Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThere has never been capitalism that didn't involve government action to privatize profits and socialize loss, so if we're going to say that kind of thing disqualifies a system as capitalism then there has never been any such thing as capitalism and we should never bother using the word again. Capitalism involved major government intervention from its very beginnings in England

I think we probably agree more than disagree, but it feels like it is getting lost in translation.

I actually agree that there has never been any "pure" capitalism (or socialism) ever enacted. When you talk about Enclosure (and the other countless examples of gov intervention on behalf of the fat cats), I don't see that as an outgrowth of capitalism. I see it as corruption. Which is why I'm generally in favor of as small a government as possible. There will always be some people that want a free lunch and they will exploit whatever (economic) system they are in. I'm sure there was tons of corruption in the USSR or even a little corruption in some uncontacted tribe in the middle of nowhere.

The small tribe, given a tight "everyone knows everyone" community, would have an easier time outcasting would-be cheaters. When you get to the scale of nation states, there are simply too many people and the corrupt can hide in the crowd. And a single defector can create a cascade of spoilage. Once someone gets the free lunch, they now have more resources to snowball into more corruption and more resources. I think this is obvious when we see Robber Barons like Rhodes (dead for over 100 years) still affecting the world today. Sure, he made his fortune under the banner of capitalism, but how many times did he bribe and lie and worse to get there?

I'm willing to bet ANY economic system would work if you could eliminate/minimize corruption. While I think capitalism (unfettered by corruption) would be superior to socialism (also uncorrupted), I would be more than happy to try socialism sans corruption.

So when I hear people (not pointing at you) saying things like "tax the rich" I am sympathetic, but I'm more inclined to advocate for "hang the corrupt". It just so happens that the venn diagram of corrupt and ultra rich is actually very close to a circle.

Quoting: eggroleWhich is why I'm generally in favor of as small a government as possible. There will always be some people that want a free lunch and they will exploit whatever (economic) system they are in.

I don't care whether your government fits in your pocket or employs half the populace, as long as it can fulfil its primary function: Ensuring the well-being (or welfare) of the nation. As in everyone in it.

We're mostly in agreement about the big picture, if perhaps not about the details.

As you said, we'll just have to accept the fact that every process involving people is going to be inefficient to a degree, and corruption needs to be actively controlled to keep it from overwhelming the system. But let's not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. If we start thinking it's worth sacrificing the well-being of some of our peers to make sure a few others don't game the system (as they inevitably will), we're doing it wrong. I know it's natural to rail against the injustice of someone getting that free lunch, but I say let them have it if it means the kids next door get to eat too. Work to improve the system, but don't lose sight of what actually matters.

Last edited by tuubi on 3 Mar 2026 at 6:43 pm UTC

Quoting: eggroleThere will always be some people that want a free lunch and they will exploit whatever (economic) system they are in. I'm sure there was tons of corruption in the USSR or even a little corruption in some uncontacted tribe in the middle of nowhere.

This is true as far as it goes. Even hunter-gatherer tribes seem to need to work to keep things egalitarian; there's this interesting custom in some of them where, if some hunter brings in say a deer, everyone almost ritually rubbishes the deer, saying it's in bad shape, probably not much good meat on that, maybe it was sick . . . just to make sure nobody gets any ideas about being the mightiest hunter in the tribe.

But at the same time, there are differences. Capitalism as an economic system is founded on the idea that what you want is more money. That isn't universal. Feudalism is founded on the idea that what you want is more land . . . and, to a fair extent, more glory. So you're going to have more corruption, in the sense of doing dirty deeds to get money, under capitalism than under feudalism. It's hard to cheat your way to more land, you have to commit some violence; the endemic sin of feudalism was not corruption, but nobles and kings starting tons of territorial wars. The Soviet system . . . I don't think in the end they really managed to make a new system "take", partly because it was an authoritarian top-down thing, partly because it was always under so much pressure from outside. The commissars still kind of thought like capitalists in terms of what they wanted and how they cheated.

If you could establish a full democratic socialism that wasn't really thinking in capitalist cultural terms, it would probably have some kind of characteristic sin, but I don't think it would be corruption in the sense we think of it. Now personally, I think that in the end, all the individual goals we've seen in unequal societies, whether it's land, money, perceived closeness to God or whatever, are all in the end placeholders for the desire for respect. People want to be respected, looked up to; that's the charge that our evolution in social bands built into us. My ideal would be societies where the goal was mainly back to respect, rather than placeholders for it, and which tried to spread respect broadly. I suppose there, the sin would be faking and calumny . . . attempts to get or deny respect on false pretences.

Quoting: eggroleI actually agree that there has never been any "pure" capitalism (or socialism) ever enacted. When you talk about Enclosure (and the other countless examples of gov intervention on behalf of the fat cats), I don't see that as an outgrowth of capitalism. I see it as corruption.

See, I think that is a misinterpretation. For instance, the Enclosures in specific wasn't either corruption or an "outgrowth" of capitalism--it was a foundation of capitalism. But more generally, capitalism is the whole system. It cannot exist without government support; before you even get to corruption, there is contract law, laws against fraud, the creation of money, and so on and on. The "marketplace" exists because government created the conditions for it to exist, and the people using the "marketplace" are going to be involved in shaping just what conditions the government is making. So if you have a system of government part of whose job is to enable the existence and activities of a class of private property owners who seek profit, individual profit-seekers enlisting the government to enable their individual profit is just an outgrowth of that, not an anomaly. Even back in the day, Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism included government--he said "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

Note that none of this speaks directly to whether capitalism or socialism or whatever are good. I'm very much into that kind of value judgement, but I feel you can't really make such judgements until you have a pretty good idea what you're judging.

Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 3 Mar 2026 at 7:07 pm UTC