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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/542559
The irrational way of ressource allocation and oganization of production inherent in capitalism leads to wasted economic potential in pursuit of personal gain and profits, instead of democratizing the workplace, improving living standards and reducing work hours. We waste the potential found in automation on producing mostly useless things that are designed to break in a few years, while also threatening the job security of countless of working people instead of shortening the work week with same or increased pay.
I don’t think a planned economy can be good. East Germany had a planned economy when it was managed by the soviets and we are still recovering from that.
The problem with our current economy is not capitalism per se but more neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is what has allowed megacorps like Google and Amazon to exist and to take massive influence in politics. The free market needs to be regulated, businesses shoudn’t have as much influence on politics and there should be more social programs to help the weak.
While it is easy to hate capitalism and seek for other ideologies it will end up creating more harm. I don’t know if the current system is fixable or if we would need to overthrow the gouvernment to bring meaningful change but it currently looks like the latter is needed.
Exactly. Monopolism is bad, but markets can be a ludicrously powerful tool. I’m personally a georgist, which is an economic ideology that holds we should have free markets free of rent-seeking and monopolism. It aims to do that mainly by policies such as land value taxes, Pigouvian taxes (such as carbon tax), severance taxes (taxes on the extraction of finite natural resources), elimination of bad taxes and bad regulations, and intellectual property reform.
When the market fails to solve climate change, that’s because carbon pollution is a negative externality, which tends to cause market failure. Price carbon correctly using taxes, and suddenly you have what is agreed upon by basically all economists as the best, most efficient climate policy.
When the housing market goes amok and housing becomes unaffordable, it’s usually because land is fundamentally scarce and NIMBY regulations are manufacturing an artificial scarcity of housing. Much of those NIMBY policies like zoning make it literally illegal to build enough housing in the places that need it most. If you tax land – a kind of tax regarded by almost all economists as the “perfect” tax – you also remove the ability to speculate and hoard land. No more hoarding vacant lots in growing cities.
Markets are a tool. It’d be a stupid to throw out a powerful tool just because it fails under certain conditions. The key is you just gotta understand when markets fail and why, then implement technocratic policy to correct those failures.
East Germany is recovering from the massive theft the Treuhand did in the early ninties after the 1:1 Währungsreform every honest and sensible scientist warned about. The Wiedervereinigung destroyed East Germanys economy.
Though you’re right that the Planwirtschaft in the GDR sucked big time,but not because it was planned. Rather it was a combination of different reasons, the ideologically driven lies in the managment, inability of the people who made the plans and the hidden classes in society. Not to mention the shit ton of money that went into surveillance. A really classless society with a planned economy based on efficieny would perform vastly different.
No no, it’s definitely coincidence that all other planned national economics have sucked too.
Also just coincidence that all those also shared many other negative aspects I pointed out? And what about all of them being in a disadvantage from the start? When Marx envisioned communism, he explictly stated that it is something industrialised societies should try to achieve.
And keep in mind that they always stood against the “free” world trying to shut them down. I mean look at Cuba and Venezuela, a large portion of their problems is the free world trying to free them with sanctions, coup attempts or full blown parakilutary operations.