this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Pretty simple really: capitalism requires infinite growth. We have finite resources. The world is literally melting around us due to unsustainability.
The pet peeve of many people is the greed (of billionaires, politicians, global companies, etc) for wealth (paper, essentially) yet not giving a flying fuck about the anyone else or the rest of the planet.
This isn't a property of capitalism, though. It's a property of humanity, and really of life. What capitalism did was just to efficiently provide food and medicine to people, and the population graph turned into a hockey stick.
Is starvation and infant mortality preferable? Do you think if people had found some (as yet unknown) economic system that was as effective at supplying food and medicine, people wouldn't have had kids? And if they did keep having kids, wouldn't that have taxed the planet like capitalism has done?
You are objectively wrong that capitalism offers an effective system at distributing medicine and food amongst societies. I'm amazed you've come to that conclusion when hundreds of millions of people die every year because they can't AFFORD TO BUY food or medicine... Further more the world is melting because of horrific mismanagement by the elite class and not much else. The technology, money and resources exist to solve most problems on earth but the monetary COST is deemed too high. See capitalists and capitalism will always choose wealth over human life, always, it's literally how capitalism began with old mate Columbus and the new world slave trade. From top to bottom, start to finish, capitalism is fucking shit and irredeemable.
Then what's your explanation for the huge rise in life expectancy and food availability--starting in capitalist Western countries, and then spreading to the rest of the world along with the market economy?
Capitalism is certainly imperfect at distribution of food and medicine. As the saying goes: it's the worst system, aside from every other that has existed. And the margin isn't particularly close.
You date the origin of capitalism to Columbus? Seems pretty arbitrary. Markets date back thousands of years, and recognizably capitalist forms of government emerged in the 18th and 19th century at the earliest. Columbus was sponsored by a king seeking new land, not capitalists seeking new markets.