1. I have an issue with your definition of a right. A right isn't a right until someone, somewhere, is under an equal and opposite obligation. You cannot bestow a right unless you're prepared to fulfil it when a claim is made under it. So, you first need to decide who is going to come up with these basics when people say they need them.
2. No sovereign nation in 2025 should be denying these basics to its needy citizens. Frankly, there is enough to go around, and if there isn't, governments are under a moral duty to raise adequate funds to do what's needed, by taxing rich people. It is scandalous that that is not done. It is more scandalous that the rich resist the mere idea. Leaving one's citizens to survive with begging bowls by the sides of roads should be a crime, prosecutable at the ICJ. The problem is that, just as nations are cocking a snoot at their own poor, they're also cocking a snoot at the ICJ. Besides basics, the poor have a right, this time enshrined in law, not to be murdered by occupying armies, and we cannot even get that right enforced in the ICJ, so what hope a right to medicine?
"A boy is drowning in a park, in a pond. You happen to notice his plight as you pass through the park. Others, too, have noticed and are concerned. But, concerned as everyone is, no one is attempting a rescue. Fact is, a drowning boy is gone in 30 to 60 seconds: if anyone is to act to save his life, it must be done now.
"Would you attempt a rescue? Let’s assume you can swim, like a fish. You’re wearing your best tweeds, however. They will be spoiled, and your shoes: crocodile. Would you take the time to tear off your clothes? The seconds are ticking. Well: will you go, or will you let him drown and continue on your way?
"It’s an everyday dilemma that nonetheless doesn’t occur to all of us every day, but it is conceivable. There is a plight menacing another that you are in a perfect position to succour to, and which requires an instant answer, but not without minor inconvenience. Do you act? Or do you “pass by on the other side”?"
4. Recently, a Pakistani terrorist group committed an atrocity in India, by which 26 people died. In response, India threatened to turn off the River Indus. Literally. Despite its international agreement with Pakistan on the supply of essential water from that water course. That would have left 250 million Pakistanis without any water at all. It's one thing to use basics as a means to personal enrichment. But to use them as roulette chips is quite something else.
"Exploitation involves using someone's vulnerability or situation to gain something for oneself, whether it's financial gain, personal benefit, or furthering one's own goals"
If productivity and (capitalist driven) cost of living are taken into account, the minimum wage should be over $23/hr.
Capitalists are stealing wages from workers. Every day. To the tune of $50 billion+ a year.
And you STILL keep pretending like capitalism "pulls billions from poverty" despite all evidence to the contrary.
If I'm just talking to someone who is going to argue in bad faith and insist on willful ignorance... what's in it for me? 🤷♂️
If capitalism was a natural state of affairs you would charge for your labour when passing the salt at the family table. In fact during times of natural disaster you would maximise your profit on the necessities of life by charging exorbitant prices for food, water and anything else needed to help people who may have lost everything.
The fact that the opposite is the rule, when times are tough people aid each other without regard to personal profit proves capitalism is enforced on us by violence and the states monopoly on using violence.
Darwin's main revelation was that resources are limited, while procreation is not, and therefore there is competition over them. Morality, like every other aspect of human existence, evolved to serve the ends of survival and procreation within an environment defined by that truth. If your argument doesn't factor in those two facts it is irrelevant except as entertainment.
We produce far more than enough food for our needs, and have more empty homes than homeless people. Any scarcity of essential needs these days is artificial for the purpose of producing profit. There is nothing evolutionary about that.
Nevertheless, we live in an age where a relatively good standard of living is possible for everyone, but which in which some hoard far more than they need, and some subsist on far less.
This is not is not advantageous for humanity evolutionary fitness or moral under most moral systems. There are many different theories of how morality has evolved and the purposes it serves. I've drafted a future article on this I hope to publish in the coming weeks.
"We" don't produce any food. For example, how much food did you produce this year? I'm guessing zero, or close to zero. Professional farmers do though. They do it because other people value it enough to compensate them for the effort they put into it. If you would like to see what happens when they aren't, visit Zimbabwe. They once had far more food than they needed, but then morons who didn't understand why took charge and soon they didn't produce enough to live on anymore. Turns out utopians are the dumbest people on the planet and their version of morals reliably leads to massive death.
Notice that he didn't respond to your main point regarding who produces food. Food and other things just seem to magically appear and the main focus is how to distribute it.
He'll spin generalities about appreciation of the work involved but ignore that, in the words of Smith, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
I'm not talking about people being slaves to supply our needs, or those who do this important work being unappreciated or unvalued.
Zimbabwe is a bad example - the redistributed land often went to politically connected individuals without adequate farming experience who couldn't maintain productivity, that coinciding with a drought was a recipe for disaster.
Mexican land redistribution of the 1910s-1930s was highly successful and popular. Likewise post-WWII Asian land redistribution (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, 1945-1960s), and West Bengal which has helped greatly with food security. More recently too in Madagascar.
I'm not talking about some utopian ideal, but what has been done in the past in civilisations which lasted longer than capitalism has (or probably will) and is still done successfully in some communities now.
I agree completely. Anyone saying that necessities should not be a right is inhuman monsters in my eyes, and that should be repeated often. Capitalism is a cruel system where anything resembling fairness, justice and equality is non-existing.
Writing off those with whom you disagree as "inhuman monsters" leaves no room for discussion or compromise. Dehumanizing people is all too often the first step toward violence as we learned from the Holocaust and the Holodomor.
You expose yourself by responding this way. I used the expression deliberately, because it is obviously true, of course. This isn't a disagreement. Those supporting a monstrous system like capitalism are obviously monsters. You don't need a crystal ball to see the obvious. You assume that I wish to debate you. I don't. The debate is long over.
So, if you agree with Mr. Keppler's demonization of anyone who disagrees with him, why are you bother to debate me? If I'm an "inhuman monster," then by definition I can't be reasoned with. The only thing that you can do with any such "monsters" who get in the way is kill them.
Is this directed to me? I believe Amos was responding to J. Thomas in his remarks. You'll have to take that up with him or Amos, as I wasn't the one who made that remark. (Such are the challenges of comments threads)
Good research question. You should study this from the perspectives of right-wing liberals, progressive/social democrats, and Marxists and anti-liberal socialists.
I find that the RW liberals and the Marxists/ALS are the ones who have the most consistent logic to their perspectives.
The progressives/SDs are not consistent because they insist we can have a mixed society but with contradictions. For example, they want a system based on competition (which is inherently exclusionary) and liberal groups (which are also inherently exclusionary) and they try to combine that with solidarity and a welfare state. However, because of the shortcomings of both liberalism and capitalism, progressive/SDs must impose rights for minorities and the poor. The whole reason we have a welfare state is because the market is unable to work for everyone as a whole. Thus, rights have to be imposed to ensure needs are met for people toward the bottom. The authoritarian state forces those (though redistribution) who are better off to support those who lack the knowledge to support themselves, even though liberalism is based on people being independent and supporting themselves. Progressives/SDs will come up with all kinds of gimmicks to keep the dysfunctional system going.
Socialism on the other hand doesnt need rights because the whole point of the system is to ensure the system works for everyone as a whole based on principles of equity, inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Thus, a socialist constitution would declare the values and principles of society without need to guarantee rights, because they would simply be redundant.
The word 'rights' in this context is inadequate for some of the reasons you mention, but the whole point of any goal is to have an aim to head towards, such as values and principles to be achieved.
The idea ensuring a certain level of life and freedom is the basis on which our ideals are founded and achieved. If one of those values in freedom to do this, or freedom from that negative, then these expected / assured freedoms have traditionally been classed under the label of rights.
When I say 'freedom of speech' I mean the 'ability and conditions where people can express themselves without fear.' That is something I believe we are 'right' to expect, even if the word 'rights' comes with other misunderstandings.
What would be a better word - essential freedoms? collective agreements? mutual guarantees? I'd love a one word alternative that encapsulates this concept.
There’s a fundamental difference between the right to free speech and the right to free food. The only thing required to secure the former is that others refrain (or are kept) from preventing it. Securing the latter requires that someone else produce food.
Yes ... and no. ;-) We have a world that produces food for us for free. Now whether it would have continued to produce enough without help if we didn't change to other systems is a matter of speculation, but maybe humanity's population would have been smaller if we kept to what we could gather.
Either way we learnt to farm, and for a long time we farmed and still shared everything. It could be argued most people were still doing this up until the end of Feudalism, although under Monarchal kingdoms food was sometimes tied to loyalty, work etc.
Either way I'm not a Primitivist. I don't want to go back to tribal communities even if many of them weren't as bad as we were led to previously believe. I like some modern comforts too much, but does that mean that no food would be cultivated, collected or distributed if there was no capitalism? No, thats not true either.
A good example of this is Cambodia before and just after French colonisation. The Cambodians only worked six months of the year, because that is all it took to grew their food and store it for the fallow months. Then the French came along and said with more modern tech (by 19th century standards) you could do this in three months, so that is exactly what they did and then had nine months off. The French of course were not pleased with this - that was not the result they had in mind.
Now if I were a betting man I'd bet that I could find a hundred people to work an hour or two a week to grow food in return for getting back a years worth of food free. I think thats a safe bet because I know several people who already do this, and they have far more people wishing to do it than they have the land to do it on.
