Quote Originally Posted by OngBonga View Post
I guess I'm slowly learning that my problem isn't capitalism, it's people.
I forgot to respond to this earlier.

This is one of the main reasons I'm so pro-capitalism and anti-government. Government is a human institution that requires human virtue to function reasonably well. Markets are not a human institution. They're a description of a type of environment. They have no central authority, no ideology, no arbitrator. Even when appearances are that something like global trade looks like a human institution, it's not an institution because it lacks those elements. Markets include billions of daily transactions, none of which are guided by an ideal or a greater good. Markets don't exist by discretion of human will, but instead emerge from human behavior.

None of this can be said for the state. It's not emergent in the same way. It's a didact. It requires stoicism. The state has purpose, a purpose it is provided by human will. It has ideology, is a central authority, and arbitrates. These institutional characteristics mean that it gets its power from the people. The very people you say you have a problem with. The quality of a government depends on the quality of its people. In it manifests all of our weaknesses.

Markets don't require our virtue and they make our weaknesses forgettable. They make it common for every home to defy the darkness of nighttime, to casually drive down the street five times faster than you could run, to hear the voices and see the moving pictures of thousands of people you've never met, for Brits and Yanks to bicker with each other through wires in the ocean. If magic was real, markets would be the factory in which it is conjured.