Another big problem is that unregulated capitalism will happily let me become sick/homeless/dead, if the market price of my labor is lower than the minimum required to keep me healthy/housed/alive.
A couple days ago I was hanging out with some friends and we watched this new movie “Nightcrawler”. It’s about a “creepy” guy. The first scene of the movie is him begging for a job or even an unpaid internship, and being turned down. Then he turns to a “creepy” occupation to keep himself alive, and the general tone of the movie is “c’mon everybody let’s hate him”. Each of us, completely independently, had a reaction more like “WTF America, you’re using money as a motivator and then you act offended when people go to extremes?”
In technical terms, capitalism provably maximizes economic efficiency under certain assumptions, but doesn’t maximize aggregate utility under the same assumptions. These two things are not the same, because money has diminishing marginal utility. If poor Alice needs a loaf of bread to survive, but rich Bob can pay more for the loaf because he enjoys watching bread burn, then Alice just dies. A centrally planned system of 1 loaf per person would’ve worked better in this case.
Yeah, that’s one big problem.
Another big problem is that unregulated capitalism will happily let me become sick/homeless/dead, if the market price of my labor is lower than the minimum required to keep me healthy/housed/alive.
A couple days ago I was hanging out with some friends and we watched this new movie “Nightcrawler”. It’s about a “creepy” guy. The first scene of the movie is him begging for a job or even an unpaid internship, and being turned down. Then he turns to a “creepy” occupation to keep himself alive, and the general tone of the movie is “c’mon everybody let’s hate him”. Each of us, completely independently, had a reaction more like “WTF America, you’re using money as a motivator and then you act offended when people go to extremes?”
In technical terms, capitalism provably maximizes economic efficiency under certain assumptions, but doesn’t maximize aggregate utility under the same assumptions. These two things are not the same, because money has diminishing marginal utility. If poor Alice needs a loaf of bread to survive, but rich Bob can pay more for the loaf because he enjoys watching bread burn, then Alice just dies. A centrally planned system of 1 loaf per person would’ve worked better in this case.