Theyre always trying to widen the gap between the upper and middle/lower class. They hate you and believe the only reason you exist is to make them money. People often blaim capitalism but this isn’t the real issue. Its the politicians who are in bed with the corporations.
It’s imperialism to be precise, the highest stage of capitalism which see the merging of monopolies and state power, resulting in things like widespread corruption (lobbying), state waging wars in the interest of big capital, policies being subordinate to the stonks line and of course bailing out corpos which are “too big to fail”.
In a nutshell, it’s just natural development of capitalism.
I guess you could say it’s “corporate welfare” but the word “socialism” is not correct and shouldn’t be used here.
that’s billions of tax payers money with the tax burden being disproportionately heavy for the 90% while the 10% pay less and less taxes the richer they are
I like how on lemmy you see both how much upvotes and downvotes you have, on reddit you could have a score of 1 and don’t know much has happened, but with lemmy you could have 50 upvotes and 49 downvotes, making you really think about it…
Once again, I blame the Chicago school of economics. Fuck that economic theory. It’s exactly why we have the mega corporations of today, it’s entire purpose was to neuter the Sherman antitrust act after Roosevelt’s crusade against the trusts.
the chicago school is just a natural development of capitalism. In competition instead of cooperation, the winner absorbs the looser and cetralizes production more and more into oligopolies. Even if you turned back the time before the era of “crony/coorperate capitalism” it would take but a bit of time to get back to the state we are in right now…
I don’t get it. Billionaires do billionaires things, but this meme being made the same week as a liberal policy requiring fair taxes for the rich to cover social security for the next 75 years makes this poster 100% out of touch.
OP’s account is full of this type of half thought out, zero context, communist propaganda memes. I don’t even disagree with the premise of most of them in general, but it’s just turning this place into an auth-left Facebook.
It’s the kind of meaningless vague posting that rightoids are rightly criticised for when they post shit about the people they consider to be the ‘problem’. It’s vaguely shaped like the way they see the world, but really this is about as substantial as the ‘immigrant benefit fraud’ posts your shitty uncle posts.
I don’t even know what this is referencing, or how this would work, but everyone is in here saying ‘Omg so true’ and believing that this is the reason that things are shitty.
Like, everyone’s quick to jump on bollocks conspiracy theories, and consider such things as flat-earthers to be significant in any way, but you’ll constantly see vague shit implying these enormous, unlikely conspiracies between multiple competing companies, the government, involving the collusion and silence of thousands of people, and they get up voted because people believe it’s the sort of thing that could happen.
What bothers me is that it ends up coming to ‘someone should do something about this!’, but exaggerating constantly makes extreme options look reasonable or even necessary.
Very few people can actually say what they’d want the new status-quo to look like though, outside of vague slogans or utopian ideas that those in power will somehow do things wisely, justly and selflessly, like they never have before. We can’t compare to any other attempt at communism, and even the most prosperous socialist state would be considered ‘neolib’. Because the thing is, it’s really not clear how communism is the silver bullet many think it is, but also, the vagueness and disparity about the end goal means that we can’t really look at our current situation, look at the proposed one, look at what it will take to get there, and make an informed decision on which is likely to actually make things better.
First of all, I don’t know which country you are talking about which put these policies in place. And it does not matter as it does not alleviate the exploitation inherent in capitalism, it only puts a nice coat of paint over it…
They’re probably US-American, who thinks liberalism is the farthest you can get as a “leftist” and that liberalism is not just spiced up centre(-left).
good one. Smth else that I find quite funny as well: ppl from the US equating “America” with “USA” as if they are somehow more important than two literal continents
Which policy is that? Does it have a built in way to prevent accumlation of wealth? Maybe a death tax? Maybe some nationalizing of industry’s? No? Then it sounds like you are the one out of touch.
The use of the word liberal here is not the same as the one used by the one commonly used in conversation. This meme is talking about neoliberalism which is the dominant economic idea in the US and UK right now.
