this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Sure, it's just too bad it's also a system in which the most powerful are incentivized to cut regulations and destroy social safety nets.
This utopic version of capitalism sounds really nice, but it's fully incompatible with the actual reality of capitalism.
All it takes for capitalism to work flawlessly is... checks notes... a fundamental change in human nature, where we no longer feel greed.
EZPZ. Best system ever designed!
(don't tell anyone that this would equally make communism work)
It’s self interest that fuels capitalism. The reason it has succeeded is that it takes advantage of this primal instinct. But obviously selfishness, while very motivating for an individual, does not magically add up to collective good. So you have to also have a plan for that, ideally funded by all the self interested wealth-getting. But if all you have is that collective good, and no offering for the instinct to serve self-interest, then all you have is a bunch of people standing around looking at each other, wondering who’s going to make it happen.
If a socio-economic system incentives greed to the point where a person who is not greedy is literally unable to succeed, can you really say that greed is human nature?
Of course it is! Just like violence, murder, rape, etc., etc. We're just better at handling some nasty parts of our nature than others. Especially because for the longest time incentivizing greed was leading to the betterment of the individual (and, accidentally, sometimes also the commune).
We punish murderers, but we don't punish CEOs running a company to the ground for a short-term increase in share prices. Or, hell, look at US healthcare insurance companies - these people DO MURDER, but because it's called different on paper, and brings profits, nobody is getting punished.
What's your alternative system?
I'm in no way educated enough to give a definitive answer, but I feel like a "socialist-capitalist" hybrid would work wonders.
A system with Universal Basic Income, universal healthcare, universal housing (basically: all basic human needs covered 100% of the time regardless of circumstances) with incentives to get education, work, and earn money (for all the shiny cool things that UBI can't cover), with a very strong grant/government investment system (replacing shareholders) to provide a non-malicious financial support for inventors/businesses.
That's not "utopic" it's how it exists right now in a number of Western countries.
The government is supposed to respond to the people. In Europe, it more often does. In the US, complacent/ignorant/lazy people do nothing to demand the government provide for the people. Instead, they waste time on the internet pretending that command-economy communism would magically be better.
This perverse incentive, however, is at least limited to a very small group of people, whose influence, with the correct exercise of state power, can be contained.
In a capitalist economy or capitalist-like economy, everyone's individual self-interest aligns with the collective self-interest a good percentage of the time, so relatively little state intervention is needed to keep it working well. The problem with alternative economic systems is that it is in almost nobody's interest to work for the common good, either because of a collective action problem (in communist or communist-like systems) or other reasons. That is why governments in non-capitalist countries are comparatively more heavy-handed with their application of state power. They have to do so in order to maintain their system when it is in nobody's interest to do so on their own.
Without addressing the more obscure systems which I do not know enough about to give an informed take, the difference between capitalism and communism is that the former works by assuming the worst of everyone and the latter works by assuming the best of everyone. And humans acting in large groups tend to act shitty and selfishly.
Except that doesn't really add up in reality. People do want to contribute. People do want to feel useful.
A lot of today's most important functions are done by people who do it out of a love for the field, not because they're paid well to do it. I'm thinking teachers. I'm thinking academics. I'm thinking people in certain medical fields such as nursing. A lot of these jobs frankly suck compared to other ones, and the list isn't limited to these.
Hell, I work at the place I do because I like the idea of working with what I do than just going private, even though I'm literally losing out on lots of money doing so.
And then you got stuff like the wealth of Free And Open Source software that people develop because they like to contribute. You got wikipedia. You got so many things people do just because they want to contribute, the list is almost endless.
Humans are wired to be pro-social. We could absolutely make it work. If anything, capitalism stands in the way of this goodness!
This is only true if you live in a fairy tale.
As soon as greed is introduced, any notion of "collective self-interest" goes out the window (in any system, not just capitalism).
Socialism assumes that everybody has a "enough to survive" baseline, but if you want bells and whistles you need to actually work yourself. I feel like that's incentive enough.
Communism would - most probably - face the exact same problems as capitalism, where greed just completely turns the system around and breaks it. But we don't know since nobody has tried it yet.
Most Scandinavian countries are very heavy on socialism, and yet that isn't a problem.
They actually both assume the same - the best - about everyone. The entire premise of "trickle down economy" is based on "when you're rich enough, you will want to help the poorer people out and uplift your community". As we now know - that's not the case (because greed).
Communism does the exact same thing, but flipped on its head - "centrally managed economy will work because people will want to help out other people" forgetting about the greed factor.