Paul Tudor Jones II: Why we need to rethink capitalism 

Jim Faindel My only argument against you would be that there may be yet unthought of economic structure that surpasses capitalism, so I would advise against the idea of 'needing' capitalism. Otherwise, very well said. :)

Yeah, there is always room for improvement, but till that day comes, this is all we have. Have a nice day. :)

Jim Faindel Great post.

Jim Faindel The problem is, greed is inherent in capitalism.

eatcarpet Yes, it is, but a least the greed in Capitalism allows for some level of movement through competition.

Dark Day Ministries Bingo.

Dark Day Ministries And by that you mean that government should cut taxes to a minimum and intervene zero with the market and everything will magically become flowers and butterflies.

TheLivirus I believe he (Dark Day Ministries) means to cut government supports of corporations....examples being things like "Film Production Tax Credits", "Green Energy Incentives", "Subsidies to battery companies that go bankrupt" and bailouts to companies like GM and AIG and General Electric and many many banking institutions. You CAN read about such things......www.againstcronycapitalism.org/

TheLivirus Better, yes.

What Observerwwtdd said.

lol

yep that is crazy even in 2015

@@FrizzelFry 😂😂

Lmao. I think the left one

Kate Clementine the tan one

Kate Clementine Really? Isn't his voice what matters? Or you just have to be visually entertained while listening?

Xeno Hey you, yeah you. Shut up, its a joke.

I don't know what's going with TED staff. This is so irresponsible

Saf Sum what we have today is NOT capitalism. the US government makes sure that corporations that do not lobby and belong to all kinds of committees in washington get left out in the cold and reward the best regulatory cronyism tools to those who pay the government the most. this is CRONYISM not capitalism.

NoName NoFame what you call capitalism has never existed in the history of man, it is a fantasy

El Torco actually there are degrees of freemarket - and the greater the level of free market the better mankind did, and the lesser the level of free market the worse the mankind did. currently we are 50% communist 50% fascist and VERY LOW on the level of free market.

I'm sorry, but where are you getting your numbers from? what does 50% communist 50% fascist mean? what is the instrument by which you extract these data. where does the rest of your data come from which indicates this correlation you seem to be so sure about, and more importantly, can i access your dataset and reproduce your results? cause you're right now looking an awful lot like you're just stating things with zero grounds.

NoName NoFame That sound like the no true scotsman fallacy. In any case, that's how capitalism works, a business grows and becomes cancerous and tries to survive by whatever means possible. In any system that cancer will grow and try to survive. In a state system that power gets channeled to adjust policies. In other system that power is still used to take advantage of people in whatever way possible. Even in anarcho capitalism the large sector is still devoted to creating demand, fancy needs, to move people towards superficial things in life and away from real human values. It does not need a state system to do immerse damage to a society. E.g. there were no governmental programs or policies aimed at making women smoke more. But there were very successful advertising campaigns to accomplish that goal. In the end, millions of people still died because of it. E.g. in US the first thing you see are fat people everywhere and it's hard to imagine how that is correlated with too much regulation. Climate change is another big issue and it's also hard to imagine how that can be solved with fewer regulations.

TGGeko sources / points of reference for your statement please?

oc00011 Google. Look for facts, not opinions.

Poverty rate in 1950 more then 60℅ in 2000's 43℅ and now in 2010's 32℅. And their are other development indeed that are showing progress like child mortality going down etc

TGGeko meanwhile america and all the first world countries are turning to more and more government control and regulations.. the onlyproblem with china is that they are following the terrible western model of increasing government control because when all is said and done all governments want more power and control.

TGGeko He never said capitalism is a bad system, only that there's room for improvement. What can possibly be more capitalist than exposing capitalism itself to a competitive market of ideas?

