I laughed when Milton Friedman thinks free market could prevent climate change through climate dividends and carbon tax. Good luck, boyo, your “greed is good” bullshit is what led us to here.
Didn’t know much about the guy except that he’s a Nobel laureate. Happened to come across a YouTube video where a curious college student asks him about how slavery and colonialism contributed to Western wealth. He had an elaborate answer but within it he actually said Britain did not have slaves and America did not have colonies (for the most part).
Nevermind the fact that America absolutely had slaves and Britain certainly had colonies (he was selective on who didn’t have what), Britain absolutely did profit from slavery also.
He added on that Britain spent more on administering colonies than it gained extracting their resources which may be one of the stupidest arguments I’ve ever heard. How can someone that worships at the altar of capitalism not understand that greed was the obvious motivator? Or is it only the motivator when it fits his narrative?
If this is the messaging we get from our intellectuals, what hope does truth have?
Income from India is the main driver of 18 century British naval dominance but even if we exclude India and the sugar growing Caribbean islands, there was tons of British colonial possessions that didn’t directly contribute to the treasury enough to cover expenditures but still benefited the Empire economically and enriched upperclass brits individually. There are maybe a handful of remote islands that could be considered charitable to add to the British Empire; exploitation was the name of the game everywhere else.
Where I’d say Friedman is arguing in bad faith is that the obvious goal of colonialism is value extraction by force or coercion. He may argue that due to inefficiency or resistance it didn’t actually produce significant wealth for Britain but the evidence shows otherwise.
That or he may argue that the East India Company (the origin of multinational capitalism) was not colonialism which would be divergent from historical consensus.
Fun fact, Britain had to create taxes in it’s East African colonies not to raise income but because British economic interests struggled to recruit workers from people who had everything they needed without the British. Forcing them to pay taxes in currency forced them to accept employment to acquire that currency.
We call that extortion in our part of the world. I assume the British call it that today too.
From cold hard rationale, Hayek and Friedman makes sense, but they do ignore reality that circumstances always change. Deregulation made sense at the time of 1970s oil crisis as the economy and welfare state stagnated, but we’re now in the age of economic prosperity again, but the wealth is hoarded by the few and act as though austerity still matters.
Not entirely sure about why Friedman’s claim that India was costing the British empire more to maintain, but it has also been repeated in many circles. I suspect that the data is not fully contextualised and repeated as if it’s the absolute truth. An Indian historian countered the narrative, mentioning that if we include the period of private control of India by the British East India company, before India was formally taken over by the British state in 1858, the total wealth plundered from India is about $1 trillion. The term “loot” is Indian origin, which became part of the English language after East India’s violent colonisation. When the British public found out of about the brutal occupation by a private company and were enraged by it, the British state took over the formal administration. But this only happened well after committing crimes against humanity, after a state-sanctioned plunder and massacre that made their private owners and their government enablers rich, while the cost of running another country is taken over by tax payers. It’s an early example of “privatise the profit, socialise the cost”.
There are several estimates. Some as high as $45 trillion.
Friedman’s take has been repeated in many Western circles.
As you’ve mentioned there were multiple members of Parliament who were directly invested in the EIC and made sizable profits. The EIC managed to extract explotative taxation during the Bengal famine of 1770 (promoting starvation) while shareholders increased their dividend from 10 to 12.5%. The massive transfer of wealth from India, the Atlantic slave trade and Opium sales to China essentially built Britain during this era. It was the seed capital of the industrial revolution.
The British Raj took over after the failed sepoy mutiny in mid 1800s. It was at this point Britain introduced the strategy of the ‘civilizing mission’, denigrating Indian culture as a justification to the British public to continue colonization. The British public accepted this. It was the independence movement in India that ultimately secured freedom (along with Nazi destruction of British infrastructure).
As we watch power and wealth slowly drift back from West to East and South, African, Indian and many other voices that speak truth on this matter will be heard more clearly.
Often times Westerners are not open to accepting voices from the global south on these matters and portray them as biased. I usual refer to the writings of historian William Dalrymple (the self admitted descendant of colonists) as a starting point to those that feel morally threatened by this history but want to learn more from someone who doesn’t feel too foreign.