Some regions, like parts of Malaysia, are so fertile that people could survive with relatively little effort. Many Chinese immigrants to the country came from harsher environments where hard work was necessary for bare survival. Within a few generations, the immigrants' descendants were the country's richest demographic. Their success led to tensions with the Malay majority. The economic and ethnic divisions contributed to Malaysia’s decision to expel Singapore in 1965.
People can choose to work far less than the average American does, so long as they're content with lower-than-average living standards. Problems arise, though, when those who choose leisure resent the wealth of those who choose to work more - as happened in Malaysia.
Capitalism doesn't force anyone to work 40 hours a week. But it does link reward to output.
There are definitely more fertile places, although surprisingly successful communities which have lived quite co-operatively have existed in more difficult circumstances, so while circumstances may sometimes bring out our negatives, other times they lead people to be more resourceful.
The problem we have now in America is that a large number of people (60% according to a recent study) find that they can no longer support what was once consider a basic living standard on a full time income.
These people are not only forced to work 40 hours a week, but often take another job, so their reward to output ratio is far lower than past generations. Since 40-60% of homeless people in America are actually working then then it seems that for some there isn’t even the reward of a roof over their head.
The chart in the following article shows price trends for various goods from 2000 to 2022. Prices for housing, medical care, secondary education, and childcare - the most heavily regulated economic sectors - have risen faster than the rate of inflation. Prices of goods in less regulated sectors have risen far more slowly or even dropped.
You're looking for a fix for government, not capitalism. I've posted my recommendations for peeling back some of the regulations that are causing these problems (in Barack Obama's words, "stop doing stupid sh*t). For example:
Right. Its like in a sporting event. Progressive/SDs want the referee to be authoritarian and redistribute points from the winners to the losers. It doesn't make any sense.
For a right to a resource to matter the resource must first exist. I’d rather a capitalist system that produces too many resources and distributes them according to economic ability and need to a socialist system that produces too few resources but distributes them according to political power and need.
That’s an interesting perspective. It seems to me that the same resources are in the ground and they are still waiting to be used whoever takes them out or moulds them.
I agree that we shouldn’t have the politically powerful making any decisions about our needs, but for that reason don’t believe in people having the power to make decisions about our needs because they are wealthy and set up paywalls either.
I also worry about the morality of overproducing food to destroy it to keep the prices and profits up, and about the health effects of us overproducing some resources to the point they are harmful to us.
I think people might prefer a few less plastic toys to have less microplastics in their bodies, or must we accept dying younger than necessary to not risk affecting the economic abilities of others?
Most resources that we consume do not exist in a state of nature. That’s true, of course, of vaccines and refrigerators, but even of food. Someone has to plant it, nurture it, harvest it etc. You can’t have a meaningful discussion of the best way to distribute those resources without understanding the best way to produce them. It reminds me of the joke, “What’s the best way to get rich? Well, first you get a million dollars…”
It all comes down to that. Some ignore how there is abundance to begin with and simply move on to how to distribute it. Nature provides nothing for free. It all has to be produced.
Indeed there are! I’m surprised there are as many co-operatives as there are due to all the financial and legal roadblocks capitalism puts in their way.
You speak as if systems based on collective ownership have a great track record. They generally don’t. Where they do have some success( e.g. the medical and retirement systems in Singapore and the Scandinavian countries) is in service industries in countries with small homogeneous populations and vigorous private sectors that generate a lot of wealth.
Of course different metrics are important to different people, and collective and co-operative enterprises will always be at a disadvantage in a capitalist economy. Nevertheless I suppose it is a matter of how we judge their track record, but according to what I might judge success they seem to be doing very well:
A 2013 study found that ‘home health aides at the worker-owned, participative decision-making organization were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than those at other agencies.’ A 1995 US study indicated that ‘employees who embrace an increased influence and participation in workplace decisions also reported greater job satisfaction,’ and a 2011 study in France found that worker-owned businesses ‘had a positive effect on workers' job satisfaction.’
A survey conducted in Seoul found that ‘in conventional firms, employees become less committed to their job as their work becomes more demanding; however, this was not the case in worker cooperatives.’ A national survey of 1,147 people employed in 82 worker cooperatives across the US, documented high levels of job satisfaction and community engagement among cooperative workers.
Worker cooperatives have markedly egalitarian pay structures with profit-sharing opportunities. The median pay ratio was 1.5 to 1, meaning the highest paid employee received just 50 percent more than the lowest paid in the typical cooperative studied.
Research by Virginie Perotin of Leeds University found that ‘worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter” and production organized more efficiently.’
According to an analysis of all businesses in Uruguay between 1997 and 2009, worker cooperatives have a 29% smaller chance of closure after controlling for variables such as industry.
Of course co-operatives & collectives are not socialism - even if some are inspired by it and try to operate according to the socialist principles they are able to within a capitalist economy.
My understanding is that they are rare. If the model starts to be more broadly adopted than investor owned firms and outcompete them, more power to the coop model.
Interestingly in Italy there are about 60,000 different co-operatives, 20,000 in Spain (including one of almost 80,000 people), 30,000 in America and 10,000 in the UK. The oldest still in existence is 260 years old.
People have always planted, nurtured and harvested food, although claiming exclusive ownership of the fields and orchards is relatively new in human history.
You said - 'You can’t have a meaningful discussion of the best way to distribute those resources without understanding the best way to produce them.'
I know how to produce them - the same way as we do now - co-operatively by hundreds or thousands of workers - but with the benefits being more equally distributed. I'm sure the workers won't mind at all. Let's give them a vote in their workplaces and see what they think.
You said - It reminds me of the joke, “What’s the best way to get rich? Well, first you get a million dollars…”
This right here! Wealth and privilege tends to lead to wealth and privilege, without anyone having done anything to earn it - far less than those who actually worked for it.
I've written on this subject in the past, and my views tend to be unpopular in liberal circles, because I don't view rights as primary.
I think actual rights (not legal fictions) are an emergent property of people taking responsibility for each other and the world around them. When we fail to take responsibility, the rights we write down in laws never seem to materialize.
to quote from another substack writer (Real Progressives):
The “political will” deficit is a power surplus for capital. When liberals plead procedural constraints while rubber-stamping $900 billion military budgets, expanding ICE detention camps, bailing out Silicon Valley Bank in 48 hours, they’re not failing. They’re succeeding spectacularly at their real mission, which is protecting capital’s veto over human needs. This is what class rule looks like with a government that can instantly mobilize trillions for banks and bombs while imposing devastating austerity.
It’s a government that claims ‘no money’ exists to house the homeless while 16 million homes sit vacant. It’s a government that claims spending is out of control and we can’t possibly feed children, while farmers are paid to destroy crops. It’s a government that claims nationalized healthcare would bring about long wait times and death panels while underfunded hospitals are already closing in rural areas and corporate consolidation is driving small medical practices out of business.
The “neutral” state is a myth. Every inaction is a choice to preserve the hierarchy where capital commands and people are forced to beg. Every inaction by those in power is deliberate.
A just society is one in which no one is abandoned - but is also one in which help is given freely, not by force. True compassion respects both the dignity of the recipient and the liberty of the giver.
I believe that we’re morally obligated to care for those who can’t care for themselves. But acknowledging moral responsibility does not mean endorsing government compulsion. There is a big difference between moral duty and legal obligation. Declaring that basic needs are “human rights” enforceable by the state transforms one person's claim into another person's burden, imposed at gunpoint if necessary.
Forced giving isn’t charity, it’s theft. It may relieve material need, but it erodes moral responsibility, discourages voluntary giving, and hollows out compassion. And perhaps worst of all, it gives us permission to abandon our own moral duty. When government becomes the caretaker of the poor, it becomes easy to say, “I gave at the office.” Paying taxes isn’t compassion - it is delegation and it’s de-moral-izing. Voting money out of someone else’s pocket isn’t a moral act. It requires no personal sacrifice, no direct service, no love for the person in need. It’s moral outsourcing masquerading as virtue.
Real compassion is neither pity nor noblesse oblige. Real compassion is getting down in the other person’s foxhole with them and helping them to fight their demons. Private charity deals with individuals and their unique circumstances. Government programs deal with categories. They process people, slot them into forms, and distribute aid according to eligibility, not need, character, or context. Rather than helping people climb out of poverty, the welfare system tends to make people more comfortable in and with their poverty.
The solution to poverty is not less freedom, but more freedom, more opportunity, more community, more space for real moral action. A free society is not perfect, but it is the only kind in which both generosity and gratitude can be real.
The Practical Case
Beyond the moral concerns, treating basic necessities as government-enforced rights just doesn’t work well in practice. First, government has no resources of its own. Everything it gives, it must first take. It has no money except what it extracts from the private sector through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. It makes little sense to claim that the private sector lacks the means to help the poor while assuming the government somehow does.
Before the rise of the modern welfare state, thousands of mutual aid societies, religious charities, fraternal organizations, and local benevolent institutions crisscrossed the nation. These groups provided food, shelter, medical care, education, and job placement - often more effectively and personally than bureaucracies do today. From 1800 to 1960 (before the Great Society programs began), the poverty rate fell from 80–90% to around 15%. This drop was driven not by redistribution, but by free markets, voluntary charity, and rising productivity.
