It is not often that I respond to these things of such low quality as the video below. I vowed a long time ago that I am done with anarcho-communists. I do not debate them, and I do not talk to them. After many attempts of communicating with them, with 100% accuracy I was exposed to the most vile of creatures totally unable to act like adults, or even like human beings. I don’t like to generalize entire groups. I was sent a message by an anarcho-communist with some very helpful and enlightening information that gave me a better understanding of their philosophy once. Will Moyer, a leftist, wrote a brilliantly put together article that I responded to in “The Limits of Will Moyer“. But any efforts I have made to talk to them directly have resulted in the most pathetic and lowest of treatments.
The reason I so thoroughly enjoyed Will Moyer’s article is because, unlike the video below, it was not full of SCE (sarcasm, cynicism, exaggeration). His article made his points directly and he proved that he had an understanding of “right libertarianism,” or synonymously, and more accurately to me, anarcho-capitalism. He did not mince words and was not afraid to go against libertarianism, but at the same time he did not treat his writing as a BuzzFeed Top 10 list. It was meant to be of high quality, and it was meant to be taken seriously.
The video below was made for attention and makes no attempt to understand capitalism, but rather it only illustrates a reconfirmation of biases. I respond to it only at request, and grudgingly so. If the video creator wanted to be taken seriously he would have sucked it up, cut out the childish SCE and utilized a little CHI (curiosity, humor, impudence). Or to put it in other words, there’s no problem with disagreeing and rejecting the arguments of others, but if you don’t want to be torn apart, try to have some fun and create a real discussion. This video, in its despicably low BuzzFeed sarcastic style, does not deserve a bit of respect. I’d be willing to point out the positives in all other cases as I did with Moyer, but this will simply be the crumpling and throwing away of an undeserving piece of junk.
A note on how to read this article: This is not a thorough break down of anything in particular. Rather, it is merely a response to a poorly put together, quick list of arguments against capitalism (which are actually arguments against socialism). For the best way to follow this article, watch the video one item at a time, and then read the appropriate response. For example, watch #10 from the video, then read #10 in the article. #9 from the video, then #9 in the article and so on.
10. Capitalism promotes innovation
Many people do indeed fall into taking easy jobs and not looking for upward mobility. Of course, the socialist answer is usually to force everybody into a single system of being equally poor. Not everyone is capable of being innovative, and not everyone wants to sit around playing the guitar all day. Most people take normal jobs that require simple work and live their life outside of work. Work does not have to be some amazing thing that we love to do, there are always going to be shitty jobs out there to be done. What we can do is allow adults to make their own decisions, and run their own lives. You simply cannot force everyone to be an artist. If everyone were innovative, there would be no such thing as innovative.
Not only that, but the source that the video uses to show that only 13% of people are disengaged at work is a worldwide poll. The four highest countries for most engaged are the United States (mixed-economy, partially capitalist), Canada (mixed-economy, partially capitalist), Australia (market economy, third freest economy in the world), and New Zealand (market economy, fourth freest economy in the world). The most disengaged? East Asia (which with the exception of newly capitalist systems such as China and Hong Kong, most countries in East Asia have socialist command economies), Sub-Saharan Africa (a highly underdeveloped region with a long history of socialism and communism), and South Asia (a highly liberalized area, it’s fastest growing nation, Sri Lanka recently took on some capitalist policies). [Source]
As for the source on people not responding to financial incentive? Massively taken out of context. First, the study found that when it comes to mechanical skills, people respond to financial incentives, and when it comes to cognitive skills people respond to different kinds of incentives, but we’ll get back to that. The economic law that says people respond to incentives is still true. If you don’t pay a programmer enough, he’ll quit for a higher paying job. However, once the pay is good enough, he’ll start to look for other incentives like the ability to be autonomous and creative. What does this mean? High value employees are capable of demanding more, and do so. This is something we have found through capitalism. It is the still generally free market in the software world that has recognized this. This is why you see such incredible innovation in the workplace in places like Google and Amazon. This has been known for a long time, this research is only repeating what has already been discovered in, and put into practice in the free market.
Within the highly capitalist software industry, this is also where you see things like Apache, Linux, and Wikipedia. Large open source projects that are dependent upon free labor and donations. The “open-source way” does call for people to lead projects, but it also welcomes free labor. Open source has become one of the best ways for young people to gain experience and work with big projects. This is why they’re so popular. It provides an opening, and the people who are at the top, leading the project and running the show? They’re being paid. Of course, they’re being paid. It’d be silly to think that wasn’t the case. Open-source is a huge industry. All of this is a part of the free market. Being free of charge has nothing to do with socialism. This entire video is an idiotic misunderstanding of a simple word that can be looked up in the dictionary in about two seconds. Socialism means collective ownership. Guess what? The Wikimedia Foundation, The Apache Software Foundation, and Linux distributions such as Fedora? All owned and operated by full time employees.
