Unpopular Opinion

How about insurance company employees who would be out of a job with universal health care?

What about all of the manual weavers put out of work by the power loom?

This happens with advancement. Grow up. "Someone might lose a job" is a terrible reason to perpetuate a murderous system.

You not blaming capitalism is exceptionally stupid. VERY stupid when you say, "problem being, money has been funneled to the top".

You don't know what capitalism is, because that is THE EXACT PURPOSE of capitalism: Take earned money from the workers and keep it away from them.

Things got this way because of fools like you thinking capitalism isn't that funneling of money. It's the root of the corruption you're whining about. The rich wouldn't own the government if they didn't have so much money that they cannot be competed with and can wantonly lobby (bribe) and overtly bribe politicians.

Ok, I'll bite, then. I am not an economist, but I think about it in 3 ways:

1. If you had a company, but all you ever did was take profit from the company, and never reinvested that money back into it, that company would fail. The examples for this are numerous. The nation is a company that we all work for. If a handful of "owners" skim all the profits without a certain amount of reinvestment, our nation will not survive.

Even worse than skimming the profits, the oligarchs are stashing them overseas, i.e. the Panama Papers.

Even worse than hoarding wealth overseas, the oligarchs pay less taxes than illegal immigrants.

None of these things will ever change under capitalism because the oligarchs have achieved regulatory capture. This is a well-known, but maybe less obvious result of capitalism.

2. Commodifying basic needs is unethical. It is well-agreed that capitalism can find efficiencies in non-essential goods and services. But a significant amount of value in capitalism comes from failed businesses, or what I call "buying things a discount". This process is indefensible when it comes to food, housing, healthcare, education, other than the "Charlie Kirk defense", i.e. some people will have to die so other people can be selfish assholes.

3. Capitalists are destroying the planet because their focus is on profit, not sustainability or general welfare.

Capitalism as an idea is dangerous because it elevates the rich. We have a social paradigm that the rich are better or smarter, or know something we don't. Until we destroy the idea that profit is King, we will never overcome the above failures or create a society that prioritizes general welfare.

Hopefully this is a thoughtful response you were looking for.

Good unpopular opinion!

The goal of capitalism is maximizing capital. What happens in society then is that human well-being comes second after capital maximizing. Yes, it is uncontested that capitalism has improved global human well-being. GDP growth is very obviously correlated with increase in human well-being. But correlation does not imply causation. If the goal were to maximize human well-being first and have capital come second, the outcomes would be different.

One criticism of capitalism that is ignored is that it was the 19th-20th century discovery of super-low entropy energy sources that were incorporated into production that has lead to such rapid growth in technological advances and efficiency. Within neoclassical economic models oil is considered a substitute for capital (which is infinite), not as a limited natural resource that provides energy that allows production to take place.

And so, as capitalism chugs on and on in society, burning more and more oil will continue to generate more and more capital, growth will go up and up and finally after all of that human well-being will go up and up. There is no endgame there, what happens when oil runs out? Or when there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere for human well-being to be sustained on earth?

If the goal changes from capital maximizing to human well-being maximizing then there is an endgame, to ensure ~~sure~~ that human well-being (infinite?) is always sustained on earth. Increasing capital can come after that instead.

It's called unpopular opinion not objectively wrong opinion.

Upvoted according to sub rules, but wow what a shit take.

Capitalists compete amongst themselves. That competition works for everyone, as long as unions are the brake pads on that train. We took the brakes off and blamed the train conductor wanting to go fast. Well, that's his job in this poor metaphor, hope it comes across.

Okay, but here's the thing: This system is not in equilibrium. When you have workers and owners in a permanent tug of war, eventually someone is going to win and when they do they'll either secure their position as the winner or let the other side recover and repeat it all again. What's going on in the modern West is specifically that; the owner class won the tug of war in the 80s and went to work ensuring they'd never need to play that game again. They took a system that was not in equilibrium and pushed it towards their own preferred equilibrium, and as you can probably tell that equilibrium fucking sucks.

Remember everyone: upvote for unpopular. This one should have 100k upvotes.

In my mind, the problem is hierarchy, whether it be in corporations or government. It must be limited as much as possible in any system. Capitalism is inherently hierarchical though. The billionaires have so much money now, they can bribe every powerful politician that's not exceptionally principled, and control how people see the world through media. Even that Teamsters leader is acting like he's getting some sort of kickback now; supporting the GOP.

I feel our core problem today is concentration of wealth and power. I think many layman calls this concentration and abuse capitalism in the same way that many people call any kind of social service communism.

Now, I personally believe that this is the end result of capitalism due to regulatory capture, and that capitalism is inherently unstable without a resilient regulatory framework to keep the system working. Still, I’m not sure that the term capitalism is perfectly fit for our situation today. I like the concept of a free market, but we don’t have a free market. We have a market where the rules are set by the big players to their maximum advantage.

Extreme and rapidly accelerating wealth inequality will be the death of us if climate change doesn’t kill us first.

Here's a capitalism problem I can't find a working answer to: How do you stop companies from enshittification when shareholders just blindly want more profits and higher stock prices?

Capitalism is unable to regulate itself, it goes against its fundamental nature. We've tried multiple times and it is simply not working because the people with the most power, given to them by the mechanics of capitalism, will do everything in their power to undercut and remove anything that stops them from generating more capital.

Is capitalism really succeeding? More than 10,000,000 people die from capitalism every year mostly by starvation but also from lack of access to healthcare and capitalist caused global warming. But that's how capitalism works, building wealth for the few at the cost of the many.

The USSR did not fail in the way that you think. It succeeded in improving the lives of the majority of its citizens. In a couple decades, it turned a largely peasant agrarian population into a global superpower that beat the USA to space. I'm not saying it was all good, but I don't think it was significantly worse than it is here.

More importantly, socialism isn't the goal. Communism is the goal and socialism is a way to get there. Just like capitalism, it can take many forms, some more pleasant than others. But I'm trying to fight for a world where you don't need a salary that will get in the way of your morals.

I think your analogy is pretty apt. The conductor wants to go fast. When we have functioning brakes, we manage to keep the train at a reasonable speed. But running the engine hard while the brakes are engaged means you're squealing the entire way and destroying the brakes in the process. Eventually they wear down and the conductor gets to run off the tracks. I personally don't want to be at the whim of a mad conductor. I would rather the people take control of the train so we can pool our knowledge to watching the tracks and adjusting our speed to stay on them.

Well maybe right now we're speeding down the tracks and even if we take control we're heading straight for a cliff. Then I say it's time to stop the train so we can build a bridge.

I agree. What the US have got isn't classical Capitalism - it's Corporatism, which is pretty much the diametrical opposite. I have zero problem with people taking a risk and benefiting from getting it right, particularly if they reinvest all the proceeds in performing solid R&D, creating new products to address real problems and / or create jobs. So long as they pay their fair share of taxes. And their fucking employees.

Instead, what we've got is people who - unlike actual capitalists - do not want honest competition. What they ideally desire is a monopoly, or, failing that, a cartel. Both virulently anti-capitalistic notions. In fact, what they really want in extremis, is for the State to be a corporation: Democracy annulled in favor of a Board of Directors telling everybody else what, when and how to do anything and everything. And there's a word for that kind of central planning: It's Communism (except, to be fair, ideally in a Communistic system the citizenry would be staffing the committee, not the owners - that's never what actually happens though).

Edit: Heh. People really don't have a counterargument to offer. Only downvotes. Pathetic.

Maybe you should go and learn what capitalism really is, and why that isn't what you currently have. While you're at it, look into what 'corporations' originally were and how they were meant to function (and, importantly, cease to function). Then contrast that with what you're calling corporations these days. It'll be instructive, I promise.

You might want to read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' (which kept me sleepless for days on end) or, you know, any book really.

No, it is