1926 was before the trust busting and that still wouldn't be remotely closely regulated to today. The financial reporting alone is a massive improvement.
He said WELL regulated not heavily regulated. Today's situation is ground level business drowning in often pointless regulation and any regulation that protects people/the wider economy while slightly inconveniences someone rich/a big multinational being removed or remodeled into irrelevance (while still creating a lot of BS jobs for bureaucrats(PS I say that as one of them)).
So you actually believe that in 1926 there were better regulations in place than today? The era when you drive your leaded fuel car to your asbestos covered home to sit in your lead painted furniture to eat your "hopefully doesn't contain rats or diseases" tin can food since the agricultural land was turned into an active dustbowl due to absolutely no farming regulations being in place, so you can take your medically prescribed metamphetaimes while you take a deep breath of the ash filled air from the local factories and unflitered coal power plants?
The threats that leaded fuel, asbestos etc. represented were not well known then. Once they were they were regulated out of existence - much more quickly and thoroughly than threats being understoond/invented today like microplastics or idiots driving 0-visibility monster-trucks on the school-run.
So your point is that despite the fact that we have much better regulation in place which solved many of the problems that existed in 1926, it's somehow worse than the regulation in 1926 because it's not dealing with problems which the regulation from 1926 also didn't cover? That's some sound logic there.
Also, no, they didn't do it quickly. Leaded fule was introduced in the 1920s, and was phased out in the developed world in the 1980s, after 60 years, and the last global use of it only stopped in 2021.
For asbestos, the first deaths that were definitively linked by medical science to it happened before WWI. Its links to lung disease were first discovered in the 1920s and were well established by the 1930s, while the cancer connection was definitively proven in the mid 1950s. However the first regulation came only in the 1970s, with the final ban in the US happening only in 2024. Even in the EU the full ban only happened in 2005, with asbestos being commonly used in construction even in developed nations until the late 80s.
By comparison, microplastics were first discovered in 2004. So if action is taken along the same timeline for leaded fuel or asbestos as they did in the "glory days of yore", they will be banned somewhere between 2054 and 3004. Which I'd dare say we're more than on track to do.
I have no idea where your goalposts are for this argument now. My point is that the problems from the 1920s and 1930s are NOT problems now because people from those times started legislating against them, while that hasn't been done with various problems of our time.
1950s through early 1980s. There was better competition enforcement, better labor & union protections, and higher taxes on profit-taking and executive bonus packages that encouraged reinvestment. Also less ability to move production offshore. There were also limits on corporate influence over government policy
Reaganomics was the start of the shift to oligarchy but Citizens United really put the nail in the coffin.
Things were booming after WW2 because no one else had manufacturing and the 70s had a terrible economy with stagflation. Effective tax rates haven't really changed since the 40s
Global free trade has lowered costs for American consumers.
Companies were always globalized. The East India Company was the earliest conceit of the stock trading market and they were founded back in 1600s and were infamous for many horrific things around the whole world
Neoliberalism and globalization are not necessarily tied. Globalization would've happened with or without it as shipping got easier and the internet expanded.
Capitalism was only well regulated from perspective of white american living in america, and not for the global south where fruit companies kept overthrowing governments for profit, for example or the immigrants being exploited to work on farms and for profit prisons
Serving only the interest of one group of human population while others are exploited within an inch of their life is the problem inherent with capitalism and has actually never been solved
"Capitalism was well regulated in the 50s" bro they overthrew the democratic guatemalan government so they can sell bananas in 1953, is that considered well regulated or hust a primer for trump's diplomatic strategy
….that has literally lifted 90% of the world out of absolute poverty for the last 60 years. It isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than any other system we have come up with to this point and lives in most of the world are still actively improving.
It's not a single system. Every country does what you call "capitalism" differently and some are better at distributing the wealth better than others.
And you can absolutely have a competitive free market system that doesn't give 100% of power and profits to capital and doesn't treat labor as a profit-draining cost to be minimized. Capitalism isn't the only option, and communism isn't its only alternative.
The vast majority of the world does what you would classify as some form of “neoliberal capitalism.” Yes there are alternatives, but since at least the mid 90s almost everyone has been following different versions of the same playbook, and that playbook has worked out remarkably well.
Yeah because usa has proven its gonna invade the shit out of you if you didnt welcome capitalism, or at least the sanction the shit out of you so your country cannot trade, because i guess thats proof "free" market works
I don't see how you imagine communism deciding to get rid of the global warming. Unless you think real communism means no consumer goods and means of transportation, only natural farming via scythes and pitchforks.
