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It's getting difficult to identify the parts of our world that aren't corrupt.


Corruption is incentive-based. There is always an incentive to lower effort. Indeed to a certain extent it may be essential for survival. It seems it can only be counterbalanced by the constraints imposed by ethics (i.e. guilt and shame) and punishments (i.e. fear). The only positive mindset way to reducing corruption is to inculcate the view that life is for service - but that does not gel well with capitalism, I guess.


The only thing more rare than righteous institutions are forum threads not plagued by malcontents griping about capitalism.


Don't forget on HN you also get people with a quasi-religious belief in the market too!


In fairness, if you didn't have to worry about where your next meal was coming from, it might be easier to not want to violate your ethics to get ahead in life. This is not an endorsement of socialism, rather, a defense of criticism of capitalism.


The market economy I live in, where you imagine we spend our time worrying about our next meal, has fostered the largest cohort of morbidly obese people in the history of our species. And I am utterly incapable of imagining anything less in need of defense than criticism of capitalism.


It indeed achieves both, at the same time! Here's how it works: a typical person - particularly an American - gets enough money to buy more food than they'd ever need, but at the same time, they're ~two random events (e.g. sudden medical or car repair bill, and losing their job) from becoming homeless.

It's really not that hard to imagine living in luxury and fear at the same time. That's how rich and/or powerful people feel in less democratic countries - they simultaneously have more money than they know what to do with, and are one random event (mistake, shifting political winds) from losing it all, possibly along with their lives. It's actually one of the main reasons democracy is considered the superior system - powerful people living in fear is a combination that often leads to blood being spilled.


>f you didn't have to worry about where your next meal was coming from,

This is statistically true for more people living under capitalism than socialism btw.




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