Is Capitalism a Sustainable Design?

[asemakula]

And this is capitalism, it’s designed to take, take, and take, in fact if they were to get away with it, businesses wouldn’t pay taxes. It’s akin to feeding your hunting dog on meatless bones - you will soon go hungry too. Is this a sustainable design?

[anon234345566]

The model doesn't fail inmediately after having consumed all the resources, because we usually don't get to that point: at certain point the costs are higher but the price of the goods hasn't improved (because somebody else has replaced the goods with technology or has started to exploit cheaper to extract resources from somewhere else), so you just drop the still available resources and get your money to other investments.

That's what's happening right now in Vaca Muerta, Argentina (which is similar to Permium in Texas).

Well, I'm not going to the end of the story in Earth resources, when everything has been depleted, but I suspect I would be rushing conclusions in that case: (even) current technology still holds some good cards to fastly add lots of new resources to our planetary whole stuff.

[anon234345566]

Also the current expressions of capitalism can be improved, and probably will be:

"What does the future hold for Western capitalist societies? The answer hinges on whether liberal meritocratic capitalism will be able to move toward a more advanced stage, what might be called “people’s capitalism,” in which income from both factors of production, capital and labor, would be more equally distributed. This would require broadening meaningful capital ownership way beyond the current top ten percent of the population and making access to the top schools and the best-paying jobs independent of one’s family background.

To achieve greater equality, countries should develop tax incentives to encourage the middle class to hold more financial assets, implement higher inheritance taxes for the very rich, improve free public education, and establish publicly funded electoral campaigns. The cumulative effect of these measures would be to make more diffuse the ownership of capital and skills in society. People’s capitalism would be similar to social democratic capitalism in its concern with inequality, but it would aspire to a different kind of equality; instead of focusing on redistributing income, this model would seek greater equality in assets, both financial and in terms of skills. Unlike social democratic capitalism, it would require only modest redistributive policies (such as food stamps and housing benefits) because it would have already achieved a greater baseline of equality."

"The Clash of Capitalisms The Real Fight for the Global Economy’s Future"

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-1...

[eucryphia]

Yes. AS Tim Worstall points out:

"Please note that in current $, average world GDP in 1700 or so was around $600, $800 a year. Today it’s around $8,000. The IPCC assumes, in its calculations of climate change, that if we’re all good little neoliberals for this coming century that it will be $80,000 in 2100. Seriously folks, what the #### else do you want from an economic system?"

[asemakula]

Yet, if it was at least 'take, take and give' model, we would already be at $40,000 in 2019.

Give your hunting dog so it gets the energy to chase down more game. I mean planet/society contribute to value creation but during wealth sharing they get meatless bones.