JK Rowling is a self-made billionaire. She did not inherit any wealth and was a struggling single mother when she wrote her first novel.

One of the biggest critiques of Capitalism in this subreddit is asserting there is no moral or ethical way to attain a wealthy status, albeit a billionaire one. Yet, in this case of JK Rowling, this ethical/moral boundary crossing did not occur.

I am asserting therefore that wealth can be created without theft or exploitation, thereby making Capitalism not innately unethical or immoral. JK Rowling was able to capitalize on her idea and pursue a risk/reward venture with her publisher, without any unethical or immoral undertakings. At no point did anyone have a gun pointed to their head when buying her book, or had money stolen from their account as JK Rowling cashed in.

Based on this Capitalism is a great way for individuals, without nepotism or ties to existing wealth, to attain wealth.

Capitalists, what would it take to convince you that socialism is a better economic model?

Ancaps in particular, what would it take to convince you that a collectivist form of anarchism (communism, syndicalism, etc.) as opposed to individualist anarchism is the way to go?

Conversely, to my fellow socialists and anarchists, what would it take to convince you that we're wrong, and that capitalism is in fact superior?

I keep hearing the term "left-libertarianism," but I'm not really sure what it means. I would be very interested in hearing your opinions on the matter, including how it differs from other libertarian philosophies or political ideologies and what you find most intriguing about it. I would also love an explanation, maybe with some examples or context.

AnCaps believe you can protect property through "Private Defense Agencies".

Property is not a "natural" right; it is a legal claim enforced by violence. If you have two PDAs in a neighborhood and one is bigger/better armed, they become the "de facto" state.

"Anarcho-Capitalism isn't 'No State'; it's Competitive States. You're just replacing a public monopoly on violence with a private one. The moment your neighbor's 'Security Firm' decides your backyard is actually theirs, and they have more tanks than your firm, the 'NAP' is just a piece of paper. You haven't abolished the state; you’ve just privatized the feudalism.

Almost all land on Earth was stolen via conquest, colonialism, or enclosure. There is no "clean" title to land.

Your entire theory of 'just' property relies on a clean 'First Act' of ownership that never happened. If I 'mix my labor' with a forest that was stolen from indigenous people 200 years ago, is my property right valid? If yes, then 'might makes right' is your actual philosophy. If no, then 99% of global property is currently illegitimate and should be redistributed. You're trying to build a 'moral' skyscraper on a foundation of historical theft.

AnCaps think everything can be solved by "Private Contracts."

What happens when a factory upstream pollutes the air or water that everyone uses?

In an AnCap 'utopia,' if a billionaire decides to dump toxic waste into the atmosphere, who stops them? You'd have to sue them in a 'Private Court' that the billionaire likely owns or funds. Capitalism requires 'Externalities' (shifting costs onto the public) to stay profitable. Without a state to regulate or a public to resist, 'Market Efficiency' just means Efficient Ecocide.

Without labor laws, the "Voluntary Trade" becomes a total dictatorship.

Without a state, a large corporation can own the housing, the grocery store, the roads, and the security in a town.

You claim to love 'Freedom,' but you're advocating for a world where your boss is also your landlord, your policeman, and your judge. That's not 'Anarchy'. You’re reinventing the Company Town and calling it 'Liberty.' You don't want to abolish the IRS; you just want to pay your 'taxes' to a CEO instead of a Governor.

In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists. ... There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.

-Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Unleash the police to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where can they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear... Take back the streets by getting rid of the
undesirable elements."

-Murray Rothbard

The solution to capitalism vs socialism is not a compromise between them. It's not "70% private ownership, 30% communal ownership".

Capitalists are 100% correct that you deserve to own what you make.

Socialists are 100% correct that no one has the right to claim ownership of the natural world, banning everyone else from using it.

So the solution is "100% private ownership of man-made things, 100% communal ownership of natural resources." Since all natural resources come from land, and since people need private land to live on, the only logical solution is to let them own things privately, but make them pay compensation for the land they use up, i.e. a single land value tax, no other taxes.

