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Question to discuss:
When the city switches over to a polluted water supply because it's cheaper than clean water #justcapitalismthings

You: Did that happen somewhere?

Stranger: flint michigan

You: Yeah but the city government did that right? That wasn't the private market I believe. That was the government.

Stranger: the government can choose profitable choices

Stranger: they're both authorities

You: Yeah but if it was the government, then that isn't really a capitalist thing. In fact that's more of an argument for privatizing everything.

Stranger: so there are no capitalist governments?

You: No. If we're just going by basic free market capitalism then they would say the water distribution should've been privately owned to avoid that disaster.

Stranger: but if a polluted water source is cheaper, why wouldn't a private company source from it?

You: Because it's a lower quality product and they can't compete in a market that's competitive. They're incentivized to get the best quality water at an affordable cost to beat competition.

Stranger: but lower quality products have their own markets

Stranger: specifically consumers unable to afford higher quality products

You: Yeah you're right, there's brands that appeal to all classes. They all compete in their little sub markets.

Stranger: how do you have competing water suppliers with regards to main-line water?

Stranger: do they all lay their own pipes?

You: I mean I'm not advocating for it. I'm just saying that's what a capitalist would say. And I'd assume they'd compete like cable companies do. Whoever can provide the best support plan in a local area.

Stranger: cable companies have regional monopolies

Stranger: they compete for bids with the local government

Stranger: and the winner gets total control over a region

You: Yeah but in an ideal free market styled society there would be no local government deciding anything.

Stranger: so then they would have to lay their own redundant lines

Stranger: it becomes an inefficient use of resources

You: Redundant how?

Stranger: multiple lines running parallel

Stranger: comcast and time warner, to access the same market, either have to share lines and provide different content, or run redundant lines

Stranger: it's already something not done with relatively small in diameter cables, but for water lines it would require significant construction investments

Stranger: a high barrier to entry into the market

Stranger: water companies can't share pipes, either

Stranger: since the water would just mix

You: Yeah stuff like that is where it gets fuzzy. Like how can a new social media company be competitive to a well established brand like Twitter or Facebook.

Stranger: with economies of scale, they tend towards oligopoly and monopoly as a matter of nature

Stranger: barring significant economic distruption

Stranger: if a company, the larger it gets, lowers its own operating costs and costs of expansion, it undergoes a snowball effect

Stranger: it efficiently outcompetes any new competitors

You: Yeah it has too just to stay alive and it gets incentivized to snuff out competition anyway it can.

You: I mean we have brands that have been around for centuries and aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Stranger: the difference between a government and a private monopoly is simply a matter of accountability

Stranger: liberal governments at least want to seem democratic and publicly accountable

Stranger: private companies can remain private and autocratic

You: I don't know if I completely buy that. In a democracy leadership and parties in power changes pretty much every 4 years. They don't have much accountability either. Plus I mean who really knows the names of people who make laws everyone complains about.

Stranger: i didn't say they were objectively accountable, i said they are interested in maintaining the pretense

Stranger: the pretense is not applicable to a private company

Stranger: very few people demand to be able to elect corporate leaders

You: They'd argue with the fact that corporations are accountable to consumers and shareholders.

Stranger: consumers only have as much input as they have money, and shareholders aren't a required entity

Stranger: a private company can be owned and operated without shareholders

Stranger: shareholders also aren't representatives of the public

Stranger: they represent their own interests

You: Yeah but that's pretty rare and difficult to run a corporation all by yourself. I don't think there's a single fortune 500 company that doesn't have shareholders.

Stranger: shareholders still are not democratic entities

Stranger: they are neither the public nor elected representatives of the public

Stranger: they are aristocrats

Stranger: or oligarchs, i'm not sure what term is better

You: Yeah I agree with you. I'd just call them elites. :p

Stranger: they're simply people with enough money invested in a publically-traded business to be granted voting rights

You: Yeah but compared to a aristocracy that is outside of a corporation, and not trained in whatever profession it's in. For example, a brick company, being managed by someone with no knowledge of the brick industry. In this way, the elites that come about are trained and incentivized to be the best in their fields.

You: Rather than just some bureaucrat.

Stranger: that's not true, there's no requirement that you be educated in any way before receiving and using money

You: Who's only gonna be there for a couple terms anyway.

Stranger: a brick company can be bought out by a watchmaker

Stranger: or a person who inherited a fortune from their parents could invest in it and receive voting rights

You: True and I agree this model is susceptible to takeovers like that, where foreign investors just buy up the stock and completely take over.

You: They'd probably say they're still incentivized to put the most knowledgeable people in those positions for the most effectiveness.

Stranger: sure, but as employees

Stranger: jeff bezos knew nothing about computer programming, so he hired computer programmers

Stranger: they built amazon for him

Stranger: now he's the richest person in the world

You: Yeah there's the problem of people who do nothing but organize and arrange the business making the most profit. But free marketers would argue that's just as difficult and important as the actual work, since the work needs that direction to succeed so well.

You: I mean who would Wozinak be without Steve Jobs?

Stranger: who would steve jobs be without wozniak?

Stranger: why does only one of them get rich?

You: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&ei=Mf3LW-PjN-Og5wLC9raICA&q=wozniak+net+worth&oq=wozinak+&gs_l=psy-ab.3.0.0i10l10.574280.575680..576782...0.0..0.148.885.3j5......0....1..gws-wiz.......0j0i71j35i39j0i131j0i67j0i20i264.DRt0-uo5u4c

You: he's not doing too bad. xd

Stranger: sure, bad example

Stranger: what i mean to say is why should a profitable business have its profits concentrated in the hands of a small number of people?

Stranger: when you have all these people involved in running the business, why should some be paid starvation wages while others earn more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes?