Marko Kraguljac the regulation fees in america is so huge that it's bigger than the entire GDP of canada or india.. so who is watching the hen house? how many people owe their living directly to government (ie. their livelihood sustained by taxing other people) this number is FAR greater than you think due to farm subsidies, lucrative government contracts, government regulations written in favor of the biggst corporations, welfare recipients both corporate and regular kind as well as ALL government workers politicians .. the list goes on and on. we have ANYTHING but a capitalist society in america today.

True, and I do not deny the evolutionary path of nature either, for which we are a part of--however, this doesnt necessarily mean non-cooperation either.

@@webguyz1 what's wrong with survival of the fittest? No business should be owed an existence - provide value to society or die. For every kmart or blockbuster that's dies, there will be an Amazon or Netflix waiting to take its place.

TheFinnmacool what's CYA?

Profit is not the reward for doing your job, that is what a Wage/Salary is. Profit is the extra money gained by selling product for more than it is truly worth and/or by lowering the cost by paying employees less than they deserve or by extracting value from resources that you do not entirely own (environmental damage for example). My personal choices (or the choices of any one business) cannot fix a fundamentally broken system. My statement was merely a logical conclusion.

Fujibear although I agree with u, it is still immoral that half of America earns less than $30,000 dollars a year rendering them in poverty. The system in america has too many losers, and too few winners. The majority of people aren't winners, they are either losers or neutral. After all, the middle class are the most abused by the system

***** when you make sure that there are no "losers" in life you have government controlled bliss for everyone just like in north korea :) the only thing close to no losers is actually capitalism because when two parties interact voluntarily with one another they both get what they want - when governments barge in like it has done in america and controls 50% of the econoomy directly (including regulatory fees which is bigger than the entire GDP of canada or india) then we actually end up with far more losers than winners - with the rich getting richer since they are the only ones who are able to comply with regulations while getting tax breaks

HamsterPants522 A loser isn't the hard worker, though, the loser when speaking about the opposite of profits: "loss" is a reference to the failed business person. When a business person fails, they go back to into the market as an employee. Employees aren't losers, they've just chosen stability over a chance at higher wealth.

That's under the assumption that resources cannot be created, which is incorrect. Capitalism has created gains on all sides, in all tiers. It's just that it something only observed over generations, rather than a couple of years.

I noticed that too. Well said.

Lol, whats that going to change?

you must be fun at parties.

what have you done in life? F*** all

Right so they were giving 4%

Capitalism is simply the ownership of capital by an individual and not by a government. Capitalism lays no claim to morality or Justice. That's the problem. Capitalism is not a political system it is an economic system. It needs tempering by political means. And the political means should be democratic.

Brent James Corporatism/mercantilism is the system we have now, it's not capitalism.

HamsterPants522 OMG, all these negative comments are sounding like a broken record. I've heard them all a million times. All this bickering about the definition of capitalism. The guy even put up his definition of capitalism to make his point.All the people suggesting we should revert to Laissez Faire capitalism are just unrealistic. Doing that would be like starting a game of monopoly where one player owns all the stations and Mayfair with hotels on them. I'm not referring to you personally Hamster (your comment just happened to be at the bottom of the page). I actually agree with you. I'm just saying LF capitalism or pure capitalism is not the solution to the Major issues this guy is referring to.

HamsterPants522 I didn't say anything about monopolies in a true free market. I was referring to the Game monopoly as an analogy. Read better..The point I was making, is that if we would implement LFC at this moment in time, the vast majority of people would be at a huge disadvantage against the small number of people that actually have capital to invest. So first you misunderstood my argument, then you accuse me of coming up with a generic status quo argument, followed by making one of the biggest cliché arguments yourself. I have read every comment on this page and every negative comment was a repeat of something I have heard a million times before with nothing new whatsoever. Completely ignoring the issues raised by the speaker. The funny thing is I actually agree with your argument about monopolies. Where I differ is in the solution. Our society today and in the future is so radically different than say 50 years ago. Technological progress, the internet and automation has changed the game completely. LFC worked during the industrial revolution, when human labour still had high value. Today, automation has made human labour far less valuable. So our new times need new solutions. I'm not claiming to have all the answers, but at least the speaker is addressing some of the problems we have in today's economic system and he is offering something new. Something needs to change, I just don't see how pure LFC can solve these problems. It might be better than the crony-capitalist corporate plutocracy we are living under today, but I believe we can come up with something better. I am a huge proponent of economic freedom, but heading into the future, the poorest 40% of people wouldn't stand a chance.