Government aid that is guaranteed and unconditional often creates dependency. It can discourage work, savings, and family formation. It may even penalize people for improving their situation. That’s not compassion - it’s a trap.
Government programs don’t just fill gaps; they often suppress private efforts. When the state assumes responsibility for the poor, private citizens and institutions often step back. Top-down systems are inflexible and prone to waste. Local, voluntary efforts are closer to the need, better informed, and more adaptable.
Perhaps most importantly, government programs are typically designed to maintain people at a subsistence level, not to transform their lives. Private charities, churches, and local aid organizations deal with individuals and individual issues – the personal barriers that keep someone trapped in poverty such as addiction, illiteracy, broken families, mental health issues - and to walk with them through change.
Supporters of government intervention often admit that free markets deliver the goods but argue that only government can distribute them fairly. They point to those who, because of age, disability, or circumstance, are unable to produce anything.
But rewarding need inevitably yields more of it - adding those who will not produce to those who cannot. Taxing production reduces wealth, which in turn increases need. In contrast, free markets reward productivity, create wealth, and thereby reduce need.
Government welfare means coercively managing a growing number of people in need amid growing poverty. Freedom means individuals voluntarily addressing a shrinking number of people in need amid growing wealth.
You're really focused on the framing of "forced government intervention" and "coerced compassion" (cringe term).
That's an entirely subjective framing and I don't see it that way at all.
Taxation isn't theft.
It's simply the dues we pay to live in a modern society. Roads, bridges, libraries, fire fighters etc. And there IS a social contract.
As long as we insist on embracing Capitalism, there will always be haves and have-nots. That's literally how Capitalism works.
The decrease in poverty from 1800 - 1960 had as much to do with the New Deal, social security, employment insurance, the GI bill, and unions as the "free market." Probably more.
Capitalism is not (nor is it designed to be) a cure for poverty. The quoted statistics of "millions of people pulled out of poverty by Capitalism" have been completely debunked, and in no way reflect reality.
There is no law against charity or helping your fellow human. We're the richest country in the world, with the richest capitalists in the world. If what you're asserting is accurate, why is poverty and homelessness still an issue?
This system is working exactly as designed. Deregulation and "freeing the market" will only accelerate inequality.
I agree that the "taxation is theft" meme goes too far. Many, if not most, of the bad ideas in the world are based on kernels of truth that people picked up and ran with to insanity.
Supporters of government intervention often point to the need for infrastructure. The federal government spent something like $6.75 trillion last year and only about $146 billion on infrastructure. or just over 2%.
I agree that under capitalism, there will always be haves and have nots, but that's true of any society.
The decrease in poverty from 1800 - 1960 had very little to do with the New Deal, Social Security, unemployment insurance, or the GI Bill. In 1945 - before Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the GI Bill had had time to work - the poverty rate was down to 30%. While the New Deal was in effect, the unemployment rate stayed in double digits. It did more to put the "great" in the Great Depression than it did to end it.
In what way has the claim that capitalism has pulled billions of people out of poverty been debunked? To take just one (very large) example, people in China lived in extreme poverty while Mao was in power. After his death in 1976, China began lowering tariffs and opening its markets to foreign trade. But the real economic boom started when farmers illegally split up collective farms into household plots and sold their surplus in local markets.
Instead of punishing them, Deng Xiaoping legalized their farms. He also set up Special Economic Zones that welcomed both free markets and foreign investment.
Under Mao, the hukou (household registration) system severely restricted internal migration, trapping tens of millions of workers in low productivity jobs on collective farms. After Mao’s death, these restrictions were gradually eased, allowing millions to move to urban areas, where their productivity surged due to access to capital, modern industry, and infrastructure. This shift triggered a massive GDP increase, though the labor reallocation was a one-time boost - peasants can be freed only once.
State-owned enterprises still dominate strategic sectors in China, but the private sector has consistently outperformed them in both productivity and innovation. What works in China isn't centrally planned. What is centrally planned doesn't work.
I believe that poverty is still an issue in the U.S. largely because of the government's "War on Poverty." One thing on which most economists - regardless of their political beliefs - agree is that you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize. Our welfare system has created perverse incentives that perpetuate and increase poverty.
Government interventions in education have led to increases in illiteracy (which breeds poverty) and its interventions in the housing market has reduced supply and increased demand, resulting in a housing shortage.
Regardless of where the bar is set, the fact remains that people are materially better off today than they were a century ago. Infant mortality is down, and life expectancy is up in even very poor countries.
The Chinese government has always expended enormous amounts of resources on industry. But for the first quarter century of its existence, it was an economic basket case. Then for the last half century its economy has been growing. What changed? The leadership freed the peasants and let private companies exist and function outside the central planning framework.
You’re claiming that the thing that turned the economy around was the thing that didn’t change. Moreover, as Xi has once again begun imposing government control over the economy, the economy has slowed.
It's estimated that China's state-owned enterprises produce only about 25-30% of the country's GDP yet they consume a far larger proportion of the country's resources. For example, they receive over half of the nation's bank loans.
I agree that technological innovation accounts for the lion's share of material progress, but I don't think you can separate that from capitalism. Free markets reward innovation by allowing individuals and firms to profit from new ideas. There’s a reason that in many languages the word for “telephone” is telephone, and “refrigerator” is refrigerator. The U.S. alone is responsible for about 40% of global pharmaceutical R&D spending and leads in the development of new medicines. In Sub-Saharan Africa, many small businesses wouldn't exist without smartphones.
You talk about market and socialist economies as if it's a binary switch. But every country today has a mixed economy, the difference is in the degree of regulation. China’s rapid growth over the last few decades owes far more to market reforms than to central planning.
Please define what you mean by a “new grassroots collaborative economy.” Market prices remain the most effective tool we have for coordinating the decisions of millions of people across time and distance. The catch is that for market prices to accurately reflect the value that those millions of people place on goods and services at any moment we need relatively free markets.
I agree that we have a responsibility to help those who fall through the cracks; the question is how best to do it. Government welfare programs often create more poverty than they eliminate, through perverse incentives that discourage work and savings. Poverty isn’t like firefighting. Fires don't have free will. They behave predictably and respond to known techniques. People are far more complex, though they do tend to respond to incentives - including perverse ones.
If by “turning brown children across the ocean into skeletons” you're referring to cobalt and lithium mining driven by government mandates for rapid decarbonization, that’s not a failure of capitalism. It's a result of top-down industrial policy and regulatory fiat rather than voluntary market demand.
I'll leave it to the other respondent to address the rest, as he has been doing so well enough without me.
But one point I think is worth making is that many of these advances you talk about are the result of science rather than capitalism. The benefits of that science has sometimes been limited by capitalism too, when a poor country needing treatments can't afford them for example, which accounts for a lot of overseas aid. We wouldn't want to mix up correlation and causation.
The benefits of science are not limited primarily by capitalism, but by the scarcity of resources. Developing and manufacturing medical equipment or researching and producing new medicines requires capital, labor, energy, and materials - all of which are limited and have alternative uses. Some socialist arguments overlook the fact that goods must be produced before they can be consumed. It’s a mistake to assume these goods simply exist "somehow" and that the only question is how to distribute them - especially if the distribution method undermines the processes that make their creation possible.
"As long as we insist on embracing Capitalism, there will always be haves and have-nots. That's literally how Capitalism works."
I think that's how the world works. We all play a status game. Inequality is part of that. There's no way to make everyone equal, and trying to do that just decreases the overall wealth that we all have to share.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea that haves and have-nots are "just the way the world works." And so does most of human history.
Here's a thought experiment. I invite you to just think this through for a minute...
100 completely random people wake up on an empty beach on an island. The people come from all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. The island has no technology or existing structures. But it's large and has fresh water, natural forage and game.
In the middle of the beach is a blanket with an assortment of hand tools and a manual that clearly illustrates how to hunt, fish, forage, make fires, build shelters, etc.
Where are the haves and have-nots?
At what point in the predictable development of this ad hoc "tribe" does inequality arise?
At what point do some members begin to be exploited?....
This is not just some imaginary hypothetical. This is a fairly accurate description of every indigenous tribe for tens of thousands of years.
Extreme inequality has not been around nearly so long. And if you think of the worst inequality in history? Say the Pharoahs or the Robber Barons? Today's neoliberal capitalists are worse 🤷♂️
Your hypothetical has a tribe living in Eden. But in the real world it's not that simple. In indigenous tribes aren't there chiefs that have more power and wealth? And beautiful women who are sought after for sex? And neighboring tribes to fight with to steal what they have, whether wealth or women?
There may not be haves and have nots when resources are abundant, but there are still have mores and have lesses. Cooperation is good in social animals like humans but competition, the survival of the fittest, generates winners and losers, and that results in inequality. The poor will always be with us. There will always be poor in the land. These observations from millennia ago in Biblical times remain true today.
So while we should nurture cooperation, we should also allow competition rather than try to eliminate winners and losers, we should make sure it is open, fair and generative.
Big companies like Amazon and Apple should not be punished or broken up just because they are big and dominate their competitors. To the victors go the spoils. That's a law of nature, which humans cannot change. As Joseph Schumpeter taught, capitalism is a dynamic process of creative destruction.
But we can build an ecosystem with diversity not just dominance. A rainforest ecosystem where the less powerful can still find a niche instead of a redwood forest where the dominant starve others of the sunlight they need to survive.