You: Yeah but these businesses for the most part aren't dictatorships. They're still held accountable by the 'invisble hand of the market'

You: IDEALLY

You: lel

Stranger: how are they not dictatorships?

Stranger: all nations are subject to forces beyond their control

You: A dictator can just decide one day to round up 10 people and kill them. In a corporation you'd have to go through stockholders, PR, marketing firms, and if you don't make a profit killing people you lose money.

Stranger: a nation has PR and marketing, haven't you ever heard of ministries of propaganda?

Stranger: nations have to deal with managing their people and their resources and their foreign trade and rivals

Stranger: the British Empire had stockholders and debt

Stranger: that's where the Bank of England got so much money from

Stranger: they bought the crown's debt and turned it into the basis for a new currency

Stranger: now everyone's got debt-based currencies these days

You: Yeah that's just the worst. But those are good points, I don't have answers to them.

Stranger: i would say dictatorship is not the right term

Stranger: but a business is an autocracy

You: I'd say different incentives maybe, governments tend to go by ideology. Corporations are just profit driven.

You: Autocracy definitely.

Stranger: a corporation can have an ideology and a government can be driven by profit

Stranger: they're both human organizations

Stranger: what is austerity if not measures taken to ensure profit?

You: Okay, so. What is your solution though? Not trying to be smart I'm just curious.

Stranger: solution to which problem?

You: The problem of corporations not having accountability.

Stranger: unions

Stranger: democratic ones, not the bureaucratic kind

Stranger: industrial unions

You: It's not like they're outlawed or anything, they've just disappeared from public eye recently. Idk what's happened with them. They were really popular back in the 60's, 70's but they just vanished.

Stranger: they became subsumed into the corporate-state structure and defanged, at least in the West

Stranger: in India and China they're still rabble-rousing

Stranger: India had the largest strike in human history in 2016

Stranger: and wildcat strikes have been popping up all over China

You: Oh yeah if capitalism is good at one thing it's incorporating opposition into itself xd

Stranger: the 60s and 70s were nothing compared to the 10s and 20s

You: Che Guevara T Shirts at a sweatshop near you xd.

You: Why are there so many strikes in the east?

Stranger: because they've got the most sweatshops

Stranger: Brazil as well

Stranger: the West gets tons of cheap shit through outsourcing

Stranger: so they get to pacify their workers with chocolate and smartphones

Stranger: but that only comes because the workers farming the cocoa and mining the metal and manufacturing the products are treated like shit

Stranger: now, the labor movements in these countries are kicking up

Stranger: Africa is industrializing rapidly

Stranger: and China is making sure they're positioned to be able to exploit them

Stranger: China's domestic markets are advancing the same way Western economies did, meaning China will probably resolve their labor issues through liberal half-measures while beginning a new cycle of exploitation in Africa

Stranger: but the West is going to have to go through China to access the new African markets

Stranger: and nobody has any clear idea what that will mean for the West

You: Are you ready for the proxy economic wars?

You: :p

Stranger: all i know is prices are going to go up

Stranger: for everything that has kept people happy and safe

Stranger: oil, food, metal, electronics

Stranger: clothing

You: Yeah the standard of living we've had for the past decade or so is just unsustainable.

You: Especially when automation kicks in and tons of blue collar jobs just don't exist anymore.

Stranger: automation could have kicked in years ago, it's just less profitable than human labor

Stranger: it's simple: if you own a machine, you have to fuel it and maintain it all through your own labor and resources

Stranger: a human who is hired, those costs can be externalized

Stranger: you have spouses maintaining the household for free

Stranger: you have government welfare

Stranger: you have general neighborly comradery

Stranger: as long as those external systems exist, humans are maintained without needing direct payment from their employer

Stranger: but if those corrode, then the costs are borne more and more by the employer

Stranger: ironically, it's through the actions of capitalists that these things corrode

You: Ehh I wouldn't exactly define the US as purely free market capitalism.

Stranger: it isn't

Stranger: nowhere do you have that

Stranger: that's a fiction created to imagine a world where capitalism works

You: What do you think about it's rival, Communism?

Stranger: communism as in?

Stranger: actually-existing socialism or the various schools of thought that have only heretofore existed in theory?

You: The idea in general that you create a single party state that ushers in a communist state.

Stranger: well, nobody's done that

You: Or lack of a state rather.

Stranger: china and the eastern bloc and vietnam and laos are all extremely liberal nowadays

Stranger: cuba is looking towards market reforms after decades of stagnation

Stranger: north korea is just messed up

You: So compared to what you said about capitalism where it doesn't work. Would you say the same for communism?

Stranger: communism, as it has been attempted, has not worked

Stranger: capitalism was never an attempted ideology in the first place

Stranger: it's a term created after the fact

Stranger: if communism were to succeed, it would be the same way capitalism did

You: Adam Smith and the wealth of nations. I wouldn't say it doesn't have an ideology.

Stranger: through the natural actions of people seeking greater liberty

Stranger: adam smith was describing an economic institution that existed before he began theorizing

Stranger: karl marx and the socialists were describing something they want to see in the future

Stranger: that is the difference between capitalist economics and socialist economics

You: Yeah and they were also taking inspiration from the socialist mini utopia societies that cropped up around that time.

Stranger: and the various historical instances of communities organized around egalitarian lines

You: wait...weren't we talked about lead posioning? xd

Stranger: yeah, flint michigan's government instituted austerity measures

Stranger: to reduce government spending, they switched over to a shit water line

Stranger: meanwhile, corporations like Nestle and General Motors continued to receive clean water

Stranger: they could afford to pay for it themselves

You: It's getting late, thanks for the chat man.

Stranger has disconnected.