and I love ContraPoints, but how are you seriously going to have a post talking about how you love capitalism except for the bad parts like...advertising. I mean, ads are terrible and I hate them too...but its pretty far down my list of 'unfortunate effects of capitalism'
I mean...I was putting things into personal relateable terms as opposed to grand economic terms.
Income inequality is currently probably the biggest issue with the current system, but massive wealth gaps have been a big issue at lots of points for lots of political systems. The French Revolution was basically a bunch of peasants killing a bunch of nobles and installing capitalism so that they would not be ridiculously poor, and for this purpose capitalism worked.
Massive income inequality gaps is mostly a sign that the system is failing and needs to be replaced (historically this often meant violence, although 1930s America under Roosevelt was a pretty significant economic overhaul and happened in a non-violent way).
So like...outside of the massive wealth gaps, which I see more as just a sign of a system in decline, the stuff that stands out as uniquely bad about capitalism compared to older economic systems that came before (feudalism etc) is...among other things advertising (selling people things they do not need; encouraging people to buy more than they need), and the requirement to maximize profits (incentivizing addictive aspects to products like adding gambling aspects to games. Incentivizing increasing prices on life saving drugs to squeeze dying patients for as much money as possible. Incentivizing cheating and bypassing environmental regulations if it will squeeze out more profit).
These latter issues conflicting with hard requirements on climate change is why the UN report is saying that a capitalism replacement is probably needed (as opposed to a capitalism overhaul like what happened under Roosevelt). But yes, I do think advertising as a mechanism is one of the flaws with capitalism that may well make it incompatible with a sustainable future (the purpose of advertising is to make people buy things they don't need or want, which is not really compatible with massively reducing our energy consumption).
Ahh I see, you meant more that it is a negative feature unique to capitalism that was not present in other economic systems through history. That's certainly the case. I definitely take issue with the idea of massive wealth gaps under capitalism being an issue, that is it working exactly as intended. The problem isn't just "how do we bandaid the poors getting uppity before they kill the rich again", it is "how do we reduce power and incentives to exploit?" But capitalism is a system that encouges and requires the powerful to use that power to exploit as much as they possibly can. It just isn't equipped to deal with climate change. If we had a robust democracy with an engaged, informed, and well organized workers, maybe...but capitalisms natural instinct is to discourage a robust democracy with an engaged, informed, and organized workforce so as to better exploit profit from their labor (and don't forget their leisure). And the corrective method of killing all the rich like in the old days isn't viable when everyone feels out for themselves and has no solidarity or class consciousness and the powerful have nukes and drones and modern surveillance toos. It's socialism or barbarism and we already made our choice, comrades.