Queue the canned rants about “global inequality” and how it’s not fair that everyone doesn’t have the same piece of the imaginary pie. First of all, wealth is not distributed, it is created. It is the socialist nations who end up poor. It is not the fault of capitalist nations that that is the case. It is the fault of the governments for holding people back and not allowing them to adapt to the world and build better lives for themselves. Second, you don’t need to be rich to innovate, the greatest innovators throughout the world come from humble and poor means. It is their striving to build something that pushes them into innovating in the first place. Does this mean it is capitalism itself that promoted that innovation? Sort of, on a general scale. But take it down to the individual scale as the video has, and it’s more because those innovators wanted to get rich and share their ideas.
Then there’s the idea, that’s repeated many times throughout the video that “capitalist education” destroys creative thinking and critical thought. Of course, the video is ignorantly referring to public schools, the exact thing it had just called for by saying that we are more than capable of providing education for everyone.
9. Free markets increase economic development
Immediately after saying the word “free market”, the video starts talking about the IMF, World Bank, and Free Trade Organization. These are not free market organizations, and it must be said that it is impossible to force free market on anyone. At that point, it is by definition, not free, nor capitalism. People must be able to trade among themselves freely in order for there to be a free market. You’d think that’d be obvious, right? It then suggests that protectionist policies such as anti-trust laws and banking bailouts are good for economies, and all the evidence that shows that protectionist policies are only to protect special interests (shocker!) don’t matter.
On the internet being a major innovation, let’s consider first where innovation on the internet has come from. To the government, the internet was nothing but a tool for the military, they had no idea of its power. It was only until the private sector started building on it that it became what we know of today. The internet that the video refers to is pure private sector. Not only that, but just because entrepreneurs use roads to drive to work, that does not mean the government is responsible for their innovations. In the absence of government, roads will still exist, just cheaper and more efficient. If the government never created the “internet”, it still would’ve been created, probably by the same private sector contractors. The internet and GPS, today, are old technologies that are only useful to the average person because of innovative entrepreneurs in the free market.
8. Markets are a rational means of organizing economic life.
The fact that the U.S. wastes so much food is a sign of prosperity (obviously). That prosperity comes from better technology and a (relatively) free market. The starving nations around the world (which are mostly under socialism and dictatorships) lack the agricultural technology that countries like the U.S. do. Even still, countries like the U.S. continue to send them food and care, causing their populations to rise disproportionally to their technology. This only makes things worse than they are. Socialist programs of just giving things away with no consideration as to the consequences and potential alternatives (such as abandoning intellectual property and business regulations that may allow companies to help these countries) are what cause the mass poverty in poor nations.
The New Deal (mentioned in one of the videos sources), by the way, destroyed the economy and it was only after Roosevelt’s death and the removal of his policies that the economy recovered from it and World War II.
As for planned obstination, this is primarily caused by inflation, which is caused by central banking. As the dollar loses value, people have less to spend, so they demand cheaper products. Companies respond to this demand by making… cheaper products. In order to do this, they must use lower quality material. This is as opposed to the post world war two era in which socialist public works programs were being dismantled and the pent up economy went through a major boom. This was an era in which cars, clothes and appliances were made to be very sturdy and long lasting. Today, people simply cannot afford such things and must choose lower quality products.
These cheaper products do not generate more profits, because they are lower priced products for lower priced material. Without planned obstination, there would be higher priced products with higher priced materials that would be more durable, and would not be replaced nearly as much.
When Keynes said that technology would lead to 15 hour workweeks he ignores the entire purpose of technology. Technology allows us to advance society. As technology rises, we create different kinds of technological jobs. The purpose of technology is not to create an imaginary, impossible Peter Joseph world. It is to raise the standard of living and to solve problems. Robots have replaced menial factory line jobs and have allowed more people to take on more challenging jobs in robotics and electronics. This is a positive that the video was complaining doesn’t exist from the very beginning. You don’t create more challenging jobs by playing the guitar for no pay, you do it by innovating in the free market to meet customer demand.
The videos source, which complains about people working longer hours, makes no mention of things like inflation and high tax rates. The countries mentioned such as the United States, Canada and Japan all have some of the highest individual tax rates in the world. As always, the socialist answer is just to pass regulation to shorten the workweek, which inevitably leads to mass poverty because no one can afford to live and afford all the socialist publics works programs at once. As for the article on “bullshit jobs,” it’s just a lot of complaints about necessary jobs and how the author wishes he could spend his life doing nothing productive.
