Ask Lemmy

Whatever happened to just doing stuff because it was fun, or because being helpful was the right thing to do, and not worrying about how to prevent other people from somehow making a sliver of a penny off of it without recompense? Why care that someone might be able to find some way to make a tiny little bit of money off of it?

For what it's worth I generally agree with you, the proposition is to prod at where one might go if one were to take the capitalist mindset to a logical extreme. It's not so much that someone might, as it is that an already profitable big business might. Nevertheless, the exasperation you're expressing here, I share, and I've sort of inverted what you ask here out of dismay at how one's supposed to go about things without serving to further help some big business' profits.

Obviously the better and more practical solution is to leverage governments to break up pseudo-monopolies, regulate and tax businesses, and support unionization in every industry. However, this sort of twisted scenario I'm asking about here? That, to me, seems like the bizarre sort of logic that a staunch, honest capitalist would prefer instead despite it being to the detriment of society.

If someone else is getting rich then they feel like that must be making them poorer somehow. But that’s not how the world actually works. It’s entirely possible to create value without taking it away from someone else.

Just caught this in your other reply and decided to address this here. While this is possible, it also isn't how the world actually works that this is consistently the case, and it is in those inconsistencies of value production that influence the mindset of others, don't you think? Supposing that it is strictly a zero sum game is wrong, but supposing that wealth accrual isn't sometimes at the cost of others is also wrong, I think it may be reasonable to say.

Wealth accrual often creates economic inequality, and in turn while the original action may not directly make people poorer, it can cost them in other ways of which I imagine we may all be too familiar.