How in any way people come to the idea that America, one of the highest performing countries at nearly every level on the world stage, is a steaming wreck is beyond me

It's not the economy or military

It's the social aspects that are terrible

Is there something in particular you had in mind?

Mordor was the highest performing country of the Middle-Earth.

It's just that its population wasn't too great.

And when America spouts a big glowing evil eye over trump tower I’m happy to reassess

Well, the dehumanizing and depressing effect of our current economic system in particular

So what’s dehumanising?

hello

Also I do wanna carry on this convo but I also have work so if I drop out @Spookaswa could we return to this?

Sure

What are we talking about?

Economics?

Spook brought up that they felt the current economic system was dehumanising and I wanted to explore that

I'd agree

I think Capitalism as it's played out through history is incredibly dehumanizing.

Money is the focal point, and nothing else.

I'd like to see someone argue that it's not dehumanizing.

Well, I think it might be possible to save the capitalist system with social democratic reforms, and if that doesn't work, then I guess the only other options we have are fascist corporatism and marxian socialism.

I would disagree, I think capitalism is a toolset that allows people to work together to achieve their goals. I see money as being a store of social credit in that regard, but I’d like to have a discussion around that space and I’m open to ideas because I agree that there are things that need to be improved.

How is it any more dehumanizing than any other ideology?

I’ll need to take a rain check on that though as I’ve gotta go to work. Cheers for the discussion though all

Well, to continue with the rest of you, I'd argue that from the beginning it was dehumanizing.

No matter your opinions on feudalism, you had people ripped from country life, which was arguably not that bad for its time, and put into sweatshops.

I'm not arguing we bring back all of feudalism, but it makes you think. Capitalism produced the sweatshops and made traditional living unsustainable.

Capitalism is based on competition, thus making it the most brutal of the three major economic systems. Corporatism is like a mix of capitalism and socialism, it focuses more on class collaboration than competition, private firms are still allowed to exist but they must serve in the interest of the state. Socialism, once it evolves into communism, will have no classes to speak of, at least in theory.

Corporatism is interesting, but there's been problems in the last hundred years with it not being very effective.

I'm interested in distributism

See, I don't hate private property. It's always existed and it should always exist. However, there was something we lost with Capitalism that we had in the middle ages.

Fascist corporatism hasn't been used in the last 50 or so years.

The closest we have gotten since then is social democracy

Was it perfect? No of course not, but it was arguably better than capitalism.

Arguably so

I mean, I'm no economist, but people seemed happier before capitalism. Back then, people had private property, but it wasn't a cashgrab free for all. Standards for trade were a given, and you had guilds to moderate the skilled tradesmen. It was also less centralized, everthing was. You didn't have to worry about multi-national coporations controlling everything.

What seems like a good option to me is the decentralization of distributism. We don't go for any kind of socialism, but we decentralize as much as we can. More local businesses, more co-ops, and more family owned small businesses.

And when you need factories, they ought to be locally owned and controlled.

Capitalism has never really been started, it was just labeled as such in the industrial period

I think that's as silly as saying "Communism has never been tried." We know it hasn't been achieved, but it sure as Hell as been tried.

Well then you didn't get what I said

Well it seems like you're claiming we never had capitalism.