I think you’re confusing the US definition of liberal with the definition of liberal in near the rest of the world. Even in Canada the Liberals are centre at best
Nah I’m not. I know that US/UK/AUS/anglosphere capitalists try to say they’re liberal but there’s nothing liberal under a capitalist hierarchy. Apparently they’re trying to be sneaky in Canada as well
Ahh gotcha, I wasn’t sure. And yeah the Liberals here are like progressive classic conservatives. They’re not insane like current conservatives but they like to maintain the current status quo and will occasionally give us something like dental care but limit it to a very small subset of people. And that’s only if forced to by the supporting left leaning party (NDP).
Yeah exactly. Conservatives & authoritarians really like to market with phrases like “economic liberalism” or “free markets”. Always building a power structure which limits freedoms
I don’t know if I can be clearer than it is. It’s very obvious that capitalism is not compatible with liberalism. Conservative capitalists try to use terms like “economic liberalism” with results showing the opposite
While this is definitely a true flow chart, the headline is misguided. Considering the only difference between the right and left when it comes to corporations is how honest they are about their policies. The right says they will do it, the left says they won’t, and then they both do exactly the same shit.
This is a flow chart from a leftist/socialist perspective
Then you have socialist governments wasting billions of the tax payer money to rescue shitty state owned companies. Look at Portugal with TAP and Efacec. Socialist party, billions of the tax payer money going down the drain. Those companies were partially or privately owned and the socialist party only rescued it to save these private owners investments.
Liberal economics would actually be telling them to go fuck themselves and give no money to them.
While this is true, most left leaning people still know how economy works and why it should keep on working.
Germany is considered heavily left leaning nowadays. Especially in comparison to countries like the US.
But that doesn’t mean that Germans are suddenly borderline communist.
They usually do this because other things depend on it, so it cannot collapse or they percieve it as such/ that that is important/ that for example workers can’t go somewhere else. They don’t see how the benefits don’t outweigh the risk.
You see that’s a fallacy I see lefts giving to justify the state literally throwing billions down the drain. That these workers won’t find anything else to do. It’s not true and I can give you a true example. Portugal has a huge bet on tourism that blew up in our face when COVID hit. The workers in the sector lost their job all at once and had to find somewhere else to work, and they did successfully. One of the challenges the sector had when returning to normally was the fact it didn’t had people wanting to work in the sector. And currently the people that are mostly immigrants.
Socialism is defined as the working people either directly owning or democratically controlling the economy. I don’t see how that is the case in any “socialist” country at the moment (speaking of the nordic ones, Portugal, China etc)
sorry to disillusion you but your system is capitalism with a nice coat of paint over it. It’s still based on exploitation, imperialism, neo-colonialism and oil/fossil fuel money
Imma bring up an example to maybe explain it easier. North Korea calls itself the “Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea”. In their official understanding/rhetoric they have a democracy in which the administration acts in the interest of the people instead of a few bureaucratic elites. In reality it’s the other way around.
Now, if someone said “Look at what democracy does to a country!!11!”, would you not object?
So if your question is in good faith let’s break it down a little.
Capitalism is a economic system. It may have some liberal or conservative slant inherently, but in theory there isn’t anything implicit.
A liberal or conservative economic policy would be how you manage that economic system. Liberal economic policy should tend to favor rules and regulations to account for the flaws of unchecked capitalism. Conservative policy tends towards less regulation, relying on the market system to set prices for goods and services.
Personally, I’m liberal because the ultimate goal for any capitalist is a monopoly. Often in that situation, you get an unequal power dynamic that allows a company to stay ahead of competition or bully them out of the market, preventing the market from setting prices. Additionally liberal policy tries to regulate negative externalities, such as companies dumping chemicals in a river (such as when the Ohio river caught on fire leading to the creation of the EPA). Frankly, these are real problems inherent in capitalism that conservative policy doesn’t address because it makes the rich richer. It’s pretty disingenuous to argue that liberal policy is there to benefit the rich.