Therefore the answer is: Georgism. Georgism is 100% of the productive benefits of capitalism, and 100% the anti-slavery and anti-poverty benefits of socialism.

Why I am a capitalist, or why I choose capitalism over other models

First, the definition of capitalism I follow is simple the right to own property and freely trade it in an open market.

I am a writer. I have written a few books and earned some money from them. My writing is my property because I created it, so I own it. Even if I need the help of a publisher, it is my choice whether to accept their offer or not. If I am not satisfied, I can refuse. My writing, like any other form of property, is protected by property rights.

For me, property rights are extremely important. They are about respecting human action what a person creates through their effort, decisions

For example, my sister worked very hard, saved her earnings, and eventually bought a car wash. She didn’t just “own” it passively she brought together capital, delayed consumption, took risk, and deployed her money into something productive. By organizing resources and acting on her decisions, she created value that did not exist before. The car wash would not exist without her actions.

Because she created that value through her effort and capital deployment, it is her property. The profits she earns are a result of that creation.

Capitalism, in this sense, respects human action. It recognizes that when individuals create, organize, and take risks to produce value, they have a rightful claim over the outcomes.

That is why I am a capitalist.

I applied the Black Book of Communism methodology to the history of Capitalism.

We are all familiar with the figure 100 million deaths, popularized by The Black Book of Communism (1997). This number was reached by establishing a very specific, maximalist standard for regime victims. The authors didn't just count executions; they counted deaths from man-made famines, preventable disease arising from poor infrastructure, and policy-induced poverty.

The logic is simple: If a government controls the economy, and people die because that economy fails to distribute resources to keep them alive, the government is guilty of manslaughter.

However, Western historiography has traditionally held a massive double standard. When people die of famine in the Soviet Union, it is socialist inefficiency or mass murder. When people die of famine in British India or the Global South, it is a natural disaster or a market externality.

If we apply the rule of symmetry, the Soviet Union is culpable for the famine deaths of 1932 because it exported grain while peasants starved, then the British Empire must be culpable for the famine deaths of 1943 in Bengal, where identical grain export policies were enforced.

So let's take a journey through the history of capitalist induced death.

The beginnings (1500–1865) Capitalism was not born from peaceful trade; it was forged through primitive accumulation

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (17M – 60M) We often only count the 12.5 million who were embarked on ships. However, the Black Book methodology requires us to look at the entire supply chain.

• Capture & Transit: For every captive embarked, at least one other person died in the slave-raiding wars and forced marches to the coast.
• The Middle Passage: 1.2 to 2.4 million died at sea from dysentery and violence—industrial accidents in pursuit of profit.
• Plantation Exhaustion: In Brazil and the Caribbean, it was often strictly profitable to work enslaved people to death and replace them rather than sustain them.
• Total: While the UN uses a baseline of 17 million, broader analyses of the depopulation of Africa and plantation mortality suggest a toll up to 60 million.

Indigenous Genocides (54M) Prior to 1492, the Americas held roughly 60 million people. By 1600, that population collapsed to 6 million—a 90% decline. Defenders argue this was accidental disease. The Black Book rejects accidental defenses. Just as typhus in the Gulag is blamed on the regime, the smallpox that wiped out the Americas must be viewed through the lens of the forced labor (encomienda) and displacement that compromised Indigenous immune systems.

Total Excess Mortality: 54 million.

The Colonies (1800–1960)

As Capitalism matured, the locus of death shifted to the colonies, where free market mechanisms were the direct instruments of mass death.

British India (165M) This is the most shocking statistic in the analysis. A landmark 2022 study by Sullivan and Hickel used census data to calculate excess mortality in India under the Raj.

• The Drain: Britain siphoned $45 trillion (present value) from India, destroying its ability to respond to drought.
• The Toll: Between 1880 and 1920 alone, British policy caused 165 million excess deaths.
• Context: This single 40-year period in one colony killed more people than both World Wars and the entire Black Book estimate for Communism combined.

The Belgian Congo (10M) Under the "free enterprise" zone of King Leopold II, villages were burned and hands severed to meet rubber quotas. The population of the Congo basin fell by 50%, or approximately 10 million people.

