Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[a500lbgorilla]

Utility is nonsense. It does nothing to help you understand and actively hurts you by masking the things you don't understand.

And I do believe that people can profit from trade. I do not believe that people must always profit from every trade. That there can be trades that benefit only one side, but that will still happen frequently because of the nature of people.

And the QVC example, all I see is a channel that hits every single sales-trick in the book and manages to sell overpriced crap to people who won't use it for profit year over year.

[Renton]

Utility is nonsense. It does nothing to help you understand and actively hurts you by masking the things you don't understand.

And I do believe that people can profit from trade. I do not believe that people must always profit from every trade. That there can be trades that benefit only one side, but that will still happen frequently because of the nature of people.

And the QVC example, all I see is a channel that hits every single sales-trick in the book and manages to sell overpriced crap to people who won't use it for profit year over year.

From the point of view of subjective value, all voluntary trade has mutual benefit. There's really no better way of ascribing value to anything than by assuming that if someone traded X for Y, they valued Y more than X and vice versa for the other guy. Sure, an omniscient observer can have a clearer picture of whether the trade was one sided, but unless you start arbitrarily ascribing value to things, it's hard to definitively state that any trade was one-sided.

It's funny, I feel warm and fuzzy when I see QVC. I see it as the result of a society that has become so extravagantly wealthy that most people have the disposable income to buy a 80th Annual Mickey Mouse Commemorative Toast Butterer, mostly thanks to a capitalistic economy. I see all of the lucky people who are escaping from a thousand-generation-long subsistence farming lifestyle to get paid 5 times as much to make dumb crap for white people to waste money on. This is wealth redistribution I can get behind.

[a500lbgorilla]

From the point of view of subjective value, all voluntary trade has mutual benefit. There's really no better way of ascribing value to anything than by assuming that if someone traded X for Y, they valued Y more than X and vice versa for the other guy. Sure, an omniscient observer can have a clearer picture of whether the trade was one sided, but unless you start arbitrarily ascribing value to things, it's hard to definitively state that any trade was one-sided.

It's funny, I feel warm and fuzzy when I see QVC. I see it as the result of a society that has become so extravagantly wealthy that most people have the disposable income to buy a 80th Annual Mickey Mouse Commemorative Toast Butterer, mostly thanks to a capitalistic economy. I see all of the lucky people who are escaping from a thousand-generation-long subsistence farming lifestyle to get paid 5 times as much to make dumb crap for white people to waste money on. This is wealth redistribution I can get behind.

Subjective value is the same nonsense. 'No better' doesn't mean 'right'* and it certainly doesn't mean you have any sense of what the world would look like without states (which I don't think is even possible).

And while all of this awesome stuff is thanks to capitalism, it's also thanks to historic knowledge, science, fossil fuels, new worlds, and political strife, and other stuff I'm not yet aware of.

But as to it being hard to state that any trade is definitively one sided, there was a bidding war between two channels for some show. Both sides got caught up in the emotion of the event and the winner eventually ended up MASSIVELY overpaying for the product and it was roundly seen as a bust by all observers (except, of course, the producers of the show). I read the example in Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahnmann. Maybe I'll dig it up later.

edit: *There was a time where there was no better explanation of the stars movement through the sky than the Earth was the center of it all. And when they noticed that some stars seemed to move backwards for a period before moving in congress with the rest of the stars, instead of invalidating the no-better theory, they simply added epicycles to it to account for the anomolies. These stars were planets and these epicycles masked their misunderstanding further, they didn't help explain anything. I see the same mistake being made with utility.