Capitalism doesn’t work without choice of consumption. If you have a bad or misleading product, eventually people won’t use it.
I’m less worried about typical profit-mongering than I am about the corporate owned media however - media has a powerful ability to skew and censor truthful news.
But until then, the bad and misleading products are quite profitable for those engaging in the bad practices, thereby ensuring the behavior will continue to happen. Once they're "found out", they'll just re-brand or move to some other garbage to manufacture.
That works well for bad products, which is why bad products are the least of our problems. But consumer choice is utterly ineffective at internalizing externalities, because consumers don't have the time to research the supply chains behind different options and don't feel like they have the money to make choices that don't lead to disaster in the long run.
That's a myth of Capitalism, a lot of crappy products are used every day because of marketing, market flooding, patenting, copyright, corruption and so on and so forth.
Not a myth at all; what you just described is generally a result of crony capitalism, in bed with the government.
When a true free market is allowed to operate (which happens all the time in many aspects of our economy), it is the most democratic meritocratic and fair way to exchange goods and services, and accumulate wealth. Pure capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system or system of government in the history of mankind.
How is a completely free market insulated from the influence of marketing/advertising? They are very effective techniques for convincing buyers to choose non-optimal products, and work exceedingly well in that regard.
I also think you would find it very hard to point at an example of a working free market that has not devolved into an oligopoly, with no govrnment support at all; nevermind one that has produced large-scale wealth.
> As long as Capitalism is the main economic system this will always be only about the profits.
I disagree. It's a matter of priorities. It's totally possible for a capitalist society to prioritize things like human rights, etc. over profits through political and social means.
I think the main issue here is that capitalist institutions and capitalist thinking are ascendent (in the US at least) while rival political and social institutions and modes of thought that could keep it in check are being hollowed out and weakened.
Sort of. Socialists contend that the mechanical logic of the system makes that impossible, so the economic system must be refounded on the material basis of the political power of the majority - worker control of the economy / democratic control of the economy. Those two ideas go hand in hand.
You're confusing socialism with communism. Socialism is a political philosophy, whereas communism is one specific (but not the only possible) implementation of that philosophy. Socialism is also intended to be a criticism of and attempt to redress the immorality of capitalism, so morality does enter into it, at least in theory.
Socialism as it's understood now is a specific plan for replacing Capitalism, tied to a specific theory of history, not just a philosophy. At the level of implementation, it isn't morality, it's economics and politics. There might be morality behind it, but there's morality behind all actions, to some extent.
Many modern capitalist governments, including the US, employ socialist programs with no intention of overturning capitalism itself.
And the entire thesis behind socialism is that it's morally superior to capitalism, in a similar way that free software is argued as being morally superior to proprietary software.
> I believe that is what most people would call socialism. When taken at its root idea anyway.
No, it could also be the society's moral system. For instance, take a hypothetical capitalist society where the shame and stigma of violating human rights is very strong. A business owner there would likely refuse to violate them even if it's very profitable, because doing so would make him a pariah, no "socialism" required.
> A business owner there would likely refuse to violate them even if it's very profitable, because doing so would make him a pariah, no "socialism" required.
This sounds like the kind of whataboutism you'd encounter on any thread negatively countering China, but it isn't. This is an uncontroversial fact about capitalism that Adam Smith covered before capitalism even emerged as a concept.
The goal of capitalism is to maximize production output. Everything else is peripheral. Maybe it's a hard truth to come to grips with, but that is what we need to do in order to move forward on resolving today's issues.
This whole thread derails from the topic of American CBS censorship,
so it sort of did fall into a whataboutism type of distraction cycle.
Theoretically capitalist companies that are censoring important content can be pressured with boycotts over censorship, though I'm not sure how feasible that is here.
> This whole thread derails from the topic of censorship
Or highlights the relationship between capitalism and censorship when the capital is held by a totalitarian state?
China has quietly sat and waited for the last 50 years while they accrued capital. Now they have it, and they're using it to take control of the same incentive systems that created the developed world. Ignoring the threat that's posed, or ignoring the weakness of those incentive systems is going to be fatal to the ideologies that China has targeted.
If siding with human rights helps make money they will side with human rights, if genocide helps make even more money they will side with genocide.
As long as Capitalism is the main economic system this will always be only about the profits.