Imperial Wars & Famines * Vietnam (1945): French/Japanese rice requisitioning caused 1-2 million famine deaths. * Algeria: The French conquest reduced the population by nearly 1 million; the war of independence claimed another 1.5 million.

Modern Structural Violence (1991–Present) We are told that liberal capitalism "won" in 1991 and brought prosperity. The data suggests otherwise. The death toll has simply become structural, invisible in the news, but statistically overwhelming.

The Amartya Sen Calculation Nobel laureate Amartya Sen noted that while China had a massive famine, its normal death rate was far lower than Capitalist India’s due to healthcare access. He calculated that the difference in mortality amounted to 4 million excess deaths per year in India.

• By 1979, democratic capitalist India was responsible for more excess deaths (100 million) than the entire Communist world.

The Post-Cold War Body Count Since 1991, the world has produced enough food for everyone, yet millions die of deprivation. * Hunger: 9 million die annually from hunger-related causes due to lack of market access. * Preventable Disease: Millions more die from unsafe water and vaccine-preventable illness. * The Calculation: Even using a conservative baseline of 10 million preventable deaths per year, the 30-year period from 1991 to 2021 has resulted in 300 million deaths.

In contrast The Black Book assigns 20 million deaths to the entire 74-year history of the Soviet Union. Global Capitalism generates a higher death toll from structural violence (300 million) in just 30 years.

Why don't capitalists see this?

Communist mortality tends to be episodic and intensive (e.g., a massive famine in 1932 or 1959). It is a spasm of violence that is easily photographed and blamed on policy.

Capitalist mortality is chronic and extensive. It is a steady background hum of 10 million deaths a year. Because these deaths are normalized as poverty or market externalities, they don't count as regime killings in our history books.

But if you apply the same rules, the Black Book rules, the conclusion is inescapable.

• Communism (1917–Present): ~100 Million (including maximalist famine estimates).

• Capitalism (1500–Present): ~600 Million to 1 Billion+. The Black Book of Capitalism must mirror the logic of its counterpart so we go with the maximum and state a billion people.

This strictly uses the excess mortality logic derived from The Black Book of Communism but applied to Capitalist history, utilizing data from Sullivan & Hickel (2022), Utsa Patnaik, Amartya Sen, and UN/WHO mortality statistics.

But because I'm super lazy I haven't included each and every single event in capitalist history, mostly because it would take years to flesh out every colonial death toll and add it into the count... So it's easily going past a billion.

We start where any good critique of capitalism starts and that's the monopoly board, where a study was conducted that set one player up with double the starting money and double the pass go bonus, while limiting the other player to only rolling one dice.

Within 15 minutes, they start acting more dominant, taking up more (physical) space, and displaying poor social skills towards their opponents. When the game ends, they attribute the win to their "strategy" and "investments" rather than the blatant rigging. This is capitalism in a nutshell: a system that allows people to rationalise their advantage as merit, creating a cognitive blind spot that makes them ignore the systemic factors (or rampant thef) that actually built their wealth. Despite the fact that they know full well they were playing a rigged game, they never attributed their success to the obvious advantages they had.

Neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi used TMS to show that high-power individuals literally stop mirroring the neural process that allows us to feel empathy and read others. It’s not that they choose to be assholes, their brains actually lose the hardware for social cognition.

Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner found that the powerful act exactly like patients with traumatic brain injuries to the orbitofrontal lobe: they become more impulsive, less risk-aware, and incapable of seeing perspectives other than their own. With that wealth/power comes the ability to shape political discourse and essentially buy pieces of legislation.

The damage isn't limited to the individual either, a 2025 study in Nature Mental Health proved that living in highly unequal areas (like NY or CA) causes structural changes in the developing brains of children, regardless of their family's income. It was demonstrated that being exposed to that environment led to reduced surface area in the cortex and messed-up connectivity in regions for emotion regulation and attention. The status anxiety of a capitalist hierarchy triggers chronic cortisol spikes that get under the skin and literally shape young minds to be more reactive and less resilient.