Anyway, that’s a super basic breakdown. None of that is say there isn’t corruption from the rich and greedy in politics. Frankly, money equating to political influence is crazy and has allowed the weathly to completely shape world policy. If you want change, look to rank choice voting systems or other ways to move more choice and power back to voters.
I appreciate you trying to answer a question in good faith, but you’re conflating ‘liberal’ with ‘vaguely left-leaning’, and none of what you’ve said makes any sense outside of current US political ‘discourse’ where ‘Liberal’ means ‘slightly left-wing’.
What you describe as liberal economics is closer to Keynsianism or Social Democracy.
In economics, the ‘Liberal’ school of thought is generally against regulation and interference in the market, seeing it as being ‘self-regulating’. In economic terms, Reagan and Thatcher were Liberals - hence them being associated with ‘Neoliberalism’.
The whole thing you said about Capitalism tending towards monopoly is actually a very Marxist/Socialist idea - Liberal economic theory tends to argue that monopolies form because of government and that they wouldn’t occur in a truly free market (although its more nuanced than that, there’s major disagreements over ‘Natural Monopolies’ etc. within the Liberal school). Source: look up any Liberal economist/thinker and their view on monopolies. E.g Friedman, J.S Mill.
Capitalism being an economic system doesn’t make it apolitical. ‘In theory’ Liberalism and Capitalism are very very closely intertwined, it’s not implicit, it’s absolutely explicit if you read any Liberal political or economic theory.
Also the idea of slightly changing our voting systems as the way to drive change is quite hilarious. Sure, moving away from FPTP would probably help a bit, but it’s not like countries with other systems are doing fine. These issues are more fundamental. And historically, fundamental change has never occured through small technical adjustments to political systems.
Good response! Thanks for the further reading! I was never an economics student, this post just felt like disingenuous US political arguments so I appreciate someone with a real background chiming in!
I’m not an expert by any means, but did Politics and Economics as my undergrad and did decently well in it; am happy to share my knoweldge. Also wanted to apologise if parts of my previous post seemed a bit condescending, wasn’t my intention.
Would be happy to debate/discuss more at any point if you’re interested.
Figure I might as well drop some more reading recommendations:
Specific to the topics of the discussion:
Chapter 14, from 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang
This basically expands on the meme, and explains the connection between liberal economics and ‘pro-rich’ economics, in only 9 pages. Not very in-depth, but quite good and readable - although note that this book is very much a pop-economics polemic, and Chang is an Institutionalist economist and very skeptical of ‘free market’ economics. He’s fairly controversial among economists, but not super radical or anything.
Link to pdf of this chapter only.The whole book is free to borrow on Archive.org.
Chapter VIII ‘Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor’, from Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman.
For a free-market take on monopolies, although a bit of an outdated take (the data has changed a lot, but the general arguments are still relevant). Free on Archive.org
Are markets efficient or do they tend towards monopoly? The verdict is in, by Joseph Stiglitz
Pretty short article that expands on our discussion about monopolies in the modern world.
Link to article
Chapter 2, Section 3 of ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’ by Karl Marx
This is basically Marx arguing against Proudhon, so a lot of it is weird out of context, but does sum up Marx’s views on monopolies. As with most Marx, not super easy to read, but very interesting.
Link to text from Marxists.org
Chapter 2, ‘Liberalism and Liberal Thinkers’, from 101 Great Liberal Thinkers by Eamonn Butler
A summary of liberal ideas, written by a self-described (neo)Liberal and founder of the Adam Smith Institute.
Freely available from the American Economic Association
More Generally Relevant / In-Depth Stuff:
The Wordly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner
Is a nice and readable intro to the history of economic thought, would recommend for an enjoyable read and broad overview.
Available to borrow on Archive.org
Economics: The Users Guide by Ha-Joon Chang
This is somewhat of a ‘pop-economics’ text so is quite readable, but also has solid knowlege. Chapter 4 has a nice summary of some of the major schools of thought, and there’s a lot of interesting economic history in here as well.
