Comment by dontoni

You have essentially used a bad-looking, cynical description of capitalism vs an idealised description of socialism. It’s not fair game to compare a cynical view of capitalism in practice with an idealised view of socialism in theory. You either both compare them in practice, in which capitalism wins every time; or compare in theory, in which both are probably on ties, because any idealised version promises the same prosperity and society well-being.

Capitalism is about investment, more than anything else. Why was capitalism born at the creation of the Stock Exchange? Because then savers could use their savings as funding for entrepreneurial endeavours. As British Victorians wanted, the goal was “to live off from the interest made by interests”, referring to their investments’ growth and compounding returns.

In socialism, they essentially want to strip off capitalists from their savings and funding and let the State manage it all. Socialists assume a centralized institution can handle all of the information and get right the incentives, which has been seen to not work every time you try it.

It is also a contradiction of terms to say that socialism, as it was defined by any socialist theorist, is of the “libertarian type”; who by definition wants both economic and social liberties to individuals, whereas socialism by its very postules looks forward to remove any economic liberty and ownership of capital as means of production, whatever vague definition they use to define these (a laptop can be both a means of production and a consumption good at the same time).

Further, advertising is like capitalism from the business perspective, not from the customer perspective. For the business it’s an investment. From the customer it’s just the cost to pay to use a service. And, as said, what defines capitalism is investment, not consumption, and prove of that is that we’ve always consumed stuff along history but only when investment was institutionalised and carried out at scale through a Stock Exchange that capitalism was coined, referring precisely to the act of investing and reinvesting.

Capitalism actually wants to convince you to be frugal, save, and invest your savings. It is consumption, and not capitalism, that tries to convince you to spend it all. Both are antagonists. Consumption is born from opulence, not capitalism. If socialism did also produce abundance in extreme levels for everyone they would be as consumptionists as they could ever be, just as we are in our rich, Western societies. Note that less consumptionist societies like Singapore do better and are considered to be more capitalists than countries like Spain or Italy.

Again, it is opulence that causes excessive consumption: and it’s only capitalism the system that has indeed produce overwhelming wealth to every individual, both poor and rich, something that no other system has ever achieved at the same order of magnitude. And that’s nothing mystical or religious: it’s just that capitalism = investing and reinvesting, so no wonder we have much more to consume if we are all day reinvesting the product of our means of production into more means of production.