how<\/em>\u00a0you privatize that can be a great thing or a really bad thing. In the same way, combatting economic centralization or poverty can be done in good ways and in bad ways, and I think Mattan’s suggestion of focussing on freedom is a very good one.<\/p>\nHowever, I would caution Mattan and others from believing the oft-repeated claim that everyone is better off in a USA-style capitalistic society. Perhaps they are when compared to economies based on central planning, but the modern state is a very new thing as far as history is concerned, and we probably have all kinds of economies to try out. I think it is key to recognize systemic problems with existing systems, and try to figure out how these can be overcome.<\/p>\n
One systemic problem of capitalistic societies is poverty. Here I mean relative poverty: being poor compared to the people in your society \u2013 not some absolute idea of poverty compared to the whole planet. We are all encouraged implicitly or explicitly to be innovative, take charge of our future, and be the very best we can be. Poverty, as I understand it, is a feature of the system of modern society: the existence of a category of person who, from birth, is not so likely to achieve those things which we should all aspire to. Perhaps some people are poor because they somehow have less potential, by nature, but this is not what I mean.There are many brilliant people born into poverty, who simply have the odds stacked starkly against them from the start.\u00a0((I believe that people’s ability is affected very much by their schooling and upbringing; specifically, I think that a traumatic childhood \u2013 such as that experience by most of us in unjust factory-like child-correction institutions mockingly called “schools” \u2013 is key to limiting people’s ability in most areas. But that’s a topic to be tackled separately.))<\/p>\n
The measures taken against poverty are many and varied, and some are better than others. Welfare, at least as I know it in Germany, is not a very good one, in my opinion. Under this system, people have access to a living stipend if they meet certain criteria, the main type of welfare being available to people who are unemployed. Even assuming the stipend is enough to keep them from being poor, this system still limits their freedom: they have to go through embarrassing, even humiliating bureaucratic procedures on a regular basis and are forced to take a job, any job, even one they would hate. Such a system makes poverty slightly less awful without making it go away, and diminishes people’s freedom in the process.<\/p>\n
Does this mean that welfare as a whole is a bad idea? I don’t think so. The German system just isn’t a good way of doing it. Perhaps all welfare systems ever tried aren’t good, but that doesn’t mean a good one can’t be created.<\/p>\n
What I beg you to realize is that systemic problems in an economic system are never “somebody else’s problem”. They belong to everyone in that system, whether you happen to mainly benefit from it or mainly suffer. Like me, you probably have that image in your mind of a self-made man insisting that he made every single cent by his own hard work and wits, insisting that nobody ever helped him, outright raging that he doesn’t owe anybody anything. I’m sure many wealthy and successful people feel this way; if they didn’t personally make the fortune but rather inherited, they might feel this way on behalf of whatever ancestor did. But those who feel this way are deluding themselves.\u00a0We live within complex social systems which can empower us to do great things or condemn us to lives of hardship. Sure, some measure of luck and some measure of ability are involved \u2013 but they do not exist in a vacuum. If you benefit from a system and that same system makes others suffer, their suffering is your problem, and you are benefitting from it\u00a0whether you like it or not. I don’t mean to say the wealthy or successful are evil or something \u2013 just that no matter what they think, they bear a responsibility for the poor and the failures.<\/p>\n
I think we have to take responsibility over the systems we live in and be brutally honest with ourselves about what they do right and what they do wrong. And when we recognize a wrong, we have to be creative and find a way to fix it while doing as little wrong as possible. It’s not easy, but it seems to me like an interesting challenge, and I believe it is the right thing to do.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I have one or two more guest posts lined up to continue this discussion. In the meantime, comments are open. What do you think about all of this? Are there good ways to improve capitalism? If so, what are they?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his guest post, Mattan Mamane argued that central planning of the economy only be turned to when necessary. I tend to agree with this approach. But a case can be made that limiting economic freedom is always necessary, and that some forms of planning are better than others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6],"tags":[22,305,331,48,579,581,582,329,332,330,133,302,333],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1770"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.didyoulearnanything.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}