you know how libs always say knee-jerk “communism only works on paper” despite the opposite being true? i would like to crowdsource help in writing a good retort to that, that could. hopefully plant seeds in someone’s mind.
Capitalism looks good on paper but it doesn’t work in real life. It’s just human nature. These academics talk about supply and demand curves, but after hundreds of years they still can’t even provide evidence that one exists. I’d love it if markets were free and efficient. It would make society so simple and everyone would get what they needed most. But people aren’t robots, you know? They don’t consume rationally and all the money ends up going to the guys at the top who use it to make themselves more powerful. It’s called tragedy of the commons. Markets can start out efficient, but people steal shit and force people to stop competing, which fucks the markets up even more.
Riddling it with cliches is fun lol. I think there could be more about labor relations, but I wasn’t sure how to work it in. Like more worker perspective and less macro economic abstract stuff
An approach I’ve had some success with is starting with a story/anecdote about problems in a big corporation and then tossing out some anti-government cliche. For example, if someone tells you about how some project they’re working on at Big Company XYZ is a mess that’s just bleeding money, hit them with:
See, that’s what you get working with the government: you end up wasting a bunch of money and never getting anything done.
It’s not exactly “capitalism only works on paper,” but it is a concise way of questioning both the supposed efficiency of the private sector and the supposed problems with public solutions.
Capitalism doesn’t actually work on paper either. For more info please see Capital by Carl Marks.
For every dollar of aid the South receives, they lose $14 in drain through unequal exchange, not counting illicit financial outflows. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.
You can read Jason Hickel’s book The Divide for more info on this topic
They talk about the failure of socialism, but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
:fidel-balling:
I heard someone say those countries are corrupt like the western corporations bribing their politicians aren’t also part of that coruption
Another angle for that one is “What, are you saying the people in those countries have some sort of predisposition to corruption? Now what does that sound like?”
My favorite retort to this is that capitalism sounds like shit on paper and still doesn’t work.
The appropriate response to liberalism is not more liberalism. You’re trying to do a “by your own logic” argument. You will not defeat liberalism with liberal thinking.
Nah, reasoning isn’t liberalism in the first place, and this approach actually does speak to some people. The mistake is in thinking you can move everyone like this.
What would be the purpose of convincing any single person that capitalism only works on paper? It’s a nonsense argument to begin with, that if something has not been achieved before, means that it can’t be achieved at all or that if something has been tried and did not succeed then we should stop trying. At one point, airplanes only worked on paper but we have airplanes now.
We know that capitalism works. The point is not to ask “does this economic system work?” but instead “how does this economic system work?” and “who does this economic system work for?”
We should be convincing people that capitalism is working as intended, that is, to enrich the capitalist class while the working class toils.
To say that capitalism isn’t working, would imply that capitalism was ever intended to do anything other than enrich capitalists, which is liberal thinking. No person should think that capitalism was ever intended to help working people.
We know that capitalism works. The point is not to ask “does this economic system work?” but instead “how does this economic system work?” and “who does this economic system work for?”
These are more precise questions, but this is basically quibbling over the definition of “works.” We all know what OP means when she says “capitalism only works on paper.”
To say that capitalism isn’t working, would imply that capitalism was ever intended to do anything other than enrich capitalists, which is liberal thinking.
It is, but the whole point of this conversation is (presumably) to move someone who buys into exactly that sort of thinking. If you tell some lib that capitalism was only ever intended to enrich the already wealthy, they’d first argue that no, capitalism “works” for everyone, or at least the vast majority of people. Which would bring the conversation back to the point that capitalism only “works” that way on paper.