The differences between an attractive woman, a chief who has a nominally elevated level of power and wealth - to a hundred billionaire to… well… you. Is like apples and blue. It's completely absurd.
That's not what survival of the fittest means.
Amazon is not a victor, it's an exploiter.
Your ecosystem of diversity not just dominance will never be compatible with neoliberal capitalism
Why are those questions important? There is no question that we can do better, and should. The question is how. And the danger is that our efforts to make things better actually make things worse.
You make some very good points and you are making a sincere effort to better the world. But are you fighting against fundamental forces to try to change the world instead of harnessing those forces so that they pull the world in the right direction?
The world is not fair. It's not just. It's not equal. We got cast out of the Garden of Eden where we could pluck fruits off trees to gorge on as we live forever into a world where we eat by the sweat of our brows and where, in the end, we die.
(I'm not religious but I think the Bible, especially the New Testament, has lots of wisdom in it.)
We need to realize what we can do and what we can't, and do the best we can. We can't recreate the Garden of Eden because it's mythical, it never did exist except in imagination. Instead of trying to do the impossible, we should try to try things to find out how to improve where we are.
The free market is the best way to do that trial and error process. The market rewards good ideas and punishes bad ones. Things improve the better the market functions. But when we punish people who reap those rewards, things don't improve, but get worse. When we break up big companies just because they are big, for example, or heavily tax top earners, we kill the geese that lay golden eggs.
That said, the market needs rules to function, or people cheat. Governments have a role to play there. But too often the government thinks it should have starring role in running the economy instead of a supporting role. That doesn't work. That's why socialism gets such bad reviews.
Substack is a good microcosm of real world economies that gives us a chance to see the problems that arise in them. People write posts and notes on Substack to share their ideas with the world. But we don't do it if we don't feel rewarded for it. We want other people to read what we write, to hit that like button, to follow us, to subscribe to our accounts, even to pay.
But not everyone is equal. The vast majority of us labor in obscurity with a few likes to scrape by while the elite get outsized rewards for what they write, arguably deserved, arguably not.
The Substack algorithm has something to do with which writers succeed and which don't. Maybe it could be made more fair, and maybe some people could be stopped from abusing the system.
But the fundamental problem will remain. Half the people on Substack will be below average in the rewards they receive. Only 10% of the people will be in the top 10%. And the higher you go, the 1%, the 0.1%, the greater the rewards but the smaller the number of people who receive them.
Merit has something to do with it, but not everything. Some people have unfair advantages. But it's hard to think of things that can be done to make Substack better rather than worse. And it's better for everyone to have the platform that anyone can come to to read and write. Otherwise, what would I spend this lovely Friday morning doing?
Good points. To say people have human rights to necessities means nothing in the real world. It's an abstraction.
We need to look to concrete examples in the real world to learn how to solve problems. Like you point to before government got so big and powerful with the Great Society programs. Like I point to with William Bradford and the Plymouth Colony.
I think it's useful to look at countries like Scandinavia's, especially Norway, and Singapore to see what they get right. But in the US we seem not to be learning how to prosper.
On the one hand we have a rapacious elite accumulating massive wealth by exploring the rest of us through private equity buying up homes, hospitals and veterinary clinics. On the other hand we have people like the soon to be mayor of New York City.
Too much capitalism or too much socialism brings an imbalance. We need both top-down and bottom-up. Yin and yang. In theory our problems are easy to solve. But that's theory. In practice solutions are hard to find. Abstractions like human rights mean nothing in the real world. Best to focus instead on experimenting to find what works.
I'm wary of the term 'human rights' myself - which is why I reframed it as ‘the inherent dignity and worth that every person possesses simply by virtue of being human and [doing] what is necessary to ensure that.’ I guess I see it as a list of the basic guarantees we need to ensure (as far as possible) to maintain freedom and retain our humanity.
You are right though, we do need pragmatic working solutions to change our conditions. Many of those we have been sold under different political labels have not been sufficient. I've tried to start addressing this in various ways, but hope to do more in the latter half of this year, as luckily there are a lot of practical working examples that rarely get enough attention brought to them.
I guess my question is, how does it help to make a list of basic guarantees? Doesn't it hurt more than it helps? Then people start to think they are entitled to things and stop working so hard to get those things themselves.
Ideas are plentiful. I have lots of ideas that I think will work, and here on Substack you can read a lot of brilliant thinking from all kinds of people. But that is all too abstract to matter in the real world. What matters in the real world is implementation. Getting things done.
A good example is in the car industry. In the early 1900s Henry Ford didn't invent the car. Others had the idea of how to build a car -- it was not hard. But to produce cars that average people could afford to buy took the genius and hard work of Henry Ford to accomplish.
Same with electric cars. Elon Musk didn't invent the electric car. The idea has been around for as long as gasoline cars. But to take electric cars mainstream took the genius and hard work of Elon Musk to accomplish.
Both Henry Ford and Elon Musk tried to apply their genius and hard work to improve the government, to disastrous effect. So we know that the ideas do matter as much as the implementation.
One problem I see is that we humans compete for status, and the status game is zero sum. We can't all be in the top 10%, ot the top 1%. But we all want to be.
So we waste a lot of effort in conspicuous consumption, like male peacocks with their tail feathers. And we come up with ways to pull those with more status down to our level. That's what socialism is. And I think that's what human rights and basic guarantees do too. Try to level things so we all have the same status, no one better than the other.
Sadly, that doesn't work. You end up with the soon to be mayor of New York with his silly promises of rent freezes and state-run grocery stores and free transportation. As if that's going to help.
I don't have the answers. I think debates like yours with Richard Fulmer are a good idea. But debates only go so far. What matters in the real world is action.
Advertiser David Ogilvy said that his goal was never to impress people with the creativity of his ideas but instead to get them to buy the product. He said one Greek orator would speak and people listening would say, how well he speaks. But when Demosthenes spoke, the people said, let us march against Philip.
If you can rouse people to do constructive actions, you can accomplish things. Telling people they are guaranteed things and they don't need to do anything to get them doesn't rouse them to do anything constructive. Just the opposite.
It seems to me that unless we have an expectation of free speech without being punished for speaking we don't be able to have great discussions like these - so I do think some expectations are reasonable and we might even call them rights for lack of a better word, especially if we want to be able to have a world in which we can reason together.
But I take your point about the need to assert, work for, and claim what we value if we can - it is important to value what we have and to realise the costs of it. But we also live in a world in which a child, an infirm, or a very elderly or sick person may not be able to do that for themselves, so there has to be a balance if we are to have a world in which everyone has dignity.
Your examples of Ford and Musk are interesting, but they rather prove my point about how current systems concentrate power and resources. Both built their success on the backs of workers whose labour created the actual value, whilst existing infrastructure, public education, and state research provided the foundation they built upon. The 'genius' narrative obscures how much innovation emerges from collective effort and how existing property relations prevent most people from accessing the resources needed to implement their ideas.
You're absolutely right that status competition is destructive, but I'd argue that's precisely what capitalism rewards. The fundamental issue isn't that people naturally compete for status - it's that we've organised society around artificial scarcity and hierarchy. When we look at how people actually behave in crises or in genuinely cooperative environments, we see tremendous capacity for collective problem-solving. That is how all these things already get invented and made, by workers co-operating together, but the real makers on he factory floor have far less of a share and take far more of a risk than the ones who own the factories or ideas.
The real question isn't whether people deserve guarantees, but how we organise ourselves so that everyone can contribute their talents without fear of destitution. The practical examples I mentioned aren't about creating dependency - they're about removing the barriers that prevent people from acting constructively. When people aren't spending all their energy on basic survival, they're remarkably creative and productive.
Your point about action over debate is spot on though. That's why I'm drawn to prefigurative approaches - actually building constructive cooperative alternatives we want to see, from community gardens to worker cooperatives to mutual aid networks.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
1. I have an issue with your definition of a right. A right isn't a right until someone, somewhere, is under an equal and opposite obligation. You cannot bestow a right unless you're prepared to fulfil it when a claim is made under it. So, you first need to decide who is going to come up with these basics when people say they need them.
2. No sovereign nation in 2025 should be denying these basics to its needy citizens. Frankly, there is enough to go around, and if there isn't, governments are under a moral duty to raise adequate funds to do what's needed, by taxing rich people. It is scandalous that that is not done. It is more scandalous that the rich resist the mere idea. Leaving one's citizens to survive with begging bowls by the sides of roads should be a crime, prosecutable at the ICJ. The problem is that, just as nations are cocking a snoot at their own poor, they're also cocking a snoot at the ICJ. Besides basics, the poor have a right, this time enshrined in law, not to be murdered by occupying armies, and we cannot even get that right enforced in the ICJ, so what hope a right to medicine?
3. There is a moral argument that hits hard and is worth reading about. You can do so here: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/peter-singer-luxury-is-immoral. Singer posits that (I quote from my article):
"A boy is drowning in a park, in a pond. You happen to notice his plight as you pass through the park. Others, too, have noticed and are concerned. But, concerned as everyone is, no one is attempting a rescue. Fact is, a drowning boy is gone in 30 to 60 seconds: if anyone is to act to save his life, it must be done now.