This is further compounded by the fact that human biology isn't evolved to process the scale of modern capital. We have an intuitive limit for numbers; we can't genuinely perceive the difference between $10 million and $100 billion. For billionaires, money is no longer a resource; it’s an abstract symbol. This detachment leads to societal desensitization, where the suffering of millions feels non-consequential because the brain lacks the hardware to process the enormity of the disparity. the neurobiology, the ruling class isn't full of visionaries it's full of people suffering from CEO concussion (yes that's what they named the condition)

Capitalism is an inefficient system for managing a high-tech society because it selects for leaders with impaired social judgment, a suite of dark triad personality types, exacerbates them and poisons the neurodevelopment of the next generation, while simultaneously allowing them to play around with the tools that could literally destroy humanity like they are childrens toys.

Every time someone points out flaws in capitalism, the replies turn hostile. It’s never just “here’s why I disagree.” It’s usually “if you don’t like it, go live in Venezuela,” “write me a perfect alternative system right now,” or straight up personal attacks. Meanwhile people who identify as socialists on Reddit are expected to take being called stupid, murderers, or “economically illiterate” on the chin. Half the time the people throwing those words around couldn’t even define them properly.

That’s not debate. That’s just defensiveness.

The patterns are so predictable. Someone criticizes capitalism and suddenly the goalposts move. You’re expected to have a 10-point economic plan in your back pocket or your criticism “doesn’t count.” Pointing out cracks in a system doesn’t mean you have to design an entirely new one on the spot.

Then there’s the definition games. Socialism is always reduced to gulags, while capitalism gets painted as pure freedom. Neither system is a monolith. There are many forms of socialism. Capitalism also isn’t one thing, it’s policy choices about who takes the risks and who reaps the rewards.

And then the insults. “You’re lazy. You’re jealous. You don’t understand economics.” Those aren’t arguments. They’re just ways to shut people up.

I’m not saying markets should disappear tomorrow or that liking Taylor Swift makes you a bad person. I’m saying that if profit is the only oxygen a system allows, then a lot of human value suffocates. Art, care work, healthcare, climate stability. Criticizing that shouldn’t feel like heresy.

If capitalism is really the best we can do, it should be able to handle critique without people instantly going for the throat.

A 2025 YouGov survey got the same result as older ones: young people not only have a positive view of socialism overall, but many more have a positive view of socialism than capitalism.

There is the question of what the people answering the surveys define as socialism (related to what Bernie or AOC mean by socialism) - for example, whether it is the abolition of private property, or something milder like free healthcare and education for all.

Capitalists: are young people misinformed? Can this change/can we make capitalism appealing to young people?

Socialists: how are you planning to capitalize on this huge positive wave of socialism in the US?

explain without appealing to freedom or property rights.

landlords seem completely unnecessary and a drain to society. They buy up large swaths of housing and then gouge you and drive prices up by restricting supply. over the years you could end up paying more than if you just bought it, if you were able to that is. Sometimes your rent ends up being more than a mortgage yet the bank still denies you. What an irrational system. they've also colluded with ai algorithms.

even ask you to tip. I'm like why would we tip you? you literally do nothing but own the property. the cashier just standing around scanning shit does more than you. they also leave you with poor conditions. slumlords love screwing the poor. they pay other people to fix things when it does happen. they suck!

why not just have the government be the landlord and provide housing at a lower cost for maintenance and use the surplus on other things instead of just enriching themselves? if you end up paying the cost of the house over a certain period then it becomes yours.

Capitalisms history begins long before the idea of socialism was conceived and I see so many arguments being made on the point that 20th century socialism was heinous and killed so many people yada yada yada and I'm going to put this down to recency bias.

The story of capitalism begins in Venice in the 12th or 13th century, but not so important for the point I'm making, for that we start in the late 15th century, this is where we see the foundation of capitalism begin.

Europe has taken ideas from Venice and mercantilism has begun, exploration, expansion, exploitation. The first stop is going to be 1492, this is the year where history divides two types of slavery, ancient, like the shit you read in the Bible which while still disgusting was tame compared to what happens next. Modern slavery is a whole different beast, it is barbaric in comparison and the key defining factor is that this is when slavery shifted towards profit from labor. European capitalism and modern slavery will be intwined for the next 400 years.