Available to borrow on Archive.org
Market Reasoning as Moral Reasoning: Why Economists Should Re-engage with Political Philosophy by Michael Sandel
Short article with interesting arguments about the limits of economics as a field, especially in considering the moral implications of allocating resources using markets.
Freely available from the American Economic Association
Chapter 3, ‘The Nature of Heterodox Economics’ from ‘Essays on the Nature and State of Modern Economics’ by Tony Lawson
Although this one is very academic, chapter 3 is only about 20 pages long and has a fairly good summary of some of the assumptions and criticisms of ‘modern mainstream economics’ vs ‘heterodox economics’. The rest of the book is excellent as well, it’s focused on a critique of modern economics and its attempts to be a ‘hard science’ by using lots of maths and models, with questionable results.
Link to a pdf here.
Chapter ‘The Place of Liberty’ from An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff
Especially recommend the section on problems with liberalism
Available to borrow on Archive.org
The Economy by Core Economics
This is just a textbook, not exactly light reading but it’s free and written by some pretty high-profile (mainstream) economists. It’s what I was mainly taught from so if you’re interested in what they teach at mainstream econ courses but want to skip the whole ‘paying massive tuition fees’ part, here it is. Link to the textbook on their website.
Also, Marginal Revolution has good stuff on econ on their YT channel and website; they are very pro-free market.
Hope this is interesting and/or useful, have a nice day!
I appreciate your effort, but my comment probably wasn’t what you would call “good faith”.
Even leaving aside the rather odd US scale, a liberal economic system is inherently capitalist, since capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, wage labour, exploitation of workers and pricing in a market.
All this is still present in what you call a liberal economic system (even if some of these effects are dampened) without touching the root of the problem, so it is indistinguishable from, or even equal to, capitalism, whether in an unregulated or regulated flavour.
Uh, liberals tend to want to shift capitalism towards something more equitable - you know, something that doesn’t leave so many people jobless or homeless.
liberals tend to want to shift capitalism towards something more equitable
No, they don’t - they try to reform capitalism to head off revolt against the capitalist status quo. That is why liberal reforms to capitalism (at best) only makes life better for a certain part of the working class - see how Roosevelt’s GI Bill left black vets and their communities out in the cold for an example. When this fails to protect the capitalist order, liberal-types will happily co-operate with fascists to violently repress the working class - see Weimar Germany for an example of that.
If you are the reading type, I’d suggest Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism - I haven’t encountered anyone who explains the history as well as she does.
Liberals are not your friends - Malcolm X was perfectly accurate when he described them as “smiling foxes.”
Right?! This is gaslighting pure and simple. Trump gave tax breaks to his corporate cronies on the backs of the poor and middle class. Was Trump a liberal? How about Bush? Clinton (who was a Democrat) made substantial strides toward fixing the economy. But I guess he was a conservative? Idiots don’t know the meanings of words. Next you’ll tell us that socialism and communism are both the same thing and what liberals want for the country.
Economic liberalism is the economic theory of both American parties. Idk how it came to be applied to only the democratic party but that’s incorrect. OP is presumably critiquing economic liberalism from a leftist perspective, of which the Democrats are not
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I’m a firm believer that all sides rob cheat and steal. Some more than others though…
Theyre always trying to widen the gap between the upper and middle/lower class. They hate you and believe the only reason you exist is to make them money. People often blaim capitalism but this isn’t the real issue. Its the politicians who are in bed with the corporations.
This is definitely not “Liberal Economics”.
“Further right than leftists” economics
Neoliberal economics
deleted by creator
What definition of liberal are you using here?
the one of (neo)liberalism. An economic state which is accepted and perpetuated by virtually all sides of the culture war
Historically by the right wing then.
Historically by both, the democrats just give out a couple treats now and then to make themselves look progressive
Edit: unless of course you’re using the actual definitions of left and right wing, but most people in this thread aren’t so forgive me if I’m mistaken
Tankies use neoliberal liberally
reagan’s a liberal?
