Technology

We're closer than we were, and I appreciate you engaging honestly. But I think the "capitalism as a tool" framing is where we still fundamentally diverge.

A tool is neutral. A hammer doesn't have preferences on what it impacts. Capitalism does. It has a built-in optimization function that rewards specific behaviors regardless of who wields it or what guardrails are placed around it. It rewards the accumulation of capital. It rewards externalizing costs onto workers, communities, and ecosystems because those costs don't appear on a balance sheet. It rewards buying political influence because the return on investment is demonstrably higher than almost any other capital deployment. That's the system executing its own logic correctly.

You're describing a government that "interferes where needed" to correct those outcomes. I'm asking who controls that government and why we should expect it to maintain that independence indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its political influence the same way it compounds its capital. Europe is the test case and the results are coming in. The interference is losing ground. European governments haven't stopped wanting to intervene but because the structural pressure never stops and the political will to resist it has to be continuously regenerated while capital only has to keep pushing, it is a system you'll never win against.

You said it yourself: the correct implementation doesn't exist. Only one that minimizes harm. I'd push that further: a system whose internal logic actively works against minimizing harm isn't a tool, but instead a system doing what it was designed to do. The harm is the output of the optimization function running correctly.

At some point "we need better regulation" becomes "we need to replace the thing that keeps eating the regulation." That's where I am. With as much abundance as we have within the world, why must we restrict ourselves to a single system of economics that has been proven to fail, that is both anti-democratic and anti-life?

As is often said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, eh?