Dan Mac *"I didn't say anything about monopolies in a true free market. I was referring to the Game monopoly as an analogy. Read better..The point I was making, is that if we would implement LFC at this moment in time, the vast majority of people would be at a huge disadvantage against the small number of people that actually have capital to invest."* I understand what you're saying now, and that's not a bad point, but I don't think it's really correct. The fact is, most of the people in this small number who have capital to invest, well, they have it because the government is protecting them from competition (aka. from laissez faire capitalism). If these increadibly rich people are afraid of laissez faire capitalism because they don't want competition, then I don't think there's reason to believe that they would last very long with laissez faire capitalim.

Paublo Picklepaper You will be happy with your cuke then, alone.

Bruno Nuñez what's cuke bro?

john smith Let's say that there are no sole proprietors in business, it's all corporations. People will put their savings into stocks to maximize their wealth, which will cause the companies to expand their business and create more jobs, reducing the need for charity. Then, when the rich die, their wealth either goes to the government or to other people. So eventually everyone gives away their wealth anyway.

***** It's a teaser for a post-capitalist RU-vid.

Adrian lol

Adrian this is such a dumb comment.

adub4ever indeed, people do not realize that and prefer to make no true scotsman fallacies and cry out "But that's not Capitalism!"

They are the dumbest of all.

Poor Man Mods Yup let's do it

Agreed. I love killing a whole bunch of people. Who shall we murder first?

mastablasta9x property rights means individuals own the means of production which is capitalism, and there are no property rights in socialism which means the society owns the means of production. It doesn't mean literal property like iPads and phones

Nice try, overpaid CEO

Yeah! Capitalism is definitely the future when 50% of all jobs will be automatable and climate change will financially destroy insurance companies! And all those people dying from mass starvation when those jobs are automatable and when global warming makes many places uninhabitable, why we'll just implement more QE when nobody is buying more of our crap. Make logical sense doesn't it?

Capitalism is going the same way as feudalism. Deal with it. There's no way out of it.

Pikes, pitchforks, and guillotines. Oh my!

Strangepete It's much easier to achieve the desired coercive ends if you have a government to do it for you, rather than if you don't have one but have to pay out of pocket for it directly. The only thing stopping honest companies from coercing customers into paying them money is that it is more expensive to do this. It's not sustainable, and the costs reach deeper than just on a monetary level.

HamsterPants522 I see what you're saying. But at the end of the day; when backed into a corner in a matter of economic survival - it get's increasingly difficult to be a "honest company". You know what I'm saying? We can only be moral and virtuous etc. to the degree that we can survive by being that way. For example the vast majority of the people emptying the oceans of fish, or cutting down the forests at an insane pace putting the future of all life at stake are not doing so because they are merely "immoral". They are doing it because they have kids to feed and they require money to do so. And so they will have to do whatever job they are forced to do in order to earn money, to survive in the short term.

Strangepete The economy is the environment through which all of the greatest technological innovations have been born. When circumstances change, the market changes to adapt, that's what makes it so efficient. There is a solution to every problem you just mentioned, and these solutions are all easily attainable by capitalist actors in the market. Trees can be replanted, fish can be produced in fish farms, etc. I think that your comparison of this to survival makes it look like you're describing the economy as a zero-sum game. The fact is, people consume services because their wealth is increased as a result, it's not just the businesses who are profiting from providing goods and services, else they wouldn't even be able to stay in business.