He’s a neoliberal which is an economic stance that promotes deregulation of the markets and support of free trade along with government austerity.
always has been (in terms of economics)
HAHaHAHAHAHAHA
I think OP meant NeoLiberal.
It’s just socialism for companies
You can kind of see it that way… the rich get corporate, state-engineered socialism while the non-rich gets brutal “free market” capitalism.
not rly, it’s capitalism working as intended
I guess I forgot the /s What I meant was capitalist socialism
It’s imperialism to be precise, the highest stage of capitalism which see the merging of monopolies and state power, resulting in things like widespread corruption (lobbying), state waging wars in the interest of big capital, policies being subordinate to the stonks line and of course bailing out corpos which are “too big to fail”.
In a nutshell, it’s just natural development of capitalism.
I guess you could say it’s “corporate welfare” but the word “socialism” is not correct and shouldn’t be used here.
that’s billions of tax payers money with the tax burden being disproportionately heavy for the 90% while the 10% pay less and less taxes the richer they are
False, the bottom 90% paid about 25% of income taxes (in the US at least). https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
it’s about the percentage of income paid, not the net sum
Ok, so what percentage of income do the various income brackets pay?
Why don’t you look it up?
But I think what they mean is that the 90% are more affected by it, because proportional it’s a bigger chunk of their income missing.
But I could be wrong
I like how on lemmy you see both how much upvotes and downvotes you have, on reddit you could have a score of 1 and don’t know much has happened, but with lemmy you could have 50 upvotes and 49 downvotes, making you really think about it…
Not only that, but admins and kbinners can actually view which accounts upvoted and which downvoted each comment.
I thought everyone can see it? Not just admin
Everybody can see the number of upvotes and downvotes. But on kbin you can literally see which accounts upvoted and which accounts downvoted.
All interesting things, I’m gonna learn more about these things.
What’s a kbinner?
A user on kbin
Once again, I blame the Chicago school of economics. Fuck that economic theory. It’s exactly why we have the mega corporations of today, it’s entire purpose was to neuter the Sherman antitrust act after Roosevelt’s crusade against the trusts.
the chicago school is just a natural development of capitalism. In competition instead of cooperation, the winner absorbs the looser and cetralizes production more and more into oligopolies. Even if you turned back the time before the era of “crony/coorperate capitalism” it would take but a bit of time to get back to the state we are in right now…
FTFY:
good one
I don’t get it. Billionaires do billionaires things, but this meme being made the same week as a liberal policy requiring fair taxes for the rich to cover social security for the next 75 years makes this poster 100% out of touch.
OP’s account is full of this type of half thought out, zero context, communist propaganda memes. I don’t even disagree with the premise of most of them in general, but it’s just turning this place into an auth-left Facebook.
Oh no! Not the “auth-left.” They may make corporations exist for the good of the people instead of profit.
Yeah see, these are the lazy non evidence driven meme statements I’m talking about which Facebook is commonly criticized for
You’re so right lol. Most of these memes are completely brain dead.
*exist for the good of those in power. I really don’t see the value of concentrating power into a single point of failure.
Neither do most Communists, to be fair.
Has this liberal policy you talk about actually done anything to threaten capitalism in any way?
It’s the kind of meaningless vague posting that rightoids are rightly criticised for when they post shit about the people they consider to be the ‘problem’. It’s vaguely shaped like the way they see the world, but really this is about as substantial as the ‘immigrant benefit fraud’ posts your shitty uncle posts.
I don’t even know what this is referencing, or how this would work, but everyone is in here saying ‘Omg so true’ and believing that this is the reason that things are shitty.
Like, everyone’s quick to jump on bollocks conspiracy theories, and consider such things as flat-earthers to be significant in any way, but you’ll constantly see vague shit implying these enormous, unlikely conspiracies between multiple competing companies, the government, involving the collusion and silence of thousands of people, and they get up voted because people believe it’s the sort of thing that could happen.
