Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 on Nostr: Criticize capitalism on here and someone is sure to jump in and tell you we just need ...
Criticize capitalism on here and someone is sure to jump in and tell you we just need to regulate it better. Arguments involving regulatory capture are tempting as a response to this nonsense, but that's a trap. The claim that something can be captured assumes that at some point it was free. The very concept of regulatory capture assumes that at some point in the past regulations worked to rein in capitalism.
This is true in a limited sense, but they never have and never will work for the good of the working class. In the US at least, and I suspect everywhere, regulatory schemes have always been about disagreements between ruling class factions about how best to sustainably exploit labor.
The pure food and drug act wasn't enacted to protect people from rapacious capitalists poisoning them for profit, but to protect more far-sighted capitalists from the rebellions and other disruptions that profitable poisoning threatened to bring about. It's the same story with the environmental protection agency and the rest of them. Slavery wasn't abolished to protect enslaved people but because some capitalists understood earlier than others that slavery wasn't a sustainable means of labor exploitation.
Regulatory schemes may work better or worse through history, but this is a function of how exploitable they are at any given time rather than their having worked before but failing now. The regulators can't be captured and made to work against us because they never worked for us and they never will. Capitalism can't be tamed by laws because capitalists control the entire legal system, from legislatures to courts to cops.
#Capitalism #RegulatoryCapture
This is true in a limited sense, but they never have and never will work for the good of the working class. In the US at least, and I suspect everywhere, regulatory schemes have always been about disagreements between ruling class factions about how best to sustainably exploit labor.
The pure food and drug act wasn't enacted to protect people from rapacious capitalists poisoning them for profit, but to protect more far-sighted capitalists from the rebellions and other disruptions that profitable poisoning threatened to bring about. It's the same story with the environmental protection agency and the rest of them. Slavery wasn't abolished to protect enslaved people but because some capitalists understood earlier than others that slavery wasn't a sustainable means of labor exploitation.
Regulatory schemes may work better or worse through history, but this is a function of how exploitable they are at any given time rather than their having worked before but failing now. The regulators can't be captured and made to work against us because they never worked for us and they never will. Capitalism can't be tamed by laws because capitalists control the entire legal system, from legislatures to courts to cops.
#Capitalism #RegulatoryCapture