Strangepete _Government or no government_ --- that's the whole difference, right there. Firstly, there is no such thing as "state capitalism" because capitalism is an economic system/structure that doesn't have anything in common with government, state or federal authority, regulation etcetera. Capitalism =/= government intervention. When it does, it's no more capitalism: it's fascism, socialism, statism, or any other form of COLLECTIVISM. "State capitalism" is downright playword bullshit. The so-called "state capitalism" is fascism (aka. corporatocracy) when big business is in bed with government. When they favor those who promise them to protect & subsidize them (very, very important fact), ultimately, you have your corporations & megacorporations controlling your government. Every powerful corporation & megacorporation knows that, with a single swindle from a pen, they can have serious trouble, lawsuits galore. The power of a state, in any form, still regains the same of its power since ancient times. They cannot aford that. So, they made possible that every political candidate needs enormous support for his or her campaign. That, also, doesn't help when politicians themselves are businessmen. That, alone, is filled with steroids. Second, this fascism(corporatocracy) isn't any better nor different than socialism. In fascism, big businesses are in bed with the governmnet, while retaining some indepence while crushing competition through government subsidisation, protectionism, favoritism & heavy regulation. In socialism (or any other form of left-wing structures), the government owns the big business, while employing their own to the means of production. Very little difference but virtually the same: government and those with the means of production are in league. So, what's the solution? Given that the notion of state, since its creation, has been the subject for wars, incompetence & swindle-swandle between people just as long as those who are the state maintain power, and capitalism helped the lives of those people, since the industrial revolution, there are only two choices: capitalism without state intervention/protection/favoritism/regulation OR state intervention/protection/favoritism/regulation in favor of _certain_ big businesses that fund PAC and SuperPACs. Do you have to guess which one we have now? _if the acquisition of money determines your right to life and mere existence does that not inherently guarantee that the propensity for coercion, corruption, manipulation and aggression is built in?_ --- remove the state in the affairs of economy, and I'll guarantee you that very small taxes (for everyone, individual and business entities) & lack of regulation will fix it. Big entities like GoldmanSachs or JPMorgan would've bitten the dust WAY, WAAAAY, long time ago if it weren't for government help. You know what is government subsidisation in the langauge of capitalism? I'm sure you've heard it: *privatizing the profit and socialising the losses*. In case you don't know what that means, let me give you a rough translation: *capitalism for ourselves & the politicians we pay to help & finance our losses from the taxpayer's wallet, and socialism for the dumb idiots who are too ignorant & too dumb to understand how this relationship (big business+government=love) really work (aka. the taxpayers)*. Seems familiar? It isn't capitalism when the state meddle in the economy. Those that had & still have capital/resources understand that. In order to maintain power, you have to pay to stand in power using the government. Let's not forget pricing: in capitalism, you have the opportunity to get something cheaper affordable with your wage, while in monopolies (big business), you have to abide by the prices of the big since they also have protection from the government. Do I also have to remind that, in monopolies, your wage grows weaker n' weaker every time, both as value and numbers?

***** *"That's exactly what self-ownership is all about. No matter the system, it is to your advantage to restrict the "freedoms" of others to control your life for your own differential advantage; free will to chose what you believe is best for you. It's inherently not to your advantage to be a slave to the will of some others, which of course restricts their "freedoms" upon what you own; yourself and your choices."* Sir that is not how negative rights work. Defending your right to self-ownership can never be an act of aggression against another person's right to self-ownership. That's literally impossible.

That's why it's good it's on the Internet and we can share it with our friends. If is a good idea it will resonate with people.

Iesvilla So only the decision makers of the government know what is best for the country?

TheAnnoyingGunner Obviously not, but it is one thing to replace SOME of your taxes with charitable work. Corporations these days pay almost no taxes, no matter the country, and the little in taxes they should pay gets exempted when they give to charities, most of which gets used to pay big salaries and throw "awareness" parties. That money is needed dearly in infrastructure and social programs, not ad campaigns.

