Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Two lines of argument against capitalism

There are two main lines of argument against capitalism:
  1. Even if it were working "correctly" on its own terms (i.e. the way apologists justify capitalism to the people) capitalism would still suck for a large number of people.
  2. Capitalism does not actually work correctly on its own terms.
The problem, of course, is that with two lines of arguments, apologists can hop from one foot to the other. The arguments against "ideal" capitalism are abstract and hypothetical; we don't actually know how ideal capitalism would actually work, since in practice, capitalism isn't working. On the other hand, a reasonable rebuttal to the argument that capitalism isn't actually working in a practical sense is that we're not actually doing capitalism correctly.
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