"Would you attempt a rescue? Let’s assume you can swim, like a fish. You’re wearing your best tweeds, however. They will be spoiled, and your shoes: crocodile. Would you take the time to tear off your clothes? The seconds are ticking. Well: will you go, or will you let him drown and continue on your way?
"It’s an everyday dilemma that nonetheless doesn’t occur to all of us every day, but it is conceivable. There is a plight menacing another that you are in a perfect position to succour to, and which requires an instant answer, but not without minor inconvenience. Do you act? Or do you “pass by on the other side”?"
4. Recently, a Pakistani terrorist group committed an atrocity in India, by which 26 people died. In response, India threatened to turn off the River Indus. Literally. Despite its international agreement with Pakistan on the supply of essential water from that water course. That would have left 250 million Pakistanis without any water at all. It's one thing to use basics as a means to personal enrichment. But to use them as roulette chips is quite something else.
"Exploitation involves using someone's vulnerability or situation to gain something for oneself, whether it's financial gain, personal benefit, or furthering one's own goals"
If productivity and (capitalist driven) cost of living are taken into account, the minimum wage should be over $23/hr.
Capitalists are stealing wages from workers. Every day. To the tune of $50 billion+ a year.
And you STILL keep pretending like capitalism "pulls billions from poverty" despite all evidence to the contrary.
If I'm just talking to someone who is going to argue in bad faith and insist on willful ignorance... what's in it for me? 🤷♂️
This isn't even an argument for me.
If capitalism was a natural state of affairs you would charge for your labour when passing the salt at the family table. In fact during times of natural disaster you would maximise your profit on the necessities of life by charging exorbitant prices for food, water and anything else needed to help people who may have lost everything.
The fact that the opposite is the rule, when times are tough people aid each other without regard to personal profit proves capitalism is enforced on us by violence and the states monopoly on using violence.
Darwin's main revelation was that resources are limited, while procreation is not, and therefore there is competition over them. Morality, like every other aspect of human existence, evolved to serve the ends of survival and procreation within an environment defined by that truth. If your argument doesn't factor in those two facts it is irrelevant except as entertainment.
We produce far more than enough food for our needs, and have more empty homes than homeless people. Any scarcity of essential needs these days is artificial for the purpose of producing profit. There is nothing evolutionary about that.
Nevertheless, we live in an age where a relatively good standard of living is possible for everyone, but which in which some hoard far more than they need, and some subsist on far less.
This is not is not advantageous for humanity evolutionary fitness or moral under most moral systems. There are many different theories of how morality has evolved and the purposes it serves. I've drafted a future article on this I hope to publish in the coming weeks.
"We" don't produce any food. For example, how much food did you produce this year? I'm guessing zero, or close to zero. Professional farmers do though. They do it because other people value it enough to compensate them for the effort they put into it. If you would like to see what happens when they aren't, visit Zimbabwe. They once had far more food than they needed, but then morons who didn't understand why took charge and soon they didn't produce enough to live on anymore. Turns out utopians are the dumbest people on the planet and their version of morals reliably leads to massive death.
Notice that he didn't respond to your main point regarding who produces food. Food and other things just seem to magically appear and the main focus is how to distribute it.
He'll spin generalities about appreciation of the work involved but ignore that, in the words of Smith, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
I'm not talking about people being slaves to supply our needs, or those who do this important work being unappreciated or unvalued.
Zimbabwe is a bad example - the redistributed land often went to politically connected individuals without adequate farming experience who couldn't maintain productivity, that coinciding with a drought was a recipe for disaster.
Mexican land redistribution of the 1910s-1930s was highly successful and popular. Likewise post-WWII Asian land redistribution (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, 1945-1960s), and West Bengal which has helped greatly with food security. More recently too in Madagascar.
I'm not talking about some utopian ideal, but what has been done in the past in civilisations which lasted longer than capitalism has (or probably will) and is still done successfully in some communities now.
I agree completely. Anyone saying that necessities should not be a right is inhuman monsters in my eyes, and that should be repeated often. Capitalism is a cruel system where anything resembling fairness, justice and equality is non-existing.
Writing off those with whom you disagree as "inhuman monsters" leaves no room for discussion or compromise. Dehumanizing people is all too often the first step toward violence as we learned from the Holocaust and the Holodomor.
You expose yourself by responding this way. I used the expression deliberately, because it is obviously true, of course. This isn't a disagreement. Those supporting a monstrous system like capitalism are obviously monsters. You don't need a crystal ball to see the obvious. You assume that I wish to debate you. I don't. The debate is long over.
A perfect demonstration of how utopian revolutions end up in blood baths.
You are right - we could have avoided a lot of bother by just being content with serving our lords and kings!
https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw
So, if you agree with Mr. Keppler's demonization of anyone who disagrees with him, why are you bother to debate me? If I'm an "inhuman monster," then by definition I can't be reasoned with. The only thing that you can do with any such "monsters" who get in the way is kill them.
Is this directed to me? I believe Amos was responding to J. Thomas in his remarks. You'll have to take that up with him or Amos, as I wasn't the one who made that remark. (Such are the challenges of comments threads)
Good research question. You should study this from the perspectives of right-wing liberals, progressive/social democrats, and Marxists and anti-liberal socialists.
I find that the RW liberals and the Marxists/ALS are the ones who have the most consistent logic to their perspectives.
The progressives/SDs are not consistent because they insist we can have a mixed society but with contradictions. For example, they want a system based on competition (which is inherently exclusionary) and liberal groups (which are also inherently exclusionary) and they try to combine that with solidarity and a welfare state. However, because of the shortcomings of both liberalism and capitalism, progressive/SDs must impose rights for minorities and the poor. The whole reason we have a welfare state is because the market is unable to work for everyone as a whole. Thus, rights have to be imposed to ensure needs are met for people toward the bottom. The authoritarian state forces those (though redistribution) who are better off to support those who lack the knowledge to support themselves, even though liberalism is based on people being independent and supporting themselves. Progressives/SDs will come up with all kinds of gimmicks to keep the dysfunctional system going.
Socialism on the other hand doesnt need rights because the whole point of the system is to ensure the system works for everyone as a whole based on principles of equity, inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Thus, a socialist constitution would declare the values and principles of society without need to guarantee rights, because they would simply be redundant.
The word 'rights' in this context is inadequate for some of the reasons you mention, but the whole point of any goal is to have an aim to head towards, such as values and principles to be achieved.
The idea ensuring a certain level of life and freedom is the basis on which our ideals are founded and achieved. If one of those values in freedom to do this, or freedom from that negative, then these expected / assured freedoms have traditionally been classed under the label of rights.
When I say 'freedom of speech' I mean the 'ability and conditions where people can express themselves without fear.' That is something I believe we are 'right' to expect, even if the word 'rights' comes with other misunderstandings.
What would be a better word - essential freedoms? collective agreements? mutual guarantees? I'd love a one word alternative that encapsulates this concept.
There’s a fundamental difference between the right to free speech and the right to free food. The only thing required to secure the former is that others refrain (or are kept) from preventing it. Securing the latter requires that someone else produce food.
Yes ... and no. ;-) We have a world that produces food for us for free. Now whether it would have continued to produce enough without help if we didn't change to other systems is a matter of speculation, but maybe humanity's population would have been smaller if we kept to what we could gather.
Either way we learnt to farm, and for a long time we farmed and still shared everything. It could be argued most people were still doing this up until the end of Feudalism, although under Monarchal kingdoms food was sometimes tied to loyalty, work etc.
Either way I'm not a Primitivist. I don't want to go back to tribal communities even if many of them weren't as bad as we were led to previously believe. I like some modern comforts too much, but does that mean that no food would be cultivated, collected or distributed if there was no capitalism? No, thats not true either.
A good example of this is Cambodia before and just after French colonisation. The Cambodians only worked six months of the year, because that is all it took to grew their food and store it for the fallow months. Then the French came along and said with more modern tech (by 19th century standards) you could do this in three months, so that is exactly what they did and then had nine months off. The French of course were not pleased with this - that was not the result they had in mind.
Now if I were a betting man I'd bet that I could find a hundred people to work an hour or two a week to grow food in return for getting back a years worth of food free. I think thats a safe bet because I know several people who already do this, and they have far more people wishing to do it than they have the land to do it on.
Some regions, like parts of Malaysia, are so fertile that people could survive with relatively little effort. Many Chinese immigrants to the country came from harsher environments where hard work was necessary for bare survival. Within a few generations, the immigrants' descendants were the country's richest demographic. Their success led to tensions with the Malay majority. The economic and ethnic divisions contributed to Malaysia’s decision to expel Singapore in 1965.
People can choose to work far less than the average American does, so long as they're content with lower-than-average living standards. Problems arise, though, when those who choose leisure resent the wealth of those who choose to work more - as happened in Malaysia.
Capitalism doesn't force anyone to work 40 hours a week. But it does link reward to output.
There are definitely more fertile places, although surprisingly successful communities which have lived quite co-operatively have existed in more difficult circumstances, so while circumstances may sometimes bring out our negatives, other times they lead people to be more resourceful.
The problem we have now in America is that a large number of people (60% according to a recent study) find that they can no longer support what was once consider a basic living standard on a full time income.
These people are not only forced to work 40 hours a week, but often take another job, so their reward to output ratio is far lower than past generations. Since 40-60% of homeless people in America are actually working then then it seems that for some there isn’t even the reward of a roof over their head.
