#AdamSmith wrote people should be able to earn a living wage, and that the interests of merchants were not the same as that of the public. Paul Samuelson twisted the metaphor of the “invisible hand” into a laissez-faire ideology, and capitalists ran with it.
Regulators didn’t put microplastics in your water.
The nanny state didn’t lie to you about whether tobacco products caused cancer.
Socialism didn’t decide to take a third of your paycheck for health insurance coverage, and then still do everything in its power to deny your claims for lifesaving care.
Capitalists pursuing their self-interest did all of that, and more.
The #AngloSaxon capitalist model ruined earth for humanity and many other species. #BigOil has been its undertaker, b/c #BigOilKnew.
If capitalism hadn't made the #GreenRevolution possible, human society would already have reached the #overshoot (1) point at the end of the last century:
In 1968, the #biologists Paul and Anne #Ehrlich wrote the book The #PopulationBomb"...
Labour buddies up with gig economy grifters rather than the ordinary working people they exploit 🤷♂️
How much further to the right do Labour have to lurch before progressives wake up and realise it’s a totally lost cause?
The UK desperately needs change in its politics but seems fixated on repeating the mistake of ‘97 by planning to elect a Tory Lite Labour™️ Government. Again.
The opaque right-wing think tank the Adam Smith Institute (beloved of Thatcher) has said it will be “expanding its network” into the Labour Party and will announce one of Labour’s peers as a patron in the coming weeks.
Noted #socialist agitator #AdamSmith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
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Socialists have been hotly anticipating the end of capitalism since at least 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto - but the Manifesto also reminds us that capitalism is only too happy to reinvent itself during its crises, coming back in new forms, over and over again:
But rents, Varoufakis writes, "survived only parasitically on, and in the shadows of, profit." That is, #rentiers (people whose wealth comes from rents) were a small rump of the economy, slightly suspect and on the periphery of any consideration of how to organize our society.
"In every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, most necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it." #TheWealthOfNations#AdamSmith#LiberalValues
Was für ein unwürdiges mediales Schauspiel:
Sobald die Regelsätze für Hartz IV bzw. jetzt Bürgergeld angehoben werden, muss natürlich unbedingt wieder hinterfragt werden, ob sich Arbeit überhaupt noch lohne.
Warum wird so ein Bezug so gut wie nie hergestellt, wenn mal wieder die Unternehmensgewinne und Dividenden in neue Höhen schießen?
Dabei dürfte es gerade Niedriglohnbeschäftigte enorm frustrieren, wenn sie selbst kaum über die Runden kommen, obwohl es ihren Arbeitgebern blendend geht.
...Arbeitsstunden für #OpenSourceSoftware vermutlich einen viel höhere Wertschöpfung für die Gesellschaft waren, als all seine bezahlte Lebensarbeitszeit.
DAS ist der richtige Denkansatz.
Wie die Vordenker des #ComparativeAdvantage der Nationen (#AdamSmith, #DavidRicardo und #HenryMartyn) sollten auch die Individuen sich auf das konzentrieren, was sie am am Besten können und mit Leidenschaft tun.
Ist sehr einfach und logisch, wenn man mal...
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare - but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the "passive income" that landowners got from taxing their serfs' harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income - and lots of it.
Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The "free market" of #AdamSmith wasn't a market that was free from regulation - it was a market free from rents.
«In any case, Smith’s perspective was generally correct: both about the way societies can develop three different tiers, and the overall view of the people at the top of them. Their vile maxim — all for ourselves and nothing for other people — seems to be reaching a level of virulence Americans haven’t experienced in living memory.»