Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

That would not be an accurate label. Nothing you wrote implies any economic system. Of course the society you describe would allow for capitalism, but it equally allows other models.



> That would not be an accurate label

...in your estimation. I and many others would call it such, and with good reason. In our estimation it is capitalism that allows for other models, as long as they are peaceful and respect property rights.

Nothing about capitalism hinders you to follow your social instincts. You are free to share your possessions with whomever you choose. You can jointly own whatever you want with whomever you want. That is capitalism.


I can't run my own bank and abolish the capitalist system. I first need ten million dollars worth of capitalist money just to get started. Every clever path to eliminate capitalism from within is blocked through absurd licensing requirements by the government.

The amount of loopholes I have to go through just to end capitalism from within are ridiculous and can hardly be described as voluntary.

To abolish capitalism you need to provide cost effective liquidity, this means you will have to start an alternative money or payment system with a demurrage fee. The challenge is using existing constructs in the law to create something that cannot be banned by the government or the central bank. How voluntary...

After you have done that you must now gather members and build the actual payment network because liquidity isn't provided by money, it is provided by the people trading with money. This is in fact the easiest problem because demurrage currencies are superior competitors to the capitalist system which is why they had to the banned before world war two or else people wouldn't become polarized enough to want Nazis in power.

Third you will have to bypass banking regulations and somehow offer most of the services banks offer without a banking license. I haven't found any, de facto illegal. There is nothing voluntary about this.

Finally, you have to somehow convince the government to adopt the non capitalist system for tax payments. If you cannot do so, you must wreck your brain trying to find an incentive structure that is competitive enough to make people who have freshly received money from the government put it into your money system faster than they pull it out by paying their taxes. Again, the fact that the government forces all economic activity to go through the capitalist system is not very voluntary. If anything, it is lipstick on a pig.

I believe the banking loophole and the tax incentive structure can be solved but that only shows how fragile and ridiculous capitalism is, if an obviously superior system has so much trouble establishing itself even though it is superior in almost every respect and it is highly competitive.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: