Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
You say that people at the bottom go with less and less, but that doesn’t seem to match what’s actually happening in the world.
People used to be able to afford homes, so yes, it definitely is happening.
Have you seen the housing market lately? Capitalism was great for the boomers pretty much in every developed country. Now millenials and zoomers encountered this ripe form of it where everything is consolidated under a massive corporate entity optimizing only for profit.
I remember even a couple of years ago renting a place straight from the owners who moved to someplace bigger and after a year they just said i can live there however long i’d like with a month notice. Same rent for five years. Now every year i renew my lease through an intermediate management company and every year they hike the rent.
Groceries are getting more expensive, ads are fucking everywhere and every news outlet lies or creates mostly sponsored shit. We are surrounded by soulless corporations and we “work” for them at our bullshit jobs providing nothing of value. Feeling down? Why dont you install a fucking subscription app for therapy.
Boomers had a fairly well regulated capitalism, which they benefited from greatly.
Then they deregulated it because they got theirs, so fuck everyone else.
The boomers were adjacent to the two generations that started the neoliberal disaster. Reagan and Thatcher and Friedman etc weren’t boomers. The Clinton and Bush jr crew enthusiastically joined in, but they didn’t start it.
There are enormous government pressures against new construction. That’s not capitalism at work it’s centralized economic planning suppressing the supply of housing.
Ummm. Im in bed right now with two construction sites nearby waking me up. The whole city is in cranes and development companies make a killing. Still a basic 40m² place costs as much as a house outside of the city cost 5 years ago.
It does match exactly what’s happening though. Others have mentioned housing cost which is a clear example, but you can also look at income inequality. Here’s an article which cites data from the congressional budget office https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
It shows up to 500% growth since 1979 in the earnings of the .01% while the 99% of earners are only making about 50% more than in 1979. That data makes it clear that wealth is being concentrated, and that people at the bottom are going with less. Especially considering inflation since 1979 has been 320% (source)
Not to mention that people in America and Europe aren’t necessarily at “the bottom”. A lot of today’s wealth is built on the backs of poorer countries that make even less than we do, or nothing at all, or by exploiting them by coming in and privatizing something as basic as water.
@Crankpork
Debt and giving weapons to extremist factions, like druglords, are the big ways that the extraction/pillage/theft happens.
BTW corporatism (aka #neoliberalism) is not capitalism. Capital (including money) is supposed to deplete when bad decisions are made in capitalism. Also capitalism was defined to have protections and a publicSector to counteract so-called ‘externalities’ (ie. bad stuff) a corporation might produce as a by-product.
Both are clowned w neoliberalism
@local_taxi_fix
The people at the bottom of the world are doing better and better.
Being removed from reality is a form of insanity itself.
A lot of people die from hunger daily in my country and different parts of the world. If you’re speaking about growing wealth in developing countries, you should go look at the people holding these wealth, most times, it’s an even smaller group of elites than in the USA.
Capitalism is wielded in a much worse manner in underdeveloped and developing countries, the elite and people in power don’t care about the citizens, they want to hoard as much wealth as they can and they would do so in any way they can. What’s worse, they take these wealth to already wealthy countries to further develop them while intentionally destroying theirs. Your should follow the flow of wealth from the global south to the north the west in particular.
Yes, in these countries there’s a growing middle class, but what can they buy or do with the little wealth they hold? They’re stuck in an endless struggle against totalitarian governments who are themselves stooges to global neocolonialist and imperialistic countries powers like the USA and European countries.
Inequality is a measure of the difference between top and bottom. It is not a measure of how much the bottom has.
Demonstrating that the bottom 99% has had wages increase 50% since 1979 while inflation has decreased the value of the same currency by 320% is damning. There’s no good defense for capitalism here.
There’s more overall for everyone, but the people at the bottom are getting a smaller and smaller share, and a lot of important things, like housing, not to mention with things like streaming, and online stores, we don’t really “own” most of the media we consume anymore, we just pay forever to rent it. Fast fashion and planned obscelescence means that our clothing is worse than what people used to have, and our machines don’t last as long, so we have to keep replacing both of those.
What we do have is designed not to last, and more meaningful, life-long purchases are out of reach. Meanwhile the people at the top of the pile who do literally nothing but “have wealth” sit around on their yachts blissfully ignoring the people starving to death on the streets.