so people don't go through the work or take the risk of selling it. Low quality products happen because companies need to lower the production cost and because if one person doesn't buy it, there will always be 10 more clamoring to buy it (no matter how low quality).

It is true that as you forcefully lower the cost, more people are able to afford it, but there are now far more people competing to buy at that price when many of them would rather spend more money and compete at a different price. More products aren't made (in fact, fewer might be made), so there aren't more people getting it, it's just harder to get now.

Price floors lower the demand and mean that many people are unable to acquire the good or service even though there is a large supply. Price floors are most common in the form of minimum wage. While there's plenty of workers willing to work minimum wage, it's hard to find a job where their input is actually worth it. Companies react by squeezing every ounce of value they can from their employees (by increasing responsibilities, lowering amenities, and forcing unpleasant working hours) all while being confident that they can replace their employees at the drop of the hat with the many people willing to work at minimum wage.

Again, there are people who might make more than they otherwise would, but they pay for it in unpleasant working conditions, and the threat of being replaced by someone who's work actually is worth minimum wage.

There are many other instances where government intervention harms the people it's trying to help. Minimum requirements for rentals mean that people who might have been able to afford a more bare bones apartments has to sleep on the street. Excessively long copyrights harm competition and allow the owners of said copyrights to act as monopolies (I don't know if no copyright protection is a good answer, but certainly government created monopolies harm people more the longer they are around). Government restrictions on what can and can't be built where cause urbanization plans that nobody wants. Even if the government provides a service for free, they tend to establish a monopoly in that area (since it's hard to compete with free) and then supply a low-quality, inefficient, unpleasant service (which still costs the taxpayers quite a bit).

It turns out, the government is really bad at helping people. Even if it genuinely wanted to help (which, historically, seems exceedingly rare) it would struggle to do so.

Since there's so little pro-capitalism sentiment on the fediverse (or maybe it's just lemmy, in either case I couldn't find much) I'd like to start posting some arguments for capitalism. I'm not an expert, so I don't know that what I'm saying matches what a capitalist who knows what he's talking about might say. Let me know if I'm way off please.

One of the basic ideas behind capitalism is competition. There are multiple companies competing for your money. It is of vital importance for each of them that they collect more consumer dollars than they spend. This ensures that they are making a profit and can keep growing their business.

To ensure that one company gets your business over another, the company will produce the highest quality product for the lowest price. They'll desperately explore how best to make a particular product, what products consumers want, the best ways to deliver that product to the consumer, and the lowest price they can sell that item for while staying in business. They are doing everything in their power to make dealing with them more pleasant for the consumer than dealing with their competitor would be. That's how they compete.

This means that you get an efficiently made product, that you wanted, in an easy to purchase place, for a low cost. What's more, this incentive didn't come from regulation (which will be ignored or exploited as much as possible) or altruism (which is unreliable and exploitable), it came from a self-interest. Capitalism takes the most selfish, ambitious, and talented people, and it forces them to stay up at night thinking about how to best please others.

Similar mechanisms protect workers. Companies compete to buy your labor. This makes it in their interest to pay you well (up to the value you can provide the company), provide good working conditions, and give you deals that have many perks and bonuses in your favor. If they didn't do that, another company could buy your labor instead, forcing your previous employer to either offer you a better deal, or search for a substitution. The issue with the latter though, is that substitute would also take better paying jobs (or jobs with better work conditions) if they were available. So long as there is competition for workers, companies will be forced to provide quality work environments to ensure that they can hire and hold onto someone.

When there's no competition, there's no incentive to provide quality goods or services. You can charge high prices, you can have inefficient development, you can make bad products, and there's no consequence. In fact, you might not have any incentive to make anything at all, preferring to simply be given money. The end result is nothing of any value is made on large scales and people are oppressed and controlled without any form of control over their oppressors. That's what socialism is. Removing competition removes any material incentive to please the people.

Capitalism looks good on paper but it doesn’t work in real life. It’s just human nature. These academics talk about supply and demand curves, but after hundreds of years they still can’t even provide evidence that one exists. I’d love it if markets were free and efficient. It would make society so simple and everyone would get what they needed most. But people aren’t robots, you know? They don’t consume rationally and all the money ends up going to the guys at the top who use it to make themselves more powerful. It’s called tragedy of the commons. Markets can start out efficient, but people steal shit and force people to stop competing, which fucks the markets up even more.

Can I be fired for wearing something the boss does not like?

I want to start by promoting a discussion about employment at-will in the United States.

Employment at-will is a concept I had a hard time with in my 20s. I now see that it is a vital characteristic of a successful society. If your boss hates the color blue and you wear a blue shirt, you can be fired. You might think this is insanity - but you have the same rights. If you think his red shirt is nasty, you can march right up to him and quit.

Employment at-will is the mechanism that self regulates your salary. You present an employer your skills and merits and they decide how much they are worth. If you have enough of these things you will not be fired because you are valuable and finding valuable people is hard. If you are not compensated enough it is your will to find more profitable employment.

There seems to be some strange idea that employers are members of some sort of elite patriarchy and the people they hire are expendable lemmings that do the same work. The opposite if usually the case - Employers look for people that have the characteristics they need to make the organization profit. Profit is not an evil thing, it is needed to keep the cash flowing to all employees.

Employment at-will is a great thing. One should not confuse this with being fired or not hired for discrimination of immutable characteristics like skin color or sex. There are laws in the USA that forbid this.

I am shocked to see how many anti-capitalist's there are these days. Capitalism is quite frankly the great western experiment that has historically been proven to promote technological and social progress through the understanding that hard work and freedom to communicate ideas brings success. The opposite would be forced ideology and mandated work schedules - this has historically brought famine, genocide and mass technological decline.

Let's keep it clean and post a single question per post so it can be more easily digested.