DCHawk1 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2023 1:07 pm
Marx was wrong about history, economics, science, human behavior, and the mechanisms that animate all of them. If you're still confused about that, then that's a you problem.
Capitalism, in a vacuum, is a perfect system. Unfortunately, as zsn noted, we don't live in a vacuum, and the perfect conditions necessary to enable the perfect system, therefore, do not exist and never will.
Smith's contribution -- particularly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments -- was to describe the moral/ethical conditions, habits, and practices that best enable a commercial economy to thrive (in the absence of the vacuum/perfect world) and to produce economic activity that benefits both individuals and society at large.
Marx was a religious fanatic. Nothing more.
I was curious about this post, but I didn’t really bother at the time. Now that this thread got bumped, lemme ask:
If capitalism really is perfect, at least in a vacuum; and if any imperfections of capitalism were already offset by Smith contributing “the moral/ethical conditions, habits, and practices that best enable a commercial economy to thrive (in the absence of the vacuum/perfect world) and to produce economic activity that benefits both individuals and society at large,” then how did we nonetheless still encounter a problem as yuge as climate change anyway?
Put more simply, how are we sure Smith’s contributions were really contributions at all?
This take makes it sound like capitalism is either best equipped to curb climate change, and/or could have never caused climate change in the first place, cuz some dood wrote some book like 300 years ago…yet here we are.
I’d also be curious to hear why Mr. “Opiate Of The Masses” himself was actually just a religious fanatic, nothing more.
But I kinda doubt I get a response to any of this.