The chart in the following article shows price trends for various goods from 2000 to 2022. Prices for housing, medical care, secondary education, and childcare - the most heavily regulated economic sectors - have risen faster than the rate of inflation. Prices of goods in less regulated sectors have risen far more slowly or even dropped.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8/
You're looking for a fix for government, not capitalism. I've posted my recommendations for peeling back some of the regulations that are causing these problems (in Barack Obama's words, "stop doing stupid sh*t). For example:
https://substack.com/@cavemaneconomist/note/c-121403820
https://substack.com/@cavemaneconomist/note/c-121119616
https://substack.com/@cavemaneconomist/note/c-120536443
https://substack.com/@cavemaneconomist/note/c-120012190
https://substack.com/@cavemaneconomist/note/c-119786265
Right. Its like in a sporting event. Progressive/SDs want the referee to be authoritarian and redistribute points from the winners to the losers. It doesn't make any sense.
For a right to a resource to matter the resource must first exist. I’d rather a capitalist system that produces too many resources and distributes them according to economic ability and need to a socialist system that produces too few resources but distributes them according to political power and need.
That’s an interesting perspective. It seems to me that the same resources are in the ground and they are still waiting to be used whoever takes them out or moulds them.
I agree that we shouldn’t have the politically powerful making any decisions about our needs, but for that reason don’t believe in people having the power to make decisions about our needs because they are wealthy and set up paywalls either.
I also worry about the morality of overproducing food to destroy it to keep the prices and profits up, and about the health effects of us overproducing some resources to the point they are harmful to us.
I think people might prefer a few less plastic toys to have less microplastics in their bodies, or must we accept dying younger than necessary to not risk affecting the economic abilities of others?
Most resources that we consume do not exist in a state of nature. That’s true, of course, of vaccines and refrigerators, but even of food. Someone has to plant it, nurture it, harvest it etc. You can’t have a meaningful discussion of the best way to distribute those resources without understanding the best way to produce them. It reminds me of the joke, “What’s the best way to get rich? Well, first you get a million dollars…”
It all comes down to that. Some ignore how there is abundance to begin with and simply move on to how to distribute it. Nature provides nothing for free. It all has to be produced.
There are almost 3 million businesses in Italy. and 35 million businesses in America.
Indeed there are! I’m surprised there are as many co-operatives as there are due to all the financial and legal roadblocks capitalism puts in their way.
I wonder if that’s the reason. It could be because co-ops are not as good at, well, allocating capital.
You speak as if systems based on collective ownership have a great track record. They generally don’t. Where they do have some success( e.g. the medical and retirement systems in Singapore and the Scandinavian countries) is in service industries in countries with small homogeneous populations and vigorous private sectors that generate a lot of wealth.
Of course different metrics are important to different people, and collective and co-operative enterprises will always be at a disadvantage in a capitalist economy. Nevertheless I suppose it is a matter of how we judge their track record, but according to what I might judge success they seem to be doing very well:
A 2013 study found that ‘home health aides at the worker-owned, participative decision-making organization were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than those at other agencies.’ A 1995 US study indicated that ‘employees who embrace an increased influence and participation in workplace decisions also reported greater job satisfaction,’ and a 2011 study in France found that worker-owned businesses ‘had a positive effect on workers' job satisfaction.’
A survey conducted in Seoul found that ‘in conventional firms, employees become less committed to their job as their work becomes more demanding; however, this was not the case in worker cooperatives.’ A national survey of 1,147 people employed in 82 worker cooperatives across the US, documented high levels of job satisfaction and community engagement among cooperative workers.
Worker cooperatives have markedly egalitarian pay structures with profit-sharing opportunities. The median pay ratio was 1.5 to 1, meaning the highest paid employee received just 50 percent more than the lowest paid in the typical cooperative studied.
Research by Virginie Perotin of Leeds University found that ‘worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter” and production organized more efficiently.’
According to an analysis of all businesses in Uruguay between 1997 and 2009, worker cooperatives have a 29% smaller chance of closure after controlling for variables such as industry.
Of course co-operatives & collectives are not socialism - even if some are inspired by it and try to operate according to the socialist principles they are able to within a capitalist economy.
My understanding is that they are rare. If the model starts to be more broadly adopted than investor owned firms and outcompete them, more power to the coop model.
Interestingly in Italy there are about 60,000 different co-operatives, 20,000 in Spain (including one of almost 80,000 people), 30,000 in America and 10,000 in the UK. The oldest still in existence is 260 years old.
People have always planted, nurtured and harvested food, although claiming exclusive ownership of the fields and orchards is relatively new in human history.
You said - 'You can’t have a meaningful discussion of the best way to distribute those resources without understanding the best way to produce them.'
I know how to produce them - the same way as we do now - co-operatively by hundreds or thousands of workers - but with the benefits being more equally distributed. I'm sure the workers won't mind at all. Let's give them a vote in their workplaces and see what they think.
You said - It reminds me of the joke, “What’s the best way to get rich? Well, first you get a million dollars…”
This right here! Wealth and privilege tends to lead to wealth and privilege, without anyone having done anything to earn it - far less than those who actually worked for it.
I've written on this subject in the past, and my views tend to be unpopular in liberal circles, because I don't view rights as primary.
I think actual rights (not legal fictions) are an emergent property of people taking responsibility for each other and the world around them. When we fail to take responsibility, the rights we write down in laws never seem to materialize.
https://open.substack.com/pub/anarcasper/p/permeable-selfhood
I totally agree with the author (Nate?) and not at all with Mr Fulmer.
to quote from another substack writer (Real Progressives):
The “political will” deficit is a power surplus for capital. When liberals plead procedural constraints while rubber-stamping $900 billion military budgets, expanding ICE detention camps, bailing out Silicon Valley Bank in 48 hours, they’re not failing. They’re succeeding spectacularly at their real mission, which is protecting capital’s veto over human needs. This is what class rule looks like with a government that can instantly mobilize trillions for banks and bombs while imposing devastating austerity.
It’s a government that claims ‘no money’ exists to house the homeless while 16 million homes sit vacant. It’s a government that claims spending is out of control and we can’t possibly feed children, while farmers are paid to destroy crops. It’s a government that claims nationalized healthcare would bring about long wait times and death panels while underfunded hospitals are already closing in rural areas and corporate consolidation is driving small medical practices out of business.
The “neutral” state is a myth. Every inaction is a choice to preserve the hierarchy where capital commands and people are forced to beg. Every inaction by those in power is deliberate.
The Case Against Coerced Compassion
The Moral Case
A just society is one in which no one is abandoned - but is also one in which help is given freely, not by force. True compassion respects both the dignity of the recipient and the liberty of the giver.
I believe that we’re morally obligated to care for those who can’t care for themselves. But acknowledging moral responsibility does not mean endorsing government compulsion. There is a big difference between moral duty and legal obligation. Declaring that basic needs are “human rights” enforceable by the state transforms one person's claim into another person's burden, imposed at gunpoint if necessary.
Forced giving isn’t charity, it’s theft. It may relieve material need, but it erodes moral responsibility, discourages voluntary giving, and hollows out compassion. And perhaps worst of all, it gives us permission to abandon our own moral duty. When government becomes the caretaker of the poor, it becomes easy to say, “I gave at the office.” Paying taxes isn’t compassion - it is delegation and it’s de-moral-izing. Voting money out of someone else’s pocket isn’t a moral act. It requires no personal sacrifice, no direct service, no love for the person in need. It’s moral outsourcing masquerading as virtue.
Real compassion is neither pity nor noblesse oblige. Real compassion is getting down in the other person’s foxhole with them and helping them to fight their demons. Private charity deals with individuals and their unique circumstances. Government programs deal with categories. They process people, slot them into forms, and distribute aid according to eligibility, not need, character, or context. Rather than helping people climb out of poverty, the welfare system tends to make people more comfortable in and with their poverty.
The solution to poverty is not less freedom, but more freedom, more opportunity, more community, more space for real moral action. A free society is not perfect, but it is the only kind in which both generosity and gratitude can be real.
The Practical Case
Beyond the moral concerns, treating basic necessities as government-enforced rights just doesn’t work well in practice. First, government has no resources of its own. Everything it gives, it must first take. It has no money except what it extracts from the private sector through taxation, borrowing, or inflation. It makes little sense to claim that the private sector lacks the means to help the poor while assuming the government somehow does.
Before the rise of the modern welfare state, thousands of mutual aid societies, religious charities, fraternal organizations, and local benevolent institutions crisscrossed the nation. These groups provided food, shelter, medical care, education, and job placement - often more effectively and personally than bureaucracies do today. From 1800 to 1960 (before the Great Society programs began), the poverty rate fell from 80–90% to around 15%. This drop was driven not by redistribution, but by free markets, voluntary charity, and rising productivity.
Government aid that is guaranteed and unconditional often creates dependency. It can discourage work, savings, and family formation. It may even penalize people for improving their situation. That’s not compassion - it’s a trap.
Government programs don’t just fill gaps; they often suppress private efforts. When the state assumes responsibility for the poor, private citizens and institutions often step back. Top-down systems are inflexible and prone to waste. Local, voluntary efforts are closer to the need, better informed, and more adaptable.