What bothers me is that it ends up coming to ‘someone should do something about this!’, but exaggerating constantly makes extreme options look reasonable or even necessary.
Very few people can actually say what they’d want the new status-quo to look like though, outside of vague slogans or utopian ideas that those in power will somehow do things wisely, justly and selflessly, like they never have before. We can’t compare to any other attempt at communism, and even the most prosperous socialist state would be considered ‘neolib’. Because the thing is, it’s really not clear how communism is the silver bullet many think it is, but also, the vagueness and disparity about the end goal means that we can’t really look at our current situation, look at the proposed one, look at what it will take to get there, and make an informed decision on which is likely to actually make things better.
First of all, I don’t know which country you are talking about which put these policies in place. And it does not matter as it does not alleviate the exploitation inherent in capitalism, it only puts a nice coat of paint over it…
They’re probably US-American, who thinks liberalism is the farthest you can get as a “leftist” and that liberalism is not just spiced up centre(-left).
could be the case, ppl from the USA often assume they are the center of the universe for whatever reason
Well, have you ever looked at a map? We are always right in the center of it!
good one. Smth else that I find quite funny as well: ppl from the US equating “America” with “USA” as if they are somehow more important than two literal continents
Did that policy become law?
Which policy is that? Does it have a built in way to prevent accumlation of wealth? Maybe a death tax? Maybe some nationalizing of industry’s? No? Then it sounds like you are the one out of touch.
The use of the word liberal here is not the same as the one used by the one commonly used in conversation. This meme is talking about neoliberalism which is the dominant economic idea in the US and UK right now.
It’s the dominant economic idea in the entire western world.
Even the Social democracies like Sweden are just a degree of neo liberalism. You won’t find most people saying they want communism.
If anything hardcore leftists are out of touch, including the OP.
You can downvote me all you want, but it’s no secret that this instance was essentially a communist refuge lol.
I think you’re equating “is dominant” to “is good”. These are very very much not the same thing.
Liberal economics be like let’s get rid of capitalism
I think you’re confusing the US definition of liberal with the definition of liberal in near the rest of the world. Even in Canada the Liberals are centre at best
Nah I’m not. I know that US/UK/AUS/anglosphere capitalists try to say they’re liberal but there’s nothing liberal under a capitalist hierarchy. Apparently they’re trying to be sneaky in Canada as well
Ahh gotcha, I wasn’t sure. And yeah the Liberals here are like progressive classic conservatives. They’re not insane like current conservatives but they like to maintain the current status quo and will occasionally give us something like dental care but limit it to a very small subset of people. And that’s only if forced to by the supporting left leaning party (NDP).
Yeah exactly. Conservatives & authoritarians really like to market with phrases like “economic liberalism” or “free markets”. Always building a power structure which limits freedoms
That’s left or socialist. Left doesn’t equal liberal.
Left doesn’t equal liberal and liberal equals not capitalism. Both are true
No, those are socialist economics.
To-may-to to-mah-to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism
Yeah that’s the scam. Not actually liberal
It appears you havent read your own link there.
I don’t know if I can be clearer than it is. It’s very obvious that capitalism is not compatible with liberalism. Conservative capitalists try to use terms like “economic liberalism” with results showing the opposite
and when we click on “economic freedom”:
The commenter suggesting you should read your own links was right…
While this is definitely a true flow chart, the headline is misguided. Considering the only difference between the right and left when it comes to corporations is how honest they are about their policies. The right says they will do it, the left says they won’t, and then they both do exactly the same shit.
that’s not a left/right divide. it’s a right/further right divide. And even staunch conservatives follow (neo)liberal economics.
This is a flow chart from a leftists/socialist perspective
Then you have socialist governments wasting billions of the tax payer money to rescue shitty state owned companies. Look at Portugal with TAP and Efacec. Socialist party, billions of the tax payer money going down the drain. Those companies were partially or privately owned and the socialist party only rescued it to save these private owners investments.
Liberal economics would actually be telling them to go fuck themselves and give no money to them.