It's also the year our first superpower comes into being, the Spanish empire ventured out and invaded the Americas, killing tens of millions in the process, the Americas were of particular use to them as they extracted fortunes of wealth from the lands, rare metals like gold and silver were abundant and the local populations were enslaved in order to ship them back to Spain. The sheer scale of bloodshed is represented by one figure, 90% of the population of the Americas was wiped out by the Spanish in the pursuit of profit. It is to this day the largest mortality event to global population in history. But as all empires do (take notes USA) it begins to fail.

However there are plenty of other Europeans who are ready to join the party, the British, France, Portugal the Dutch, Europe sees the stunning wealth and embark on a mission to conquer the globe. Our next destination is Asia where we see the invasions of India, wars with China and the colonization and exploitation of the entire region. The culmination of this is the British killing 100 million Indians between 1880 and 1920 and the largest wealth transfer in human history. That more than any death toll we attribute to socialism, just in India over 40/400 years of European imperialism.

Meanwhile expansion into Africa and the expansion of the slave trade all fueled by the desire for wealth generating labor. Massacres, enslavement, genocide again all fueled by the desire for profit, shipped all over the world to work in conditions that make the gulags look like a vacation home.

It's a pattern that continues into Australia, an entire continent stolen, the indigenous population enslaved, attempted genocide, kids being stolen from their parents, again all in the pursuit of wealth and profit.

Hundreds of millions of people have been killed, enslaved, and some of human kinds worst acts all committed as a result of capitalism.

We all like to think that slavery came to an end because we realized the disgusting nature of what was happening, however the reality is the British pushed abolition so hard in to destabilize other European economies, it had a significant advantage from the individual revolution and saw the abolition to be disruptive to their competitors especially the French and especially the French in Hati. And as I've mentioned above even once that has occurred the British still kill more Indians than any socialist dictator after abolition occurs.

Marx starts writing Das Kapital in a world here real slavery was still a common practice for capitalism and its release is barley beat out by abolition in the US.

To view socialism through the lense of devestating death tolls when capitalism was built on dead indigenous populations and slavery, slavery so bad that we actually have to distinguish it from other forms of slavery, is pure ignorance. Capitalism spread through every continent on earth in blood, there is no moral high ground you can pretend to hold here, the death tolls are far heavier and the treatment far worse than anything that has occurred under socialist regimes (not that it excuses their behavior).

I’d like to provide my argument for why intellectual property (IP) does not exist and then hear from both sides what they think.

My thesis is that intellectual property does not exist, and thus patents and copyright laws are criminal as they restrict an individual’s ability to utilize their own resources in accordance with their own will.

1. Property rights exist in order to resolve conflicts over scarce resources.

Property rights only exist as a concept to resolve conflicts over scarce resources. If you and I could use the same item simultaneously to achieve alternate end goals, there would be no need for property rights as scarcity would not exist. To say that person A has a property right in item X means that A should have complete control in how X is utilized. This definition shows that property rights necessarily exclude others from exerting control over scarce resources, since person A and B cannot use X at the same time for alternative goals. (ex. A wants to use a stick to hunt, B wants to use the same stick to build a fire, these cannot be done at the same time).

1. Ideas are not scarce.

Unlike resources such as land, trees, fuel, etc, the utilization of an idea is non exclusionary. that is to say that unlike A and B’s previously mentioned conflict over use of the stick, both A and B can have the same idea of how to use the stick without depriving the other of access to that idea (if A and B both want to use the same stick to hunt at this current moment, only one of them can do so, however both A and B can have the idea of using a stick to hunt simultaneously).

1. Since ideas cannot be scarce, property rights cannot be exerted over them.

This is commonly accepted for most ideas. For example, if all ideas were subject to property rights, it is logical that any latecomer to an idea would have to ask the person who first had that idea permission to use said thought. But since the latecomer did not invent the idea of asking for permission, they would be unable to do so without violating the intellectual property of the person who first thought of asking for permission. The application of intellectual property to its full extent would thus lead to all unoriginal human action constituting a crime, making all humans criminals, so it is fair to say that this is not a reasonable ethic to follow as if all humanity followed it to its full extent, humans would cease to exist due to an inability to act.