Perhaps most importantly, government programs are typically designed to maintain people at a subsistence level, not to transform their lives. Private charities, churches, and local aid organizations deal with individuals and individual issues – the personal barriers that keep someone trapped in poverty such as addiction, illiteracy, broken families, mental health issues - and to walk with them through change.
Supporters of government intervention often admit that free markets deliver the goods but argue that only government can distribute them fairly. They point to those who, because of age, disability, or circumstance, are unable to produce anything.
But rewarding need inevitably yields more of it - adding those who will not produce to those who cannot. Taxing production reduces wealth, which in turn increases need. In contrast, free markets reward productivity, create wealth, and thereby reduce need.
Government welfare means coercively managing a growing number of people in need amid growing poverty. Freedom means individuals voluntarily addressing a shrinking number of people in need amid growing wealth.
A couple of points.
You're really focused on the framing of "forced government intervention" and "coerced compassion" (cringe term).
That's an entirely subjective framing and I don't see it that way at all.
Taxation isn't theft.
It's simply the dues we pay to live in a modern society. Roads, bridges, libraries, fire fighters etc. And there IS a social contract.
As long as we insist on embracing Capitalism, there will always be haves and have-nots. That's literally how Capitalism works.
The decrease in poverty from 1800 - 1960 had as much to do with the New Deal, social security, employment insurance, the GI bill, and unions as the "free market." Probably more.
Capitalism is not (nor is it designed to be) a cure for poverty. The quoted statistics of "millions of people pulled out of poverty by Capitalism" have been completely debunked, and in no way reflect reality.
There is no law against charity or helping your fellow human. We're the richest country in the world, with the richest capitalists in the world. If what you're asserting is accurate, why is poverty and homelessness still an issue?
This system is working exactly as designed. Deregulation and "freeing the market" will only accelerate inequality.
Just my two cents.
J.
I agree that the "taxation is theft" meme goes too far. Many, if not most, of the bad ideas in the world are based on kernels of truth that people picked up and ran with to insanity.
Supporters of government intervention often point to the need for infrastructure. The federal government spent something like $6.75 trillion last year and only about $146 billion on infrastructure. or just over 2%.
I agree that under capitalism, there will always be haves and have nots, but that's true of any society.
The decrease in poverty from 1800 - 1960 had very little to do with the New Deal, Social Security, unemployment insurance, or the GI Bill. In 1945 - before Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the GI Bill had had time to work - the poverty rate was down to 30%. While the New Deal was in effect, the unemployment rate stayed in double digits. It did more to put the "great" in the Great Depression than it did to end it.
In what way has the claim that capitalism has pulled billions of people out of poverty been debunked? To take just one (very large) example, people in China lived in extreme poverty while Mao was in power. After his death in 1976, China began lowering tariffs and opening its markets to foreign trade. But the real economic boom started when farmers illegally split up collective farms into household plots and sold their surplus in local markets.
Instead of punishing them, Deng Xiaoping legalized their farms. He also set up Special Economic Zones that welcomed both free markets and foreign investment.
Under Mao, the hukou (household registration) system severely restricted internal migration, trapping tens of millions of workers in low productivity jobs on collective farms. After Mao’s death, these restrictions were gradually eased, allowing millions to move to urban areas, where their productivity surged due to access to capital, modern industry, and infrastructure. This shift triggered a massive GDP increase, though the labor reallocation was a one-time boost - peasants can be freed only once.
State-owned enterprises still dominate strategic sectors in China, but the private sector has consistently outperformed them in both productivity and innovation. What works in China isn't centrally planned. What is centrally planned doesn't work.
I believe that poverty is still an issue in the U.S. largely because of the government's "War on Poverty." One thing on which most economists - regardless of their political beliefs - agree is that you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize. Our welfare system has created perverse incentives that perpetuate and increase poverty.
Government interventions in education have led to increases in illiteracy (which breeds poverty) and its interventions in the housing market has reduced supply and increased demand, resulting in a housing shortage.
The statistics around the claim that "capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty" are based on erroneous numbers fabricated by the World Bank.
They said anyone that makes more than $1.90 a day is not in poverty.
That was never accurate.
The U.N. said that it took $7.40 per day to ensure basic nutrition and a normal human life expectancy.
That's a HUGE difference.
And again, with China you are ignoring the enormous government industrial spending that created millions of jobs and massively boosted the economy.
Regardless of where the bar is set, the fact remains that people are materially better off today than they were a century ago. Infant mortality is down, and life expectancy is up in even very poor countries.
The Chinese government has always expended enormous amounts of resources on industry. But for the first quarter century of its existence, it was an economic basket case. Then for the last half century its economy has been growing. What changed? The leadership freed the peasants and let private companies exist and function outside the central planning framework.
You’re claiming that the thing that turned the economy around was the thing that didn’t change. Moreover, as Xi has once again begun imposing government control over the economy, the economy has slowed.
It's estimated that China's state-owned enterprises produce only about 25-30% of the country's GDP yet they consume a far larger proportion of the country's resources. For example, they receive over half of the nation's bank loans.
Your entire argument hinges on "where the bar is set."
I'm sorry, but you can't just step over that, like it's somehow irrelevant to the conversation.
Life is materially better because of advances in technology and health care, not capitalism.
I made no such claim with China. I simply pointed out that you consistently ignore the impact of government investment on the economy.
China has dramatically increased spending on R&D, tech, industry etc. That's a fact.
I find it strange that you keep coming back to China, which is not remotely considered a "free market economy."
And it's also a fact that no country has ever pulled itself out of poverty WITHOUT large government investment.
To be clear, I have no interest in state controlled socialism.
I believe the key to equitable progress and widespread economic fairness is a new grassroots collaborative economy.
Built by we the people.
But I also believe that it's our responsibility to care for citizens that slip through the cracks. Statistically, there will always be some.
I find it no more coercive to care for the homeless, than I do to support firefighters or repair roads.
And considerably LESS coercive than paying to turn brown children across the ocean into skeletons...
I agree that technological innovation accounts for the lion's share of material progress, but I don't think you can separate that from capitalism. Free markets reward innovation by allowing individuals and firms to profit from new ideas. There’s a reason that in many languages the word for “telephone” is telephone, and “refrigerator” is refrigerator. The U.S. alone is responsible for about 40% of global pharmaceutical R&D spending and leads in the development of new medicines. In Sub-Saharan Africa, many small businesses wouldn't exist without smartphones.
You talk about market and socialist economies as if it's a binary switch. But every country today has a mixed economy, the difference is in the degree of regulation. China’s rapid growth over the last few decades owes far more to market reforms than to central planning.
Please define what you mean by a “new grassroots collaborative economy.” Market prices remain the most effective tool we have for coordinating the decisions of millions of people across time and distance. The catch is that for market prices to accurately reflect the value that those millions of people place on goods and services at any moment we need relatively free markets.
I agree that we have a responsibility to help those who fall through the cracks; the question is how best to do it. Government welfare programs often create more poverty than they eliminate, through perverse incentives that discourage work and savings. Poverty isn’t like firefighting. Fires don't have free will. They behave predictably and respond to known techniques. People are far more complex, though they do tend to respond to incentives - including perverse ones.
If by “turning brown children across the ocean into skeletons” you're referring to cobalt and lithium mining driven by government mandates for rapid decarbonization, that’s not a failure of capitalism. It's a result of top-down industrial policy and regulatory fiat rather than voluntary market demand.
I'll leave it to the other respondent to address the rest, as he has been doing so well enough without me.
But one point I think is worth making is that many of these advances you talk about are the result of science rather than capitalism. The benefits of that science has sometimes been limited by capitalism too, when a poor country needing treatments can't afford them for example, which accounts for a lot of overseas aid. We wouldn't want to mix up correlation and causation.
The benefits of science are not limited primarily by capitalism, but by the scarcity of resources. Developing and manufacturing medical equipment or researching and producing new medicines requires capital, labor, energy, and materials - all of which are limited and have alternative uses. Some socialist arguments overlook the fact that goods must be produced before they can be consumed. It’s a mistake to assume these goods simply exist "somehow" and that the only question is how to distribute them - especially if the distribution method undermines the processes that make their creation possible.
"As long as we insist on embracing Capitalism, there will always be haves and have-nots. That's literally how Capitalism works."
I think that's how the world works. We all play a status game. Inequality is part of that. There's no way to make everyone equal, and trying to do that just decreases the overall wealth that we all have to share.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea that haves and have-nots are "just the way the world works." And so does most of human history.
Here's a thought experiment. I invite you to just think this through for a minute...
100 completely random people wake up on an empty beach on an island. The people come from all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. The island has no technology or existing structures. But it's large and has fresh water, natural forage and game.
In the middle of the beach is a blanket with an assortment of hand tools and a manual that clearly illustrates how to hunt, fish, forage, make fires, build shelters, etc.
Where are the haves and have-nots?
At what point in the predictable development of this ad hoc "tribe" does inequality arise?
At what point do some members begin to be exploited?....
This is not just some imaginary hypothetical. This is a fairly accurate description of every indigenous tribe for tens of thousands of years.