This comment will not go down well here, this site leans left pretty heavily and it’s easy to upset them lol
While this is true, most left leaning people still know how economy works and why it should keep on working.
Germany is considered heavily left leaning nowadays. Especially in comparison to countries like the US. But that doesn’t mean that Germans are suddenly borderline communist.
lol, who in their right mind considers germany as left leaning?
Yankees.
I am German. And Bernie sanders was even more konservative than us.
Probably, but considering Germany as a left-leaning country is still rich.
It sounds more like your perception of Germany is a little displaced from reality.
Where will you go when you realize the majority of people don’t subscribe to the right wing scam?
“Right wing scam”. Meanwhile the heavy you go on the leftism the more poverty you get. It’s not opinion, its facts.
…you say without giving a fact to base your comment.
Can you see that you’re a hypocrite?
Your comment is retatded, btw.
They usually do this because other things depend on it, so it cannot collapse or they percieve it as such/ that that is important/ that for example workers can’t go somewhere else. They don’t see how the benefits don’t outweigh the risk.
You see that’s a fallacy I see lefts giving to justify the state literally throwing billions down the drain. That these workers won’t find anything else to do. It’s not true and I can give you a true example. Portugal has a huge bet on tourism that blew up in our face when COVID hit. The workers in the sector lost their job all at once and had to find somewhere else to work, and they did successfully. One of the challenges the sector had when returning to normally was the fact it didn’t had people wanting to work in the sector. And currently the people that are mostly immigrants.
Socialism is defined as the working people either directly owning or democratically controlling the economy. I don’t see how that is the case in any “socialist” country at the moment (speaking of the nordic ones, Portugal, China etc)
Hey hey hey now don’t bring us Nordic countries into this🥺
sorry to disillusion you but your system is capitalism with a nice coat of paint over it. It’s still based on exploitation, imperialism, neo-colonialism and oil/fossil fuel money
Lmao you are literally the ‘but that’s not real socialism/communism’ meme right now 🤣
Imma bring up an example to maybe explain it easier. North Korea calls itself the “Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea”. In their official understanding/rhetoric they have a democracy in which the administration acts in the interest of the people instead of a few bureaucratic elites. In reality it’s the other way around. Now, if someone said “Look at what democracy does to a country!!11!”, would you not object?
God damn that is an excellent, concise refutation of his tired point. Definitely going to borrow that argument in the future
yeah… the cognitive dissonance hurts
One thing is the theory, other is how it always works out.
That’s not “liberal economics”, that’s just “Capitalism in practice”.
Where is the difference?
So if your question is in good faith let’s break it down a little.
Capitalism is a economic system. It may have some liberal or conservative slant inherently, but in theory there isn’t anything implicit.
A liberal or conservative economic policy would be how you manage that economic system. Liberal economic policy should tend to favor rules and regulations to account for the flaws of unchecked capitalism. Conservative policy tends towards less regulation, relying on the market system to set prices for goods and services.
Personally, I’m liberal because the ultimate goal for any capitalist is a monopoly. Often in that situation, you get an unequal power dynamic that allows a company to stay ahead of competition or bully them out of the market, preventing the market from setting prices. Additionally liberal policy tries to regulate negative externalities, such as companies dumping chemicals in a river (such as when the Ohio river caught on fire leading to the creation of the EPA). Frankly, these are real problems inherent in capitalism that conservative policy doesn’t address because it makes the rich richer. It’s pretty disingenuous to argue that liberal policy is there to benefit the rich.
Anyway, that’s a super basic breakdown. None of that is say there isn’t corruption from the rich and greedy in politics. Frankly, money equating to political influence is crazy and has allowed the weathly to completely shape world policy. If you want change, look to rank choice voting systems or other ways to move more choice and power back to voters.
USian detected.
I appreciate you trying to answer a question in good faith, but you’re conflating ‘liberal’ with ‘vaguely left-leaning’, and none of what you’ve said makes any sense outside of current US political ‘discourse’ where ‘Liberal’ means ‘slightly left-wing’.
