Concentrated in the hands of the few on the expense of everyone else.
You can look at it in a stoic, unemotional, free of any morals way and just analyze the basic workings of capitalism to see that this is true.
The need for any capital to throw up ever increasing profits, if the owner of said capital doesn’t want the capital to actually become mere treasure and lose worth over time, is the foundation of continous need to exploit human labor and more and more natural ressources.
Any wealth that is produced, is produced by human labour working with natural ressources and working over the work over the work over the work that others did with these. Capitalism doesn’t produce humanly usable wealth(use value), it produces nothing on its own. Humans work and that’s why we have toothpaste, cars and internet porn. Capitalism was at one time in the past the necessary step to evolve from the stupidity of feudal economy into a global, less moral form of exploitation. Now that this has been sufficiently done, the next step will be to get rid of the insane, exploitative, unreasonable way we humans work under Capitalism and introduce a more effective system in which ressources, human lifetime and work are not wasted, while also creating better conditions for technological and scientific progress.
It only needs to be in the right hands and not in the wrong ones in the end. All our laws, rules, regulations, restrictions and limitations serve us to set these hands right and to help them get there where we all can live in peace.
Don’t hold your breath for that to happen. Capitalism is not a evil system that forces the problems we have. It is a simple concept that if we teade with eachother we mutualy benefit in most situation. That does not mean that it works on its own. As I already said it has to be regulated to work correctly and that is not always the case.
The whole problem at the moment is that the right doesn’t get that regulation is needed and that the left dreams about some completely dellusional different system that has shown to not work at all.
What we need is to get rid of this dogmas. They are both wrong.
The right hands would be everyone hands then, which is technically not possible within the current economic system. We’d need to re-negotiate a lot of rules and specifically introduce higher forms of democracy to make sure peace and basic human decency can ever be a realistic goal.
You know, so that every kid has a chance, every older person can live their last decades in dignity, everyone who puts in work actually reaps the fruits of their work and doesn’t have to be afraid to lose their house, have no food or can’t afford to buy the products they are creating themselves.
I’m wondering why it matters. Why does everything that doesn’t fall immediately into a fixed form need to be locked?
It could get moved into OoPE and out of GD, but it can qualify as a general discussion, too. But locking it when it’s rather peaceful seems a bit over-ambiguous.
That argument comes up quite often when it’s about government backdoors in encryption. Even if I trust the current government enough not to abuse it, what happens after the next election? Is the new government also not going to abuse it? How long does it go on without anyone abusing the system?
Take the centralized lists about jews for example that were created long before world war 2 (I don’t know exactly when, but it was at least 2 decades earlier). Those lists may have served a useful purpose when they were created and after, but come Hitler with the Nazis and those lists turned into death lists.
Even if you get the right people into power now, you can absolutely not foresee what is going to happen with that in the future. The only sensible option is to never create those positions of power in the first place, because they will be abused. The only variable is when.
Agreed, evil is really not a good term for it. Capitalism has shown us that we are capable of formerly unthinkable complex work, which is good. At the same time, it continues to show us that we - as the human race - still lack a lot of core strength, which I think is mostly due to the completely underdeveloped clarity that solidarity with each other makes the group and each part of it much stronger. One might simply say that we need to learn to separate between fun competition that makes us grow together, from competition to the death, which is a limiting factor for human life, creativity, progress.
The craziness of the right is to insist that everything that is wrong now, would be better if done in a more extreme way. The craziness of the left is to assume that slight betterments combined with good ideas are at all a substitute for a complete and honest restructuring of how we organize us as a human race.
You don’t think this only shows how little of an understanding people have in the US? Seems to me you folks are still going through the extremes until you’ve finally figured it all out.
Where I live can people not use the n-word on you without fearing legal consequences. Suit yourself.
I rather think that the governments are the least of our problems. It’s corporations these days who gather far more information on us than a government alone ever could.
Facebook is making a ton of money with selling information and who is connected to whom already. And when you see how the police uses DNA databases created by corporations to track down murders then you have another good example for this.
The government possesses the power to declare that all this data “now” belongs to them. Plus, there is reason to believe that the CIA already has access to this data. Sure, you can call that “conspiracy theory”, but I would call that “usual practise”. It’s the CIA, after all.
And as politicians are basically fed by corporations, the distinction isn’t necessarily necessary.