You can work as long as you want, the free market (again) is by definition free. The market isn’t some magical being that doesn’t let you do less work. It is, however, inefficient and bad for the people to hire 100 people to work for half an hour each. To quote the video, “How stupid is that?”
The claim that everyone is working “bullshit jobs” to buy “bullshit products” is.. well.. bullshit. It’s entirely subjective opinion. My smartphone is not a bullshit product, nor is my laptop. I don’t own any bullshit products, because I don’t choose to buy products that I think are bullshit. I think socialist books are bullshit products and a waste of money. But some people don’t, so be it. Nobody “makes me want” anything, that again, is a bullshit argument. If you buy one thing over another, that does not make you superior, that makes you human.
7. We can prevent bad business practices through ethical consumerism.
The very first argument is that the media (state controlled) is advertising products to people and are, therefore, catering to the evil corporations. Advertising, overtime, has become much more subtle, internet marketing is about advertising products to people who already want that product. This has happened because people have begun to ignore advertisements, this is why adless mediums such as Netflix have become so popular over things like cable.
Yes, vegging out on the couch and watching TV is bad for you, but will it program you to go out and buy stuff? No. In the end, it is the individuals choice and responsibility to do so. Everyone, including the commentator of this video, has found a great product that they like (and is, therefore, subjectively not bullshit) through advertising. Advertising is not only a great way to drive down costs of certain things like YouTube (ads are the reason it’s free) but it’s a great way for us to discover new products that we might enjoy. A personal lack of self-control is no reason to vilify the entire thing. That’s like saying Mountain Dew should be illegal because I enjoy it too damned much.
But, the point of saying advertising is bad is because companies won’t advertise their own bad practices. Yes… that’s an actual claim. At no point have I ever heard a capitalist claim that companies should self-police. What I have heard is that the market is capable of self-policing. This means that there is no need for government intervention. Especially when there are things like Consumer Reports and the thousands of systems for product review out there such as with Amazon and eBay.
Just because single products bring multiple products together, it doesn’t mean a thing. Individual products and companies speak for themselves. What the video is referencing (but coyly doesn’t mention) is the “business practices” of companies in foreign socialist nations in which workers are treated like cattle, thanks to bad economies and regulations created by their governments.
At the end of this rant, the video says you can only vote with your money if you actually have any money. This shows a total misunderstanding of what voting with your wallet means. First of all, politics currently control and dictate most business products, especially things like food. Businesses can not cater to their customer because they are either held back by protectionist regulation or must use protectionist regulation to get ahead. Voting with your wallet has nothing to do with moving companies actions by yourself, it’s about making your own decisions. Yes, this gets increasingly harder as countries become more socialist, that does not negate the purpose.
6. Government regulations address the question of bad practices.
No. They don’t. They create them. This is not capitalism, it’s got nothing to do with it. What the video complains about is actually socialism.
Capitalism: The possession of capital or wealth; an economic system in which private capital or wealth is used in the production or distribution of goods and prices are determined mainly in a free market; the dominance of private owners of capital and of production for profit.
Socialism: A theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society; advocacy or practice of such a system, esp. as a political movement.
The enforcement of collective ownership and social organization is government. The government, through socialism, chooses certain companies over others by creating protectionist regulations.
“Worker control” already exists due to government regulation, they’re called unions, and they only make things worse by deluding supply and demand.
5. Don’t you buy things from corporations? Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?
No.
4. Capitalists put risk into their businesses.
It was challenging for Nazi’s to take power, and because it’s challenging to start a business, then it’s wrong? Wait, what if it’s challenging to build a socialist system that doesn’t collapse in five years? Does that make it wrong? This has nothing to do with challenge, it’s about the fact that when someone puts blood and sweat into building something, you can’t come along and claim that it somehow equally belongs to everyone on earth.
People voluntarily build businesses, other people voluntarily work for those businesses. In the same way that this video creator thinks you’re stupid for buying a smartphone instead of socialist literature, he thinks you’re stupid for working for a private company rather than working for the government or a cooperative. It is actively saying that you are too dumb to manage your own life and instead, your life should be run by a British teenager on the internet.
Socialists want to exercise their power over others by destroying systems that everyone explicitly agrees to and is perfectly happy with. Thankfully, they’re unwilling to take the risks of gaining actual support and tend to enact what they want through groups like the democratic party in the hopes that one day, the government will put a gun to your head and tell you that you own nothing, no matter what your personal beliefs are.
3. Living standards improve overall, even for the poor.
Living standards improved under Nazism and Fascism, therefore, it’s not a good thing that living standards improve under capitalism. Again, the video is going immediately towards the Nazi’s and saying, “Look, they did it!” If the video claimed that socialism improves living standards for the poor (as it does temporarily) I could claim the same thing. What’s more important is that capitalism and free trade permanently raise living standards and does not lead to mass famine and poverty as socialism and Keynesianism does.
Argentina has always had economic troubles and experienced the usual boom bust cycles that any Keynesian economy does. There’s nothing wrong with worker cooperatives and are perfectly welcome under capitalism. If they work, if they can meet customer demand, then they are totally OK. I would love to see more attempts at cooperatives, but only if they compete on the free market where people can decide which is best. It is important to mention that there are both pros and cons of co-ops. It is also important to remember that the customer is more important than the employee. This does not mean it’s OK to commit criminal actions against employees, but to say that working is a personal decision that is about serving others for the sake of future personal benefit.
2. Capitalism is the result of human nature.
First of all, capitalism has existed for at least 150,000 years. Second, of course it came after humans, humans created trade. Capitalism being a result of human nature has nothing to do with genetics as the video author very well knows. It’s about the fact that trade is a part of communication. It’s what allows us to build societies. The division of labor is the entire reason modern society exists.
Communicating with others and having friends has nothing to do with communism.
Communism: A theory that advocates the abolition of private ownership, all property being vested in the community, and the organization of labor for the common benefit of all members; a system of social organization in which this theory is put into practice.
The video is trying to suggest that capitalism means you can’t live with friends, have relationships or communicate. However, it is in communism that it becomes impossible to solve disputes because there is no recognition of ownership. Such a society quickly devolves into a primitive state.
Capitalism does not force you to charge your friends to help you to move. This, as the video creator and everyone on earth knows, is a ridiculous thing to say to begin with. Capitalism thrives on, and asks for cooperation, it is built on cooperation. Competition is not the opposite of cooperation, nor is it the only foundation of capitalism. And yes, competition is natural, if it weren’t, sports wouldn’t have been around for well over 4,000 years.
And then we get back to how public schools are capitalist schools. Over and over, this video talks about socialism and calls it capitalism. The public education system (which this video creator should adore) teaches an over exaggerated idea of “sharing is caring”. They do not teach fundamental reasoning, negotiation and critical thinking skills. If we had a capitalist education system, there surely would be plenty of schools that did just that, but alas, we have a socialist one.
1. Capitalism is the only system that’s possible.
No one is saying this. In fact, it is very rare to see capitalism today. It certainly does not exist in the US or UK. But the video doesn’t talk about that and the historical effects of socialism. Instead, it queues the pictures that are purely a result of the tragedy of the commons and the lack of private property. When all land is unowned, people have no incentive to take care of it.
It’s been proven time and again that the environment is not headed for collapse, and when the economy collapses it is often due to Keynesian practices and central banking which creates ridiculous and unnecessary boom/bust cycles.
The only need for social change is the need to get rid of government to allow people to act like adults and make their own decisions instead of bending to these ridiculous “common good” arguments that have never had a lick of actual reasoning behind them. (Mostly because there is no such thing as a common good, it’s an impossible concept.)
The only way you’re ever going to convince everyone that all companies should be cooperatives is to force it on them by regulation. The fact is that structured companies, which are responsive to the customer, not some bratty socialist employees, will always out compete them and the customers will always choose them as superior businesses.
As for anarcho-syndicalism in the Spanish Civil War, this system was indeed forced on those peaceful non-criminals who did not want it. The punishment for using money was death. There is no possible way to force a particular kind of anarchy without the use of coercion, in which case, it is inevitably a state. Of course, this is only in the few areas that anarchy was established. In the grander sense, the Spanish Civil War was fought between Nazi and Italian Fascist supporter Dictator Francisco Franco against the Soviet Union.
I get that anarchy makes places better than they are, I’m sure those parts of Spain under anarchy were in a better position than being under a long series of dictators who were constantly at war for the entirety of Spain’s history. Is this really the best case for “left libertarianism?” If so, it’s got nothing to stand on.
Conclusions
In reality, this video gives no real arguments against capitalism and why it is criminal. There are a lot of arguments against socialism and the usual whining of, “Why isn’t everyone as economically ignorant as me? I’ll make them that way!”, but nothing with any real content.
When the video says not to use, “rehashed, terrible phrases that mean nothing [that] are often completely inconsistent with reality” it ignores the fact that the video uses a stereotypically wrong view of capitalism pushed by socialist government and it ignores the realities of economics, something socialists like this have never been able to get straight in their entire history.
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