feotakahari

You can claim there’s hypocrisy in buying a pro-anarchy T-shirt from a company that exploits its workers. But is it any worse than buying clothes from any other company that exploits its workers? You have to get clothes from somewhere.

I guess what I’m pushing at is that all the anti-capitalist stuff I see assumes the replacement for capitalism is closely linked tribal groups, and I tend to assume that the more linked people are, the more they’ll hate me for being different. I feel a lot safer in an environment where I’m valued for earning money, and will continue to be valued so long as the money comes in, than in an environment where the only thing protecting me is love, which can be conveniently discarded if someone doesn’t like that I’m queer.

WOW that’s so much more cynical and depressing than I thought I was capable of.

I don’t get anticapitalism, if only because of comparative advantage. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone grows their own food, because every plant I grow dies. Rather, I want to live in a world where someone specializes in growing food, and I specialize in what I’m good at, and I perform services that the food-growing person values.

And when people trade goods and services for other goods and services of equal value, what do you call that?

I want to end slavery, and apparently that’s something anticapitalists want as well. But they also seem to want a society where people do not trade, and aside from the implausibility of how you stop people from doing so, trade is something that makes my life better in a thousand different ways.