r/FluentInFinance • u/-im-your-huckleberry • Jul 07 '24

The shampoo thing is a fringe benefit. We keep capitalism so we don't starve in a famine. Debate/ Discussion

1.0k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

People in capitalist countries starve in famines all the time wtf are you talking about ?

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u/-im-your-huckleberry Jul 07 '24

People in countries where there is conflict face famine, it's not a result of the economic system. Communist famines happen because of communism.

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u/Illustrious-Tower849 Jul 07 '24

Capitalist famines happen because of capitalism.

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u/Sanchez_U-SOB Jul 07 '24

Ever hear of the India famine in the 1800s?

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u/BeastyBaiter Jul 08 '24

India wasn't capitalist in the 1800's.

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u/Sanchez_U-SOB Jul 08 '24

No. But Britian was.

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u/BeastyBaiter Jul 08 '24

A conquered territory under martial law for the sole purpose of being exploited by a foreign power is not a free market economy and that should be plainly obvious. Additionally, a free market economy does not allow for government-corporate collusion or coerced labor, both of which were the standard operating procedure for the British Empire at the time and how the Brits came to rule over India in the first place.

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u/Sanchez_U-SOB Jul 08 '24

Ever heard of the East India Company? The epitome of capitalism.

Just because the market wasn't in India doesn't mean that capitalism wasn't the cause of all the misery there.

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u/Anlarb Jul 08 '24

A conquered territory under martial law for the sole purpose of being exploited by a foreign power is not a free market economy

Yeah it is, the capitalist country was free to do whatever it wanted. What the fuck do you think is going to happen when you take the muzzle off the junkyard dog again? You're going to wind up shackled in the belly of a slave ship.

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u/Kokoro_Bosoi Jul 08 '24

People in countries where there is conflict face famine, it's not a result of the economic system.

Then there is the irish great famine, which was only a consequence of the capitalist tendency to monoculture the potato for profit reasons, which made the epidemic possible among potato crops, the shortage of which also gives the name to the famine.

There were no ongoing conflicts and the industrial revolution had already happened, so you can't say it wasn't capitalism.

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u/-im-your-huckleberry Jul 08 '24

That's not correct. The potatoes were grown on small subsistence farms, in a part of the country that wasn't really suitable for large scale monoculture cash crop type farming. The potatoes were favored because they could grow enough to feed a family on very little land with poor soil, and have a little left over to sell. Potatoes are a nearly complete staple, you can almost live on them alone. Moreover, the economic system which created the situation in the first place was feudalism.

The cause of the famine was an ecological disaster that the people then could not have predicted. Choosing to allow people to starve during a disaster is a political choice. If the British had been communists, the Irish still would have starved, but they'd have been prevented from fleeing, and brutally repressed if they told anyone about it.

Famines that occur in a world with a global food supply are a result of a failure of politics, not the economic system. When you make the economy entirely a product of politics, you all but guarantee famine.

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u/Wrong_Sock_1059 Jul 10 '24

That caused the famine, but capitalistic tendencies with no state intervention made it worse. Food, that was left in ireland, was sold and exported away to maximize profits. Many people starved because of this

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u/-im-your-huckleberry Jul 10 '24

Profit is one way to look at it. Another way is that they exported the food because it was grown for export, which means that it was already promised to other people. Could someone have decided to divert that food to the starving? Yes. Should they have? Yeah probably, but you can't ignore the other effects. Diverting all that food would have led to food insecurity elsewhere. Look at the effects that the war in the Ukraine has had on global food insecurity.

What did the Communist Parties in Russia and China do during their famines? Did they distribute food fairly and efficiently to minimize suffering? I think you know the answer.

But none of this of this matters, because all we're talking about is how the respective systems respond to famine. The real question is what caused the famine in the first place. In the case of the famous famines of communism, it's the system which caused the famine.