• AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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    1 year ago

    Not everyone in capitalism is a winner, and that’s ok. The big advantage is that the losers are usually offered the opportunity to work and make a living.

    The alternative is crossing your fingers and hoping the government (or whatever body is responsible for distributing pay) gives you what you need. If they don’t, tough luck, there’s nothing you can do about it.

    • Michal@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      As opposed to under capitalism where you have to cross your fingers and hoping that one of those winners will offer you a job with living wage, while another doesn’t charge you an arm and leg for housing.

      • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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        1 year ago

        If none of the winners offer you a job, make your own, or acquire some marketable skill. You have options and opportunities.

        There aren’t as many options for housing as I’d like honestly. I’d prefer less regulation to allow for lower quality, cheaper housing. As it stands though, you still have options and the ability to improve your living conditions.

        • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Ableism at it’s best. I bet you‘re gonna ask for compensation if you ever get disabled for some reason.

        • Michal@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Smart people will do fine either way. I thought you were showing concern for the other people.

          • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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            1 year ago

            I think everything I said applies to stupid people as well.

            There’ll always be people who need to rely on charity, but if even a guy in a wheelchair can make a good living and has more opportunities than he can count I’d say that’s a really good sign.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      The problem is that the biggest “winners” in this case are almost exclusively the people willing to go the furthest to put profits ahead of people, which in a better system would never be incentivized.

      • Cleverdawny@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all others which have been tried

      • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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        1 year ago

        That leads to a beauty of capitalism though. People prioritize profit, yes, but with competition, the way to make a profit is to be appealing to people. You make a profit by providing the best good or service at the best price. This means that the people who have the goal of profits also have the goal of pleasing their customers.

        There’s a quote from somewhere that goes something like this “capitalism takes the most ambitious, selfish, and capable people and forces them to stay up at night thinking about what everyone else wants”.

        • kev@lemmy.kevhomeit.trade
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          1 year ago

          We have seem over and over again that companies will eventually become greedy and will kill all competition. One example Standard Oil , they will eventually not serve the customers as you mentioned. The customers will have to pay really high prices for lower quality service or product. I am not a lot into socialism because we come back to the same that one entity is controlling everything and we have seem also that the government sucks. So maybe a hybrid approach will be nice to try.

          • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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            1 year ago

            Insulin prices in the US is a great example of this. It’s not about being competitive, it’s about charging the absolute highest amount they can possibly get away with.

            • kev@lemmy.kevhomeit.trade
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              1 year ago

              Yes that’s a great example! Capitalism is great in paper it improves quality of life and the free market make companies more competitive but big corporations abuse this and create monopolies.

              • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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                1 year ago

                It’s not a question of not being allowed to produce it, it’s anti-competitive practices by the pharmaceuticals industry, which capitalism rewards.

                Specifically, drug manufacturers have repeatedly made lots of little changes to their existing insulin products in order to apply for new patents on them. This process, called “evergreening,” has discouraged competitors from developing new versions of existing insulins because they’d have to chase so many changes. This has slowed down innovation, along with “pay for delay” deals, in which insulin manufacturers pay competitors to not copy specific drugs for a period of time.

                Source

                Even though there are very few insulin products that have patent protection on the compound itself, the vast majority of insulin products still have patent protection on the pens and other devices that deliver the dose of insulin. Novo Nordisk has patents for Novolog, Novolin, and FIASP products; Sanofi has patents on the devices for all of its products; and Eli Lilly still has patents on some devices that deliver Humulin and Humalog.

                The patent protection on the devices is significant. Because the pens and other insulin delivery devices can only be used on with one brand of insulin, competition on those products is effectively delayed. While a prospective competitor could develop a follow-on biologic or biosimilar of the insulin, it would have to develop its own delivery device.

                Source

                • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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                  1 year ago

                  Save for pay for delay, all of those rely on patents and copy-rights, which are government intervention.

                  According to the first source, it also looks like competitors are entering and offering lower prices, including open source methods (though I have no idea how that really works). One of the biggest problems for all of them is the government saying “no, you can’t do this or that for whatever reason”. Sometimes it’s good for the government to intercede, but it seems like in this case it’s helping perpetuate monopolies.

          • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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            1 year ago

            Monopolies are pretty dangerous, and I’d like to avoid then as much as possible.

            I think that they’re generally created and sustained by government intervention though. Bailouts, legal fees, red tape, price controls, exceedingly long copyrights, they all hurt new competitors more than established ones.

              • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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                1 year ago

                If one company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks then I’m going to buy someone else’s bread and that company loses a lot of money.

                If every company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks, that’s an extraordinary opportunity for a new competitor to come in with reasonable prices.

                  • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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                    1 year ago

                    One valid use of government power is punishing people who murder, and I’m not exactly sure what power cartels have outside of that.

                    I googled it and the Wikipedia page said they’re inherently unstable, but I don’t know how reliable that is.

                    In any case, I don’t see how my second example isn’t a cartel itself. All the bread companies are colluding to set the price of bread artificially high. The problem is there isn’t much to stop new competitors (or to stop members defecting).

            • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              You should read Lenin’s “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”, you’re like 2 steps from it, just in this moment you try to turn back the clock instead of looking forward.

    • burntbutterbiscuits@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      There are quite a number of other alternatives. Your reduction of this issue shows that you are not only a capitalist whore but also very ignorant.

      • AchillesUltimate@lemy.lol
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        1 year ago

        I wasn’t aware there are ao many other options? Could you reference some?

        I guess you could grow and make everything yourself, buy that doesn’t seem like an economic system.

        I’m actually not sure how pay was distributed in feudalism, so that could theoretically be another way, but I doubt it is.

        Something like UBI would be the latter option.

        Maybe if you had capitalism at a macro level, but communism at a micro level. Each town internally worked like communism, but interacted with others in a capitalist fashion. But even there, there will be people in the town distributing pay (or goods and services directly) without you having control over it. You might be able to be especially charismatic, or threaten a revolt, but I don’t think those are things people can typically do.