The Soviet Union had no trouble at all monitoring and punishing tens of millions of people. It also operated forced labor camps (gulags) on a vast scale.
Actually, on average the rich countries that has diverged most from capitalism has been significantly worse.
I'm leaving out the developing countries on purpose here: they may have had it even worse but it doesn't feel fair to blame them.
Nazi Germany and Soviet/USSR (the whole time more or less) can't blame anyone else for the insane scale of human suffering that they created. Both are representatives of centrally planned economies where companies either don't exist in a western sense (Soviet), or only exist to serve the country (Germany).
Nazi Germany became Nazi Germany in large part because of severe economic problems, but by the late 30s, living conditions for conforming, “good” Germans had improved somewhat.
There was a reasonable supply of consumer goods for “good” Germans in the late 30s and early 40s after the economy started turning around, and food wasn’t a serious issue until very late in the war, and was worst in the years right after (again, for “good” Germans).
Weird little anecdote: my mother-in-law had her feet x-rayed in a shoe shop to check the fit of her new shoes circa 1943 in Essen. Absolutely no military benefit to ensuring that a 3 year old’s shoes fit, but definitely a market advantage for a shoe shop competing for sales (remember, we didn’t know that casual x-ray usage by non-radiologists was a terrible idea).
The big industrials were geared for military production, especially after 1939, but their owners often helped support the Nazis on their way to power, because they were more worried about Communists and Socialists, and either didn’t take the Nazis seriously, or figured the conservatives could get them under control… or actually agreed with them.
There’s a reason that the modern Social Democratic Party in Germany is the same organization that existed pre-NS era, but the Christian Democrats (conservatives) and Free Democrats (market liberals) were completely new post-war organizations.
Labor camps in the Soviet Union suggest otherwise. More likely, being an evil asshole is a human universal, and the (relatively) peaceful life and society we enjoy in the west right now is the exception in history, not the rule. Capitalism as a system at least has the advantage of acknowledging the existence of self interest and attempts to harness it. Communist systems try and pretend it doesn't exist or can somehow be socialized away (i.e. the New Soviet Man).
There are a a lot of people who believe that evil assholes are only created due to the oppressive forces du jour (whether that be capitalism, white supremacy, or whatever), not that it is innately a part of human nature.
Which is just patently silly from a cursory glance at history and the horrific acts committed under every economic, religious, and social structure ever.
> The emergence of free markets coincided with a dramatic decline in slavery.
Free markets are an analytical fiction like frictionless surfaces; they don’t exist in the real world. The emergence of the real-world economic system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (which is not the same system as the modern mixed economy that has generally replaced it, though both critics and defenders of the modern mixed economy conflate it woth capitalism, with which it shares some core elements) corresponds with the expansion of chattel slavery and the development of the slave trade, and pressure for its abolition corresponds with (and often involved the same people as) early organized opposition to capitalism.
> Free markets are an analytical fiction like frictionless surfaces; they don’t exist in the real world
Yes, they do exist. They aren't perfect. Nothing human is perfect.
Slavery goes back to the dawn of man. In America, slavery was the norm (including among the native americans) until the US was formed. Yes, I know that only half the colonies had abolished slavery when the union was formed, it was forcibly abolished in the rest in 1865.
> Yes, I know that only half the colonies had abolished slavery when the union was formed, it was forcibly abolished in the rest in 1865.
It had to be forcibly abolished because "free" market capitalism failed to bring about abolition itself; plantation owners had a vested interest in maintaining the institution of slavery.
In fact, said vested interest is sufficiently strong that we never actually abolished slavery in the US; we simply replaced plantations with private prisons, and chattel slaves with penal slaves. Said private prisons, penal slavery, and the broader prison-industrial complex are all the direct consequences of "free" market capitalism as applied to the American penal system.
> said vested interest is sufficiently strong that we never actually abolished slavery in the US
Actually, the whole point of the Confederacy seceding was it needed to protect itself from free market capitalism, because it made the Southern economy uncompetitive.
> we simply replaced plantations with private prisons
The numbers don't remotely compare with the number of slaves in the Confederacy.
> private prisons, penal slavery, and the broader prison-industrial complex are all the direct consequences of "free" market capitalism
They are consequences of the government, not free markets. The Soviet gulags were penal slavery camps, which the communists liked because they could work people to death in them, saving money on food, housing, and medical care.
Penal slave labor long predated free markets.
A theory I see all the time is that slavery is somehow more efficient than free labor. The most obvious refutation of that is the United States during WW2. The US free market was able to not only conduct a war on both sides of the planet, it also supplied the British and Soviet war machines. The US didn't just win, it buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
No slave based labor could possibly compete with that.
P.S. The Union also buried the Confederacy under a similar avalanche.
> Actually, the whole point of the Confederacy seceding was it needed to protect itself from free market capitalism
The Confederates would disagree; from their point of view, they seceded to protect their "free" market - that being of chattel slaves - because their capitalist profit motive gave them a vested interest in minimizing labor costs to the bare minimum with which they could get away.
What the Union capitalists figured out (and the Confederate capitalists didn't) is that it's just as profitable (if not more so) to replace those chattel slaves with wage laborers, especially if you can get away with paying those laborers less than what it would cost to house and feed them. No need to care about their working conditions, either, since wage laborers are rentals and therefore (if you care more about profit than morals) entirely disposable (unlike chattel slaves, which had to be purchased upfront). Said laborers predictably recognized this to be effectively slavery/serfdom with extra steps, and thus organized into unions for better bargaining/negotiating power.
> The numbers don't remotely compare with the number of slaves in the Confederacy.
There were about 4 million chattel slaves by the Civil War, v. 1.6 million incarcerated today. Sure, it's lower nowadays, but not so much as to be incomparable.
> They are consequences of the government, not free markets.
They are consequences of the government seeking to save money by deferring government functions to privatized replacements competing in a "free" market.
You might've noticed those scare quotes I keep using around "free"; those are there because capitalism is at odds with an actually-free market (contrary to capitalists' claims); given the opportunity, a capitalist would vastly prefer to have absolute control over the market (a.k.a. monopolization) than to have to actually compete, because said control allows the maximization of profit for oneself.
> The US free market was able to not only conduct a war on both sides of the planet, it also supplied the British and Soviet war machines. The US didn't just win, it buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
> [...]
> P.S. The Union also buried the Confederacy under a similar avalanche.
If I had a nickel for every confounding variable underlying those outcomes, I'd be able to bury the Axis powers and the CSA under avalanches of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
