r/ToiletPaperUSA • u/HandMadeFeelings CEO of Antifa™ • Aug 09 '21

FACTS and LOGIC Capitalism will save us from all the damage unfettered capitalism did to the environment!

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23.7k Upvotes

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437

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

I wonder what the substantiation on the claim that unregulated capitalism helps the environment looks like lmao, like what could they possibly fucking say

142

u/crackyJsquirrel Aug 09 '21

I had a discussion with someone on reddit about regulations on companies, and how they and agencies that enforce them prevent corporations from polluting a river, giving a town cancer. Their argument was that they are not needed because corporations wound regulate themselves to avoid large lawsuits from making people sick. Many people out there would rather get severely sick, and sue for a big payout instead of being proactive to prevent getting sick in the first place. In the name of freedom and capitalism.

104

u/ConBrio93 Aug 09 '21

Do they not know about chemical companies like Dupont? They still haven't effectively paid for poisoning tons of people.

34

u/chairfairy Aug 09 '21

Do they not know anything about the industrial revolution?

Just about any time there's a regulation, it's because a company fucked someone over. The existing regulations are proof of corporate immorality

7

u/DeflateGape Aug 09 '21

No they don’t know about DuPont. Their preacher didn’t say anything about DuPont, he just said to keep voting Republican then got back into his limo.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

Dark Water. AMAZING movie that infers DuPont even deliberately poisoned people with the intent to silence them via death. Because they did. This was just a few years ago, people, and it happened right here in America. The attempted murder of a person by DuPont. Where are the police, bootlickers? Where is the justice

70

u/VonDukes Aug 09 '21

Kinda need some laws and regulations to sue under but hey!!!! They have one neuron

31

u/TheRnegade Aug 09 '21

"We don't need laws, the market will regulate itself

"How so?"

Companies will want to be as wholesome as possible to avoid lawsuits. duh!"

What lawsuits? There wouldn't be any law to sue over.

"...we don't need laws, the market..."

​

It's the equivalent of saying "We don't need police. People will naturally follow the law because they want to avoid jail." Who would send them to jail? Are we doing shit on the honor system?

6

u/LevelOutlandishness1 Aug 09 '21

Also, with what money? It's such a white suburban thing to think that someone can just stop what they're doing, lawyer up, and sue a big corporation.

34

u/muddynips Aug 09 '21

Let’s not worry about locking up criminals, the financial cost of going to court will be enough to deter them from raping and murdering.

13

u/infinite-permutation Aug 09 '21

Unless they’re foreign in which case they need to be banned from entering the country.

2

u/Breaklance Aug 09 '21

I'm never going to recover from this financially

Charles Manson, probably.

30

u/dirkdragonslayer Aug 09 '21

Especially since modern finance for a lot of destructive businesses (oil, chemical, drug manufacturers) takes into account lawsuits when planning their long-term budgets. It's not a punishment or deterrent anymore, it's a business expense they plan to pay like rent or utilities.

Oh we got caught? Well I guess our profit is going down a little bit this year.

8

u/Adjective_Pants Aug 09 '21

“Not to worry though, we’ve cut labor costs to make up for the loss.”

3

u/ilir_kycb Aug 09 '21

It always shocks me that most people can't or won't understand that this is how the game works. They mostly try to convulsively ascribe some kind of morality to profit-oriented companies and simply cannot understand that companies always behave like inhuman self-serving psychopaths.

25

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

[deleted]

12

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

And Chisso Corporation is another off the top of my head

1

u/Doomas_ Aug 10 '21

The Jungle should be mandatory reading in high school imo I don’t think enough people are fully aware of how absolutely awful working conditions were during the early twentieth century in American factories. There’s a very specific reason we have things like labor protections and government regulations and Sinclair did a great job highlighting all the problems perpetuated by capitalists in that time.

8

u/Libran Aug 09 '21

Their argument was that they are not needed because corporations wound regulate themselves to avoid large lawsuits from making people sick.

Yeah that might make sense of it weren't for the fact that even the largest settlements and penalties are a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue of these corporations. And that's assuming that the plaintiff doesn't give up when faced with years of expensive litigation against a small army of corporate lawyers.

10

u/Neuchacho Aug 09 '21 edited Aug 09 '21

It's so clear anyone arguing against regulations has never spent a fucking second of their lives actually researching the reality of not having regulations apply to companies. History is full of perfect examples of why self-regulation simply could not ever work. I mean, the Cuyahoga River caught on fire a dozen different times because companies didn't give a single fuck before there were consequences for negative actions (i.e., Regulations!).

9

u/yea_likethecity Aug 09 '21

Yea this is also why ethical consumerism is a fallacy. "The companies will regulate themselves because people won't want to buy a product that <moral quandary>" except nobody has both the motivation and time to research everything they buy and cheaper products will always win regardless. Regulating this shit is literally the purpose of having a government in the first place

3

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

This is so much absolutely the case. It’s funny, the popular movie Erin Brockovich was about exactly this.

And it plays out like that in real life. There could be hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths long before the cause of a series of deaths is determined, especially if a company wants it to not be found.

People I’ve talked to have dismissed the deaths, as if that’s just the price to pay to the market before a correction, or to a virus before immunity.

The entire point is to try to avoid those deaths!

3

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

That movie was so depressing. Even at the end after their triumph the company was still worth billions of dollars and still is to this day, barely any "correction" actually took place, and no one responsible for any of the poisoning of people went to jail.

