Is there any practical Alternative to Capitalism?

[Theo520]

Selfishness or greed isn’t limited to capitalism. These things are features of man and exist in any system.

These are the reasons why Socialism fails, it’ pretends they don’t exist in man’s base motivations.

Captialism turns self interest from a vice into a benefit as people compete for your business, resulting in better products at lower prices.

Also ‘Selfish’ is an inappropriate term to apply broadly and relates more to maturity. Our prime motivation is self interest, which is different.

 

[AlNg]

The real question is why would anyone accept as a store of wealth a piece of intrinsically worthless paper printed up by the state or a banking cartel at their whim. Paper money became a medium of exchange only because it was tied to gold. Otherwise it would be as worthless as Monopoly money.

Bitcoin is not tied to gold or to any state or banking cartel and yet one bitcoin is worth $6865 dollars. How do you explain that?

 

[exnihilo]

Lots of rare things are worth a lot of money. Bitcoins are an interesting product. It has a lot of elements that would make it good as a backing of paper money. But it is missing the one essential element which is it doesn’t need have some value beyond just as a backing of paper money. I think a lot of the current value is in being able to escape the central bank controlled monetary system and government taxation and regulation or at least the hope that it can.

 

[Vonsalza]

I would call that social mores. It isn’t a contract unless all parties agree to it.

They’re inseparably linked, but a social contract isn’t necessarily a legal document that you assent to. If you violate the “agreement”, the society places negative consequences upon you, regardless if you never explicitly agreed.

Like when I smoked in Japan…

We are likely to make less than our parents precisely because of big government…

No. We’re slightly prone to make less than our parents because competition ever-increases and the paradigm that you obtain from your parents is generally outdated by changes in societal norms and technology.

And we’re most likely to occupy the same socioeconomic niche our parents occupied. It’s just that in terms of mobility, the odds of sliding lower are substantially better than the odds of moving up; thus forcing the average down.

Social mobility is low in most countries. But I think it much better in western countries with more economic freedom. It might have been greatest in communism but you get with that all the evils of communism.

Alas, there is no governmental system nor economic system that exists without some sort of systemic downside. When there are winners, there must be losers or the value of winning is nil. Zero-sum game as it pertains to relativity.

 

[Seeksadvice]

Strange thing about other economic systems… You don’t see the esteemed leaders of socialist or communist countries living in the same conditions as they seek for the masses. Selfishness exists everywhere, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s capitalism, socialism, or communism.

AING: Bitcoin is an odd duck. I can tell you why it’s worth so much; people believe it is anonymous in many respects. It’s worth that much because it is used to buy/sell various interesting things which may or may not be legal.

 

[SuperLuigi]

The idea that if Germany had just been on the gold standard during its economic collapse in the 1920s things would have been better is absurd.

No it isn’t like that.