Iesvilla I'm a Washington DC contractor, I've seen a lot. How about this. A big corporation gives a lot of money to a charity, a sitting or former president makes a speech at said charity and gets paid a large amount of money for speaking. At this point giving the money to government is also a mistake. We the people should demand the flat tax negative tax system. Putting some of the money in our hands makes us the customer. A social program is providing goods and services. The federal government that prints money should never provide goods and services. Imagine if Walmart could print money and put it on the national debt, also imagine, if the CEO was voted in by the employees. The CEO would promise big salaries fat tensions just to get elected, this is essentially how the federal government operates today. By printing this money and throwing it on the national debt, the CEO of of Capitol Hill Incorporated keeps all of his federal employees happy. Keeping the tax code complex keeps the CEOs donors happy. Washington DC was never supposed to be a corporation.

rswjr66 In fact, Walmart can print money. As you could too. But most probably no one would use that money and the government doesn't accept it.

rswjr66 I think you misunderstood me. I'm not advocating for a government to provide the services by itself (which I think is what fascism was all about right?), but rather that a strong, just, tax base from all sectors of society coupled with needed social programs in the form of subsidies (both to companies, increasing supply, and individuals, increasing demand) are key to betterment of a country. That means, no subsidies to large multi-nationals or oil companies, but rather housing, infrastructure, education and health.

How about being so valueable that you're able to demand better pay?

how about not having a federal reserve and QE to skew it in the first place?

You took 8 words of his 10 minute speech out of context, and argued for 4 paragraphs about a conclusion he never came to and ended with an analogy about fiscal policy and a forest fire. You also managed to confuse the definition of profit with the definition of surplus. Had you payed any attention to what he was actually talking about you would have realized that hes talking about wealth inequality, and that he never once tried to convince anyone that it is better for corporations to take a loss every quarter. If less people can afford to be shareholders and less money is being donated to charity and less money is collected for corporate tax revenue then overall societal wealth is decreasing, and income inequality is increasing, period. The only thing increasing is corporate and shareholder wealth. Your "simple thought experiment" proves nothing because it is not logically connected to his argument in any way.

IKR!!

2020

+djayjp yeah what is up with that

"Get government out of business, including fiat currency, and it'll fix itself." LOL!

blurglide Yeah, once we have kids back in the coal mines, radium tea reappears on grocery store shelves and Lake Erie starts to catch fire again periodically from pollution floating around in it, we'll achieve a Libertarian Utopia!

John Salinas What does fraud and taking someones water from them, or forcing someone to work against their will at the threat of violence, have to do with Capitalism? The more capitalist a country is, the better the environment tends to be. The more communist, the more polluted. It's because people have no recourse in an unfree system, and they're really just property of the state anyway.

Essentially, Capitalism is just people interacting and exchanging things voluntarily. Everything else is interactions and exchanges made by threat of violence. How can you be against voluntarism and for force?

blurglide No, the more democratic a country is, the cleaner the environment is. Unrestrained capitalism brought us "London Fog", the Love Canal, leaded gasoline and a whole rogues gallery of environmental nightmares. It was only when people demanded the government stop these problems that anything started to improve. And there are plenty of countries that have a more active government in terms of protecting their citizens that are both more democratic and have better environmental outcomes that the USA, so your hypothesis does not stand up when confronted with the facts.

TCBeads although I can see what u mean, minimum wage is needed. It can be argued that competition for labour would rise wages, but the reality is that a lot of companies would work together to keep wages low

BraceFace exactly "race to the bottom" is already happening

If you're poor and working super hard and you're unhappy about it, doesn't it make sense to do somethin else.

It does. I did read those economic books too, don't worry. Unfortunatelly it's not so easy in a real life. If you're crappy programmer after you've studied it, you probably will be crappy in everything else you didn't study too. Dreams about "everybody is good at something" are sweet, but idealistic. It just doesn't work that way all the time. It's just a fairytale for successful people to justify their luck.

Good for you. :)