For those that are open to Indian voices, Sashi Tharoor’s writings or his YouTube series ‘Imperial Receipts’ does a good job capturing the history and scale of extraction.
I get this is a meme, but it is trying to talk about something serious. It’s worth saying that fatalist arguments are actually beneficial to liberalism and capitalism. Capitalism is not going to kill us all, humans are exceptionally durable. Capitalism intends to kill us all though, whether through the dehumanization it requires to function or its inability to contend with the material limitations of reality. Climate change mitigation is a discussion around minimising the harm this system causes while it dies, and liberals often subscribe to fatalist narratives because they dont truly imagine a world that is not capitalist as one worth living in.
Someone’s got their head buried in the sand. The number of critical problems that are gonna come to a head in the next 20 years that could collectively degrade the biosphere beyond supporting a substantial human population is nuts. It’s not fatalist to say that billions could die and it’s no consolation to the dead and their loved ones that “humans are exceptionally durable”.
Yep, that’s why we need to have revolutionary optimism. Right now, incredible strides are being made by socialist countries like China to combat climate change and push for electrification and sustainability.
Calling a country where the means of production are controlled by the upper classes “socialist” is a stretch even before we consider their mixed economy and rampant capitalism.
Public ownership is the principle aspect of their economy, and a working class party has domination over their state. The large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly publicly owned, with massive state owned enterprises forming the backbone of their economy. Private, cooperative, and joint-stock ownership covers mostly the small and medium firms, and the larger of these are heavily controlled and influenced by the CPC.
As for being “mixed,” all economies are mixed, that doesn’t mean we can’t identify what the principle aspect of the economy is. Socialism isn’t a “pure” mode of production, and neither is capitalism, you don’t have X% capitalism, Y% socialism, etc. That’s not how modes of production work.
Saying the public has ownership implies that they have some control of it which certainly isn’t true. It’s more like a Palace economy than anything.
Capitalism will make the earth uninhabitable. That will kill us all. If you care about the future, you are thinking about how to murder an oligarch.
Any other kind of ‘planning’ for the future is delusional clown shit. Just chill the fuck out and do unreasonable amounts of drugs.
No, Capitalism will not make the Earth uninhabitable. It will kill very many things the longer it is part of our world, but you are subscribing to a liberal fatalist narrative that constructs the future as definitively destroyed because it does not resemble the world we live in. It’s doomer shit that is painfully white.
How you got, “we don’t need to end capitalism” I have no responsibility for. If I say it isnt infinitely powerful but must end as quickly as possible, what exactly do you think I’m advocating for?
Oh you’re just basing everything on wishful thinking and vibes. Okay.
My brother in Christ, you people are talking about capitalism as though it were a god. Have none of you seriously thought about like, doing something even when the world is less livable? Do you think everyone will just lay down and die because the world isn’t as nice as it is today?
This is not “wishful.” This is fucking reality. Right this moment, you are working on a fantasy that is only appealing to settlers who would rather die than live in a world they are not comfortable in.
So fucking tired of liberals here insisting that people should die because they only pretend to want to give up this way of life.
You’re talking about earth as if its a guarantee, not an incredibly fragile complicated thing.
Best case scenario, we fix everything today², the next century or three is going to be rougher than you can really imagine. If it’s not already too late to salvage-and it may be; we don’t know for sure. Every moment we stay on this course things get worse.
We cannot fix anything before killing most/all of the oligarchs. They wont let us. No amount of cutting back and going green and switching to passive systems with society built around vegan electric trains matters a single fuck while oligarchs are still poisoning every option and building new coal plants to power the machine that murders truth. Portions of the planet are already becoming uninhabitable.
Your insults are nonsense. You are not serious. Your hysterical climate denialism is an unwillingness to choose between killing the fuckers making the problem so the rest of us can crack down and fix our shit, or a graceful death. You’re disgusting insistence that I kill myself¹ while insisting I’m not doing that and that my slave morality should be coddled is absolutely devoid of virtue. Kill yourself if you like, but don’t insist that those who dont are random words people called you in a mean voice, shitlib.