What you describe as liberal economics is closer to Keynsianism or Social Democracy.
In economics, the ‘Liberal’ school of thought is generally against regulation and interference in the market, seeing it as being ‘self-regulating’. In economic terms, Reagan and Thatcher were Liberals - hence them being associated with ‘Neoliberalism’.
The whole thing you said about Capitalism tending towards monopoly is actually a very Marxist/Socialist idea - Liberal economic theory tends to argue that monopolies form because of government and that they wouldn’t occur in a truly free market (although its more nuanced than that, there’s major disagreements over ‘Natural Monopolies’ etc. within the Liberal school). Source: look up any Liberal economist/thinker and their view on monopolies. E.g Friedman, J.S Mill.
Capitalism being an economic system doesn’t make it apolitical. ‘In theory’ Liberalism and Capitalism are very very closely intertwined, it’s not implicit, it’s absolutely explicit if you read any Liberal political or economic theory.
Economics is inherently political.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/#Libe Sections 3 and 4 of this are a decent starting point.
Also the idea of slightly changing our voting systems as the way to drive change is quite hilarious. Sure, moving away from FPTP would probably help a bit, but it’s not like countries with other systems are doing fine. These issues are more fundamental. And historically, fundamental change has never occured through small technical adjustments to political systems.
Good response! Thanks for the further reading! I was never an economics student, this post just felt like disingenuous US political arguments so I appreciate someone with a real background chiming in!
You’re welcome!
I’m not an expert by any means, but did Politics and Economics as my undergrad and did decently well in it; am happy to share my knoweldge. Also wanted to apologise if parts of my previous post seemed a bit condescending, wasn’t my intention.
Would be happy to debate/discuss more at any point if you’re interested.
Figure I might as well drop some more reading recommendations:
Specific to the topics of the discussion:
More Generally Relevant / In-Depth Stuff:
Hope this is interesting and/or useful, have a nice day!
I appreciate your effort, but my comment probably wasn’t what you would call “good faith”.
Even leaving aside the rather odd US scale, a liberal economic system is inherently capitalist, since capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, wage labour, exploitation of workers and pricing in a market. All this is still present in what you call a liberal economic system (even if some of these effects are dampened) without touching the root of the problem, so it is indistinguishable from, or even equal to, capitalism, whether in an unregulated or regulated flavour.
Economic liberalism
Have you noticed how liberalism is always pro-capitalism?
Uh, liberals tend to want to shift capitalism towards something more equitable - you know, something that doesn’t leave so many people jobless or homeless.
No, they don’t - they try to reform capitalism to head off revolt against the capitalist status quo. That is why liberal reforms to capitalism (at best) only makes life better for a certain part of the working class - see how Roosevelt’s GI Bill left black vets and their communities out in the cold for an example. When this fails to protect the capitalist order, liberal-types will happily co-operate with fascists to violently repress the working class - see Weimar Germany for an example of that.
If you are the reading type, I’d suggest Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism - I haven’t encountered anyone who explains the history as well as she does.
Liberals are not your friends - Malcolm X was perfectly accurate when he described them as “smiling foxes.”
You just said the same thing twice
Liberals tend to be against handing large amounts of money over to big corporations, though.
“liberal economics” ? Seriously? This flowchart describes every POS robber baron capitalist for the last several centuries.
those are the effects of liberal capitalism
Right?! This is gaslighting pure and simple. Trump gave tax breaks to his corporate cronies on the backs of the poor and middle class. Was Trump a liberal? How about Bush? Clinton (who was a Democrat) made substantial strides toward fixing the economy. But I guess he was a conservative? Idiots don’t know the meanings of words. Next you’ll tell us that socialism and communism are both the same thing and what liberals want for the country.
Economic liberalism is the economic theory of both American parties. Idk how it came to be applied to only the democratic party but that’s incorrect. OP is presumably critiquing economic liberalism from a leftist perspective, of which the Democrats are not