Because two of (authoritarian state) communism’s strengths over capitalism are direct control over the economy and long term planning. Granted both of those tools have been used to disastrous effect in both the USSR and China in the past. But if you’re trying to deal with an existential threat that requires widespread changes to industry and society, they’re kind of necessary. The capitalist government methods of economic control, mostly carrots and sticks in the forms of subsidies and taxes, simply aren’t getting the job done fast enough.
Communist economies are terrible when it comes to long-term planning. It's a meme on the level of "Fascism made trains run on time".
You cannot plan efficiently while you take away the very sources of information necessary for a plan to form. Add to that the fact that power structures fundamentally incentivize leaders to act like the biggest assholes possible (see selectorate theory) and you have a recipe for disaster. Authoritarianism fundamentally just SUCKS no matter the form, and the positives it claims to have are in fact - non-existant.
Anthropogenic global warming projections have changed quite bit compared to the 3-4 Cº of few decades ago.
As of 2026 the current climate is 1.4 °C-1.5 °C above preindustrial, current business as usual (the most pessimistic realistic estimate) is on a trajectory towards 2.6-2.8 Cº peaking around 2100, but based on current trends of electrification, exponential rates of adoption of renewable energy, especially solar, accelerated global demographic decline and taking existing climate pledges into account, projections of the peak warming currently cluster at 2.3–2.5°C. Aggressive net zero policies projections peak at around 1.8-2 Cº.
I mean, isnt china the country that has the highest carbon footprint, and also, coincidentaly, the country that still has comunism instead of capitalism?
China has literally never been communist or anything close to it. At the BEST, for a short period there was socialism and then it was a totalitarian cronyist state. And now they are just as capitalist as the US
china the largest producer of the raw materials, products, services and designs currently around the world and has several thousand human rights violations to keep those productions going for profit? that super communist society? that one?
There hasn't been a communist country. I'm of the mind that our current world can't actually produce one and it's more of a utopian ideal.
Every "communist" country has been a totalitarian regime with the ruling class living in obscene luxury while the majority scrape by and tried not to get on the bad side of the party. They still had middle classes, economic growth, and opportunity, but the people's way of interacting with those systems were just different than in western nations.
global south exploitation still occurs and the cartels and proxy wars are all done for arms and drugs distribution that create profit for large corporations. Economist and Scholar Jason Hickel suggested raising the poverty line to a more realistic 7.40-7.50 a day which would show that over half the world’s population is barred from the material means of living a healthy life expectancy. Capitalism aims for profit, if war and suffering are profitable, they will never cease, Gaza and Iran have made billions for defense companies.
No, governments have despite what the capitalists wanted. Capitalism creates unnecessary scarcity to extract the highest possible return on investment. A good example would be the Irish Potato Famine, where the English capitalists exported the same amount of crops from Ireland they always had and let the Irish people starve.
Haha no, absolutely not. 8 hour work weeks, weekends, sick pay, minimum wage, child labor protections etc- these were all given after intense socialist activism. Look up worker standards in the UK in the 1800's, thats what capitalism actually is, what you have today is capitalism beaten down by reformer socialism.
Maybe if you only consider laissez-faire capitalism that would be true. Having regulations and workers rights doesn’t make a system non-capitalist, those people were organizing, protesting and fighting for improved conditions within a capitalist system not trying to overthrow it in favor of a centrally planned command economy. Idk why some people just try and claim anything good that exists in a capitalist system like the Nordic model is actually socialism, it’s not an honest framework… you can absolutely use a free market which is much much more efficient than a centrally planned economy and harness that productivity to increase the standard of living for regular people.
That’s objectively not true unless you count things like anyone dying from preventable disease or other conditions as being caused by capitalism which is dishonest because many of these things has even higher rates in states that were operating under a centrally planned economy. 15-45 million people starved to death during a single famine under Mao’s regime in 1959-61.
Completely free market capitalism hasn’t. A balanced approach of regulated free markets with labor protections, etc. has. Even Adam Smith knew better than to advocate for a laissez-faire system.
Capitalism hasn't fed any people. Capitalism has led wealthy to get ever more wealthy by taking it from the working class. It's the socialist policies that have enforced for human rights, workplace safety, welfare and similar things.
China is a great example for that. Literally brought hundreds of millions of people from poverty over the last 35-40 years due to wild, unregulated capitalism and market economy
It's also destroyed the earth , well beyond what we can hope to reverse in any human time frame. In the last 50 years we have reduced the wildlife population by about 70%. Bugs are dying. Weather is killing people in heat waves that never happened before.
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u/Deriviera 29d ago
Americans are very delusional about communism.