¹the current plan. Hence the drugs. I don’t love any of you enough to die violently for a world I’m not gonna see unless i think the rest of you would follow through, and you wouldn’t.
²go real hard on walkability and electric trains. Cars straight up get disassembled where they’re currently parked and scrapped via cargo bike. Meat is off the shelves. No more commercial flights. No more disposable bullshit. Every spare hand to reclamation and remediation projects. Everything switched over to passive systems in all new construction. Maybe no more concrete.
I actually had to read all of that because I cannoy believe someone is this intentionally misunderstanding. You seriously have to actually read about the shit you talk about because your usable knowledge is obviously very slim despite your confidence.
You are fighting people who are not in this comment thread. Not only did I never say capitalists (no, not “oligarchs” like this is about individuals and not a system) should not be killed, I asked you to actually think about why youre making this incomprehensible assumption in the context of my comments. What do you think I mean when I say capitalism is both fragile and an immediate threat? Slave morality? You’re not even talking about anything at that point; it’s so contained to your own misunderstanding of what has been said here.
It is incredible to hear someone so dedicated to the settler way of life call me a lib. Blocked.
What I never understand is, do the billionaires not care about their own children? Or tbh even themselves at this point as it’s happening so fast even they will be affected (although they can probably mitigate the effects by moving to one of their 500 houses that’s in a safe zone)
They have bunkers, they have stockpiles of food and medicine, and they have staff to maintain it all. They fully believe they have the means and resources to insulate themselves from all consequences.
We should start planning on fouling their air exchange systems now.
Which they wont, but they believe they will.
Capitalism is kinda like a control system, if you aren’t willing to do everything possible for profit you get outcompeted and fall. The billionaires at the top are the ones that truly believe they are doing right, and are building apocalypse bunkers for themselves and their immediate families.
although they can probably mitigate the effects by moving to one of their 500 houses that’s in a safe zone
That’s why they don’t care.
Climate change hits the poorest first and hardest (see: hurricanes in the Caribbean and SEA).
Billionaires can fly in, enjoy the sunshine, fly out and not get a drop of water on their skin.
And they’ll keep “outrunning” climate change on an individual level, and only feel it when it hurts their net worth*.
*
At which point, they’ll just re-organize their investments to exploit clean energy subsidies and real estate wherever everyone is fleeing to when the coasts flood.
If we dont get rid of capitalism, rich will be the last one to be affected by climate change. Proletariat is as shield for them to face wrath of climate change first
The fact that every billionaire will gleefully kill you, me and everyone to make number go up would, if humans were even a little rational, be enough evidence for their immediate liquidation. Capitalism is providing the best evidence for it’s own destruction and yet people just don’t see it because they personally aren’t starving and freezing right now.
do the billionaires not care about their own children?
Ummm…no? I sincerely believe some people are inherently evil. Look at Elon Musk and how he treats his children.
I was watching a documentary on the nature of evil. There is an incarcerated serial killer who acknowledges what he did is evil and wrong, but he doesn’t feel empathy. CT scan of his brain showed that the part of the brain associated with empathy is not really active. Having said that, I heard that the longer someone is in power, the more that their brain physiologically changes.
Of course it is more complicated and nurture still plays a role on the person’s development, but I think sometimes nature is stronger.
Once down the dark path you begin, forever with it dominate your destiny.
Thank God something is taking us out. ＼(_)／
Humans are have been killing each other over pettiest things for millenia before capitalism. So an ~ism is not the root problem
‘An ism’. This fucking folkism pretention can fuck right off. You dont even know the word for the thing you’re talking about.
Lol. No point in talking to you, noted. Have a good day
Climate change goes beyond killing each other; it’s killing our planet’s ability to sustain our species.
Okay, let me lay out my thought to you in a longer and more boring way: humans have been idiots with no regard to consequences of their actions throughout their history, so anyone interested in fixing any problem caused by how they act has to replace current population with more evolved (read: mature, intelligent and sensible) one, there can be no other way and wasting time on anger against this or that social framework is very foolish
I replied before checking instance; they’re .world. Not really human. No point in arguing.
Buddy has a USSR ghost as his profile picture, I think he has a bone to pick with capitalism specifically.
