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'Neoliberal capitalism' has contributed to the rise of fascism, says Nobel laureate
(www.abc.net.au)
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Efficiency under capitalism?
We waste tremendous amounts of food but people go hungry.
We produce absurd levels of clothing, much of which is destroyed and sent to landfills without being worn, but there are people who need it.
We have more houses than unhoused by a huge factor.
Capitalism optimizes for profit and profit only. Sometimes that leads to good outcomes, sometimes it leads to bad outcomes.
It's not "efficient" in terms of taking care of people's needs. It's only efficient in terms of producing profits for the owner and investor classes.
This waste may look big in absolute numbers, but probably isn't meaningful as percentage of total economy - we're wealthy so many of us can afford to be a little wasteful.
Usually bad outcomes are the corner cases - I'm perfectly aware that they exist (harmful monopolies, CO2, ect.) But it's the role of solid legal framework to deal with these issues.
On the other hand you have at best no idea what sort of pathologies can arise in alternatives to capitalism, and at worst it can be repeat of the of USSR or North Korea.
I'm used to shallow responses that regurgitate the capitalist realism everyone grows up in but this one is exceptionally poor.
We waste food on an industrial scale, it's not just household waste. Grocery stores dump good food all the time, sometimes going so far as to spoil it or otherwise prevent it from being retrieved from the dumpsters they toss it in.
You're also just parroting the notion that socialism means authoritarianism, there are many examples of non-democratic and pseudo-democratic countries with a capitalist economy, this is because the economic system is different from the political system.
The biggest irony with your (poorly thought out but strongly held) belief is that a socialist economy IS more democratic. Workers owning their workplaces and benefiting from their output and participating in decision making is more democratic and free than the petite dictatorships that make up a capitalist economy.
As a worker you are only hired and remain employed insofar as you produce more value for the company than you cost, that's a plain fact. This means that the people who own your company are taking wealth that you produce. This is the "freedom" you're blindly advocating for.
I wonder why you feel like you must be a champion for this exploitative system. You're being so submissive to your owners. What a good little worker.
My relative happens to work in the food trade industry. The only cases when they dump food is either when expiration date is passing, or when they suspect that frozen stuff was transported incorrectly - aka cooling/freezing chain was broken somewhere - in that case they just don't accept the transport - it's most likely dumped afterwards by the company delivering it.
Sale of expired food is forbidden by law.
Of course. Also as a worker I remain hired and employed as long as the employer delivers me more value (aka wage and other benefits) than his competitors. Otherwise I dump him just like he'd dump me.
The "best before" dates aren't expiration dates. They dump them only because they don't sell as well. It's prioritizing profit over feeding people.
You're very uninformed, but very confident.
In EU they ARE expiration dates. It's forbidden to trade expired food
I don't know anything about European regulation but food waste is still a major problem there https://feedbackeurope.org/results-of-eu-food-waste-survey-2024-edition/. In the US and Canada grocery stores throw food out if they think they can't sell it, even "ugly" fruit and vegetables.
Your point seems to be that you think grocery store food waste is a matter of too much regulation. I can't argue with someone who treats capitalism like a deity and works backwards from the axiom that capitalism is perfect therefore something else must be wrong.
You're the biggest capitalism simp I've encountered in quite some time. You come across like a libertarian, and maybe you are, if so I wish you had been forthcoming with that information so I knew not to waste my time trying to have a rational conversation with someone with an oxymoronic political identity. Nobody can rationalize their way out of such doublethink.
I thought it's a mater of public health and safety.
I can't ignore what I see. And I see, computers, airplanes, modern agriculture, and all the wonders of modern civilization.
I was a libertarian as a teenager, but with time I understood that every extremism is pathological. I'd say I'm a liberal now.
It's always gets personal with you people. You can't win the debate and you get angry.
Which part of my identity is oxymoronic? You throw accusations but you never give any examples.
The oxymoronic identity is libertarianism. It masquerades as anarchy but doesn't oppose capitalist oppression.
You don't seem to understand that what's profitable isn't always what's best. You are ignoring the scale of waste.
In the off chance that you're interested, here's a really accessible apolitical video about climate (likely from a liberal perspective, but apolitical like I said) that does a great job summarizing https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4GDLaYrMCFo. Liberal regulations might help there, but it's capitalist forces at play.
Regarding your "what about iphone?" comments, I'm sick of that tired argument and won't engage further. You might consider that there's been technological progress long before capitalism and even in recent history the Soviets outperformed the Americans in quite a few areas.
I'm not pro-soviet, but it's interesting that a serfdom-turned-communist nation that was brutally destroyed and lost much of its population in world war 2 was able to maintain global superpower status against a nation that was relatively unscathed and gained economically from ww2.
China is absolutely a capitalist nation, but they don't need American style capitalism to dominate the Americans in green technologies.
Attributing all technological progress to your vision of capitalism is pure worship, not fact.