logoalt Hacker News

danudeyyesterday at 4:27 PM3 repliesview on HN

Saw an interesting discussion on how capitalism has existed for as long as markets have existed, including ancient Greece, and how it inevitably leads to wealth inequality, monopolistic behavior, unsustainable resource extraction, and all the other negatives we see today. The only difference is that in Greece, all of these negatives would have been applied locally but now they're all being applied globally. Instead of one super-wealthy man being a pain in the ass for the local Athens economy, he can now ruin things for everyone everywhere.


Replies

wredcollyesterday at 4:56 PM

I would more simply define that as "wealth inequality" rather than capitalism (or more broadly, power inequality) and perhaps go on to say that the real problem is that, while you can't realistically prevent/remove all inquality, most systems do a poor job of preventing the people with more money/power from using that to consistently increase their own share.

show 2 replies
atmosxyesterday at 4:54 PM

Nah, Ancient Greece has nothing to do with today’s capitalism. It’s a dumb example and the parallels will fall down to a close inspection. Different world.

alistairSHyesterday at 5:40 PM

Pretty sure Adam Smith captured that in his writings.

Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).

show 1 reply