> It's not. It's nowhere close. "Capitalism" (which is a weasel word to begin with), has produced far more innovation than any other economic system.
This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.
> Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
This is a whole lot of words that says precious little. Also, you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions. Tons of the massive tech companies we have today that feel older than time itself were products of university and government grants, notable in that they didn't have to make money. Huge innovations like GPS that basically any product can use for damn near free started life as ways for the military to track deployed assets. Flat panel LCD screens, lithium batteries, like I said, it's hard to find a product so ubiquitous now on this level that ISN'T in some way funded by the Government.
The corporations role in turn is to take those expensive new technologies and make them cheap, and in THAT regard, they are very good at their jobs. But it doesn't translate well to every product.
> It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
Horseshit. The entire open source community disagrees with you. Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you. Food pantries disagree with you. Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation. If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
> Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
> This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.
This is false - we've had many attempts at alternative systems to free markets - all of which have failed because they don't work.
Also, bringing "colonialism" into this shows that you're not interested in seeking out the truth - just pushing your own political agenda onto other people.
> This is a whole lot of words that says precious little.
Funny, I thought the same about most of your comment.
> you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions
Turns out that a decent number of technologies had their fundamental research funded by "defense projects, grant money, other such institutions" - which doesn't mean anything, because (1) many innovations are not funded in those ways (2) the vast majority of modern technology's commercialization was done exclusively by "capitalism" and (3) as we've seen with communist countries, the government can fund as much research as it wants, and it doesn't matter for any purpose except weapons development if the private sector doesn't go through the process of refining it and making it cheap enough that consumers can buy it.
> Horseshit.
That perfectly describes your next paragraph:
> The entire open source community disagrees with you
No, they don't. The open-source community does not encourage innovation in any way. It encourages free clones of successful products whose innovation was performed by another entity (literally a parasite on the economy) and ego projects. A large number of successful open source projects (e.g. Netscape/Firefox, OpenOffice, Llama, Inkscape, Blender, Eclipse) are reactionary projects that were started several years after a piece of proprietary software started to become popular, and often copy the UI, features, and workflow of those programs - the literal opposite of innovation.
> Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you
No, they don't. The internet archive does barely any innovation at all - in fact, they perform significantly more theft and copyright infringement than "innovation".
> Food pantries disagree with you
No, they don't. Food pantries are not models of innovation.
> Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation
I never claimed otherwise - but only someone speaking from a position of extreme ignorance would claim that anything except money has been responsible for the vast majority of innovation across all of human history (and especially over the past several hundred years).
> If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
Strawman argument - I never claimed this. Quite a silly strawman, too.
> Would love a citation on this
Software and genetics are patentable in the US, purely as a result of corrupt regulators - there you go.
This is like saying Earth has produced far more life than any other planet: where's the competition? We don't have a non-capitalist control society to test against ever since Colonialism exported Capitalism to every corner of the globe.
> Strawman argument - very few people believe or claim that "capitalism" directly incentivizes innovation - the "side effect" of innovation happening as a result of chasing profits is literally how "capitalism" is designed to work - and does so extremely effectively. Unless you've been living under a rock the past century, it's not hard to see the incredible technological advances that have happened purely as a result of "capitalism". The "small intersection of the Venn diagram", while small in relative terms (and there's nothing wrong with that), is a large absolute amount.
This is a whole lot of words that says precious little. Also, you'd be hard pressed to find any technological advancements especially that don't have their roots in defense projects, grant money, other such institutions. Tons of the massive tech companies we have today that feel older than time itself were products of university and government grants, notable in that they didn't have to make money. Huge innovations like GPS that basically any product can use for damn near free started life as ways for the military to track deployed assets. Flat panel LCD screens, lithium batteries, like I said, it's hard to find a product so ubiquitous now on this level that ISN'T in some way funded by the Government.
The corporations role in turn is to take those expensive new technologies and make them cheap, and in THAT regard, they are very good at their jobs. But it doesn't translate well to every product.
> It's also the case that it's completely infeasible to directly incentivize innovation - the best that you can do is attach it to some other measurement - which is exactly what "capitalism" does.
Horseshit. The entire open source community disagrees with you. Massive volunteer organizations like the internet archive disagree with you. Food pantries disagree with you. Humans have worked for one another for things besides money since long before money existed, and that very much includes innovation. If innovation required financial benefit, we'd have never left our caves.
> Patents have become rent-seeking because of corrupt regulators - corrupt regulators that anti-capitalists would happily put into greater positions of power and give more power to meaningfully decrease the quality of human life.
Would love a citation on this.