Extreme inequality has not been around nearly so long. And if you think of the worst inequality in history? Say the Pharoahs or the Robber Barons? Today's neoliberal capitalists are worse 🤷♂️
Your hypothetical has a tribe living in Eden. But in the real world it's not that simple. In indigenous tribes aren't there chiefs that have more power and wealth? And beautiful women who are sought after for sex? And neighboring tribes to fight with to steal what they have, whether wealth or women?
There may not be haves and have nots when resources are abundant, but there are still have mores and have lesses. Cooperation is good in social animals like humans but competition, the survival of the fittest, generates winners and losers, and that results in inequality. The poor will always be with us. There will always be poor in the land. These observations from millennia ago in Biblical times remain true today.
So while we should nurture cooperation, we should also allow competition rather than try to eliminate winners and losers, we should make sure it is open, fair and generative.
Big companies like Amazon and Apple should not be punished or broken up just because they are big and dominate their competitors. To the victors go the spoils. That's a law of nature, which humans cannot change. As Joseph Schumpeter taught, capitalism is a dynamic process of creative destruction.
But we can build an ecosystem with diversity not just dominance. A rainforest ecosystem where the less powerful can still find a niche instead of a redwood forest where the dominant starve others of the sunlight they need to survive.
The differences between an attractive woman, a chief who has a nominally elevated level of power and wealth - to a hundred billionaire to… well… you. Is like apples and blue. It's completely absurd.
That's not what survival of the fittest means.
Amazon is not a victor, it's an exploiter.
Your ecosystem of diversity not just dominance will never be compatible with neoliberal capitalism
You say 'There's no way to make everyone equal' and maybe thats true, lets presume it is, the questions still arise:
1) 'Is there a point of inequality that is dangerous to others freedoms and abilities to operate functionally and healthily in any system?'
2) 'Is there a point of base level equality to ensure that people can operate functionally and healthily in that system?'
3) 'Is there a point at which overall wealth becomes so wasteful and polluting and dangerous that it is no longer desirous to keep extending it?'
Why are those questions important? There is no question that we can do better, and should. The question is how. And the danger is that our efforts to make things better actually make things worse.
You make some very good points and you are making a sincere effort to better the world. But are you fighting against fundamental forces to try to change the world instead of harnessing those forces so that they pull the world in the right direction?
The world is not fair. It's not just. It's not equal. We got cast out of the Garden of Eden where we could pluck fruits off trees to gorge on as we live forever into a world where we eat by the sweat of our brows and where, in the end, we die.
(I'm not religious but I think the Bible, especially the New Testament, has lots of wisdom in it.)
We need to realize what we can do and what we can't, and do the best we can. We can't recreate the Garden of Eden because it's mythical, it never did exist except in imagination. Instead of trying to do the impossible, we should try to try things to find out how to improve where we are.
The free market is the best way to do that trial and error process. The market rewards good ideas and punishes bad ones. Things improve the better the market functions. But when we punish people who reap those rewards, things don't improve, but get worse. When we break up big companies just because they are big, for example, or heavily tax top earners, we kill the geese that lay golden eggs.
That said, the market needs rules to function, or people cheat. Governments have a role to play there. But too often the government thinks it should have starring role in running the economy instead of a supporting role. That doesn't work. That's why socialism gets such bad reviews.
Substack is a good microcosm of real world economies that gives us a chance to see the problems that arise in them. People write posts and notes on Substack to share their ideas with the world. But we don't do it if we don't feel rewarded for it. We want other people to read what we write, to hit that like button, to follow us, to subscribe to our accounts, even to pay.
But not everyone is equal. The vast majority of us labor in obscurity with a few likes to scrape by while the elite get outsized rewards for what they write, arguably deserved, arguably not.
The Substack algorithm has something to do with which writers succeed and which don't. Maybe it could be made more fair, and maybe some people could be stopped from abusing the system.
But the fundamental problem will remain. Half the people on Substack will be below average in the rewards they receive. Only 10% of the people will be in the top 10%. And the higher you go, the 1%, the 0.1%, the greater the rewards but the smaller the number of people who receive them.
Merit has something to do with it, but not everything. Some people have unfair advantages. But it's hard to think of things that can be done to make Substack better rather than worse. And it's better for everyone to have the platform that anyone can come to to read and write. Otherwise, what would I spend this lovely Friday morning doing?
Good points. To say people have human rights to necessities means nothing in the real world. It's an abstraction.
We need to look to concrete examples in the real world to learn how to solve problems. Like you point to before government got so big and powerful with the Great Society programs. Like I point to with William Bradford and the Plymouth Colony.
I think it's useful to look at countries like Scandinavia's, especially Norway, and Singapore to see what they get right. But in the US we seem not to be learning how to prosper.
On the one hand we have a rapacious elite accumulating massive wealth by exploring the rest of us through private equity buying up homes, hospitals and veterinary clinics. On the other hand we have people like the soon to be mayor of New York City.
Too much capitalism or too much socialism brings an imbalance. We need both top-down and bottom-up. Yin and yang. In theory our problems are easy to solve. But that's theory. In practice solutions are hard to find. Abstractions like human rights mean nothing in the real world. Best to focus instead on experimenting to find what works.
I'm wary of the term 'human rights' myself - which is why I reframed it as ‘the inherent dignity and worth that every person possesses simply by virtue of being human and [doing] what is necessary to ensure that.’ I guess I see it as a list of the basic guarantees we need to ensure (as far as possible) to maintain freedom and retain our humanity.
You are right though, we do need pragmatic working solutions to change our conditions. Many of those we have been sold under different political labels have not been sufficient. I've tried to start addressing this in various ways, but hope to do more in the latter half of this year, as luckily there are a lot of practical working examples that rarely get enough attention brought to them.
I guess my question is, how does it help to make a list of basic guarantees? Doesn't it hurt more than it helps? Then people start to think they are entitled to things and stop working so hard to get those things themselves.
Ideas are plentiful. I have lots of ideas that I think will work, and here on Substack you can read a lot of brilliant thinking from all kinds of people. But that is all too abstract to matter in the real world. What matters in the real world is implementation. Getting things done.
A good example is in the car industry. In the early 1900s Henry Ford didn't invent the car. Others had the idea of how to build a car -- it was not hard. But to produce cars that average people could afford to buy took the genius and hard work of Henry Ford to accomplish.
Same with electric cars. Elon Musk didn't invent the electric car. The idea has been around for as long as gasoline cars. But to take electric cars mainstream took the genius and hard work of Elon Musk to accomplish.
Both Henry Ford and Elon Musk tried to apply their genius and hard work to improve the government, to disastrous effect. So we know that the ideas do matter as much as the implementation.
One problem I see is that we humans compete for status, and the status game is zero sum. We can't all be in the top 10%, ot the top 1%. But we all want to be.
So we waste a lot of effort in conspicuous consumption, like male peacocks with their tail feathers. And we come up with ways to pull those with more status down to our level. That's what socialism is. And I think that's what human rights and basic guarantees do too. Try to level things so we all have the same status, no one better than the other.
Sadly, that doesn't work. You end up with the soon to be mayor of New York with his silly promises of rent freezes and state-run grocery stores and free transportation. As if that's going to help.
I don't have the answers. I think debates like yours with Richard Fulmer are a good idea. But debates only go so far. What matters in the real world is action.
Advertiser David Ogilvy said that his goal was never to impress people with the creativity of his ideas but instead to get them to buy the product. He said one Greek orator would speak and people listening would say, how well he speaks. But when Demosthenes spoke, the people said, let us march against Philip.
If you can rouse people to do constructive actions, you can accomplish things. Telling people they are guaranteed things and they don't need to do anything to get them doesn't rouse them to do anything constructive. Just the opposite.
It seems to me that unless we have an expectation of free speech without being punished for speaking we don't be able to have great discussions like these - so I do think some expectations are reasonable and we might even call them rights for lack of a better word, especially if we want to be able to have a world in which we can reason together.
But I take your point about the need to assert, work for, and claim what we value if we can - it is important to value what we have and to realise the costs of it. But we also live in a world in which a child, an infirm, or a very elderly or sick person may not be able to do that for themselves, so there has to be a balance if we are to have a world in which everyone has dignity.
Your examples of Ford and Musk are interesting, but they rather prove my point about how current systems concentrate power and resources. Both built their success on the backs of workers whose labour created the actual value, whilst existing infrastructure, public education, and state research provided the foundation they built upon. The 'genius' narrative obscures how much innovation emerges from collective effort and how existing property relations prevent most people from accessing the resources needed to implement their ideas.
You're absolutely right that status competition is destructive, but I'd argue that's precisely what capitalism rewards. The fundamental issue isn't that people naturally compete for status - it's that we've organised society around artificial scarcity and hierarchy. When we look at how people actually behave in crises or in genuinely cooperative environments, we see tremendous capacity for collective problem-solving. That is how all these things already get invented and made, by workers co-operating together, but the real makers on he factory floor have far less of a share and take far more of a risk than the ones who own the factories or ideas.
The real question isn't whether people deserve guarantees, but how we organise ourselves so that everyone can contribute their talents without fear of destitution. The practical examples I mentioned aren't about creating dependency - they're about removing the barriers that prevent people from acting constructively. When people aren't spending all their energy on basic survival, they're remarkably creative and productive.
Your point about action over debate is spot on though. That's why I'm drawn to prefigurative approaches - actually building constructive cooperative alternatives we want to see, from community gardens to worker cooperatives to mutual aid networks.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History