Asklemmy

Nothing substantial to contribute ... just wanted to say that I came in here expecting a shit show (maybe I've been on mastodon too much :) ) and am genuinely impressed to see a bunch of polite and good discussion, not least from the OP!!

When you have a system that values profits over everything, it tends to (either by accident or design) exploit workers and destroy the middle class.

With capitalism, you’ll pay the absolute minimum needed to get workers, regardless of the value they create for the business and regardless of how much profit your business is making. You’ll collude with other businesses to keep wages down, because again that’s a way to increase profit. You WONT support any worker rights laws like weekends, PTO, benefits, minimum wage, etc.

You can argue that the free market takes care of itself, but we’ve seen that isn’t true. Companies constantly exploit customers and workers. They will raise prices and lower wages in ways that a pure “free market” theoretically wouldn’t allow.

Now this isn’t to say capitalism is all bad. I do think smart people and hard working people should be rewarded. But any sufficiently large system is going to have some corruption. I’d like to have a reasonable minimum standard of living for everyone before we run off and let capitalism give us multi-billionaires. If everyone was guaranteed enough for a decent standard of living, I’d be fine with the rest being as capitalistic as anyone wants. But we dont have that. Minimum wage is $7. Healthcare is shit and tied to employment. Etc. etc.

I'm a bit libertarian leaning myself, but I do believe capitalism requires moral constraints on external, societal costs that are not included in market forces (e.g. environmental pollution).

In short, capitalism's greatest benefit it is also it's greatest issue: it delivers most efficiently exactly what people want, but without any evaluation whether those wants are beneficial.

In a nutshell:

Capitalism in theory is an ok idea. Capitalism left unchecked and largely unregulated (as is the case in america) evolves into a monster that controls government and the people in order to feed and sustain life. Or rather, companies do this.

Sell things, make money. Pay labor a small amount to make more things. Labor complains, company buys good PR. Labor complains, company fires workers and hires more, buys more PR. Workers die, company sued, company buys good laywers, company pays small fine. Product is discovered as dangerous, company buys better science in the form of funding biased research. People start grassroots campaign to prevent product from being sold, company buys lobbyists to prevent grassroots campaign from working. Competitor starts doing better than company so company buys competitor, company now doubles in size and profit, can do twice the damage dealt previously.

"Corporations are people, my friend" but they cannot vote. Company is founded in delaware like many other companies. Delaware now considering allowing corporations the right to vote as citizens would". Company loves this as it would save them money on lobbying.

Company buys town, citizens move there and work for company in exchange for goods at the company store. Company store is the only store in town and they just raised their prices again for the third time in a month. Company considering statehood as next possible growth opportunity.

Labor has less money and is increasingly overworked. Half of labor thinks the other half is lazy and that company will promote them because they feel they work harder than the other half. Promotions happen, but the increase barely keeps up with the cost of living. Technology improves, productivity soars, wages stagnate, CEO income compounds.

Election season rolls around, a "CEO" type "business tycoon" is an option. The half of labor who think they will be promoted support the business tycoon candidate because they read reports of how much money he compounds. "My wages stagnated under the last guy, but this guy's income compounds, exponentially! He surely knows how to save our country!" Business tycoon is elected and runs the country like a business, cutting costs where it helps anyone other than his own interests. Services people relied on are cut, people take on more stress and less income, the president denies all blame.

Rinse, repeat.

Because .ml stands for Marxist-Leninist, and Lemmy was created by Tankies because their Tankie places got banned on Reddit.