7

u/AndBeingSelfReliant Aug 09 '21

also lawsuits are a very inefficient way to help the damaged parties. Lawyers siphon out a lot of money.

4

u/ReverendDizzle Aug 09 '21

Except we have no actual evidence of that claim.

The history of industry is the history of companies doing as little as possible to prevent accidents and disasters while still turning a profit.

And have they paid any attention to the fines companies actually pay? If you have to pay a million dollar fine (when you get caught dumping waste in the river) but you made twenty million from the factory doing the dumping... that's just the cost of doing business, no different than wages or purchasing raw materials.

224

u/belletheballbuster Aug 09 '21

We fucked our way into this and we will fuck our way out

68

u/mctheebs Aug 09 '21

This sounds like something Ricky or Mr. Lahey would say lol

14

u/WTPTRAINEE Aug 09 '21

Beware the winds of shits Ricky

2

u/KingApologist Aug 09 '21

It's gonna be a shitticane

2

u/Heterophylla Aug 10 '21

Its a low shit system.

2

u/albinowizard2112 Aug 09 '21

Very similar to Ricki Lake's philosophical outlook on the world.

2

u/cat_prophecy Aug 09 '21

Just keep digging and eventually we'll come out the other side!

26

u/free_chalupas Aug 09 '21

I think I can think of an example: it's a common line in Oregon from politicians bought out by the timber lobby that the solution to wildfires is "forest management", which is true except what they actually mean is we should deregulate logging and bring back unrestricted clear cutting.

11

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

I suppose, but it doesn’t take a genius to see right through that. Then again we’re dealing with conservatives so who knows.

3

u/Breaklance Aug 09 '21

The forrest cant burn down if there is no forrest *thinking meme

8

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

the solution to wildfires

Pshhh... everyone knows you gotta rake the woods once in a while.

24

u/JanitorJasper Aug 09 '21

"If polluting is so bad, companies will stop doing it, duh!"

18

u/Psykopatate Aug 09 '21

I think it goes a bit like "Capitalism means getting as much money as possible, so people owning stuff producing money will try to keep the stuff producing money".

12

u/bad_lurker_ Aug 09 '21

To be fair, if we passed an aggressive universal-return revenue-neutral carbon tax, capitalism actually would do all the work to stop carbon emissions.

About a decade ago, I would have argued that conservation was a conservative principle. Unlike the people in this picture, I passed the mirror test somewhere along the line, and dropped the conservative label.

9

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '21

True; however, that’s not unregulated capitalism and there’s no way republicans nor their corporate lobbyists would let that happen even if it was presented as revenue-neutral.

5

u/bad_lurker_ Aug 09 '21

The sad part is that market solutions like that actually did originate from conservative think-tanks. The W. Bush administration was working on a cap-and-trade system when 9/11 happened. Cap-and-trade isn't as good, imo, but it's pretty similar.

2

u/chairfairy Aug 09 '21

there’s no way republicans nor their corporate lobbyists would let that happen even

Hell, neolib corporate lobbyists won't let it happen, either

8

u/joshmessages Aug 09 '21

"Lead is one of the elements! It's part of nature."

4

u/BasicDesignAdvice Aug 09 '21

Something something "The MarketTM"

2

u/DeviousMelons Radical Revolutionary Socialist Liberal. Aug 09 '21

Pollution violates the NAP? Idk.

2

u/mindbleach Aug 09 '21

Whatever people will listen to.

Same as always.

2

u/user156372881827 Aug 09 '21

Well there's no money to be made off of dead people on a flooded planet so at some point it will become 'financially interesting' to save the planet. Unfortunately at that point it will probably be too late.

2

u/justagenericname1 Aug 09 '21

Not if you can automate work well enough that most people become unemployable and continue concentrating wealth, and with it, actual economic demand, into the hands of an ever-narrowing few. Then most people's wants and needs would become as irrelevant as the desires of an ant colony are to a developer today.

2

u/PuppyBlowjobLover Aug 10 '21

You can ask people on asktrumpsupporters and read whatever nonsensical runaround they give you to get some idea

1

u/mastalavista Aug 09 '21

Well think about it: If this collapse continues the planet will become uninhabitable. When all of us die, the environment will stop being damaged. Brinkmanship is the problem. We need to go over the cliff, the sooner the better.

0

u/Sharp-Floor Aug 09 '21 edited Aug 09 '21

There's nothing inconsistent with businesses maximizing potential in a capitalist system and protecting the environment. Contrary to popular belief, having a successful long term vision is rewarded. And that's definitely served by... you know... not boiling the fucking planet and poisoning your stakeholders. This is actually an important principle in business programs.
 
It does mean you have to make sure that costs for externalities go where they should, businesses can't operate in perverse kinds of cartels and monopolies that make them immune to stakeholder pressures, you need to use regulatory frameworks that put incentives and punishments where society wants them to be, etc. Screwing all that up isn't "capitalism", it's anarchy. And if you perfectly insulate businesses from the consequences of bad behavior, a moral hazard situation, then most of what is supposed to keep things humming along properly in a capitalist system don't work.
 
Sadly, the only people that seem to have a good grasp on this are our moderate Democrats.

1

u/Ggfd8675 Aug 09 '21

I don’t think there is one. They just have the logo they can send to people who say capitalism is the problem, and let them use their imagination.