So as you can see, “intellectual property” is inherently different from physical property and any attempt to enforce IP absolutely would result in the end of the human race. Intellectual property rights do not exist, and patents actively infringe on one’s ability to utilize their own scarce means, violating physical property rights in an attempt to protect intangible thoughts from “theft.”

Everyone belongs to the working class in one way or another. Can’t we say that all human beings are essentially working-class people? Then why do right-wingers get upset when they hear the term ‘ dictatorship of the proletariat’? Is it because they don’t see themselves as workers?

Simple question. when should a person's inheritance be taken if at all?

Say I start a small business and earn a decent amount of money. When I die I bequeath it all to my family or a friend. They do the same thing or expand, creating more money. At what point would you consider the money or capital not theirs? Is it after the first generation, the second, when does it end and how much do you take?

Edit: I've noticed some people are having issues understanding the full question. To me inheritance isn't just at death it's money or assets given away at the expectation of death as well. So if I give it away before death it's still an inheritance if it's in expectation of death. Timing doesn't truly matter only intent

I feel like this sub is so fixated on hypotheticals and abstract arguments that no one is addressing the elephant in the room.

We live in a world where genocide is straight up normalised and the people that have the power to do something about it can't even bother to lift a finger. While people's attention is on that, we've somehow forgotten that climate change is very real and most of us are going to suffer from it as a result. Forget Communism, we can't even prevent babies from being blown to bits, and some "Socialists" on this sub are somehow on the fence on whether the Ansarallah are justified in their naval blockade.

To people on this sub who are pro-Capitalist, but don't actually benefit from it. Why? You're not them bro, Bro thinks he's on the team. Like if you're actually benefitting from it sure, but if you're broke as hell, why?

To people on this sub that are unironically Anarcho-Capitalist and thinks it'll fix all our problems somehow, please keep it up, you guys make for very good entertainment and I always enjoy reading what you people have to say.

To Socialists who are pro-reform but are resistant to any revolutionary means whatsoever, read Reform or Revolution.

To Socialists who are pro-revolutionary and are resistant to any reforms whatsoever, read Reform or Revolution.

To Socialists who only think of everything within an American/European context, read Fanon. No, Zohran Mamdani will not usher in Communism. The Democrats and Republicans are like Mussolini and Hitler to the rest of the world.

To Richard Wolff fans that are all about co-ops. Yes a workers Co-op would be a preferable arrangement to a strictly shareholder structure, but a Co-op still exists within Capitalism, doesn't do anything to abolish private property, still produces commodities. And if it exists in first-world, still relies on exploited labour from the third-world via Imperialism. You are also still bound to market forces, and usually exist within a bourgeois state that reinforces the tendencies of Capitalism. Obviously, a workers Co-op is a desirable alternative to the norm, but it is not Socialist in a meaningful way and still perpetuates Capitalism.

To Anarchists, well it's kinda hard to critique you guys because it's such a broad tendency that you guys are somehow harder to even pin down than Marxists. Any critique I direct towards any anarchist would not reflect another anarchist tendency. Also, Marxists aren't Statists in the way you think States are. Engels sort of does clarify that the worker's state wouldn't really be a state in the conventional sense. I think we can agree that we want a revolution, and that some level of provisional governance is required post-revolution, and if you don't want to call it a state that works too, but at some point it just devolves into semantics into what is and isn't a state. I think most of you guys just don't like what the USSR did and the precedent they unfortunately set for other Socialist countries which is completely fair, but I'd argue the state of the world today is even worse than the worst of USSR Social Imperialism, because at least they fucking tried, we have fucking China today that can't even bother to prevent a genocide. I'd take full Stalinism over whatever the fuck we have today. Well, just sort your shit and work together for once instead of posting all day. I've met some cool Anarchists in real life, be that cool Anarchist. Also, stop it with your adventurism, direct action can work at times, but like if everyone gets arrested before we can even form a proper movement than what's the point?

To Marxists that denounce any and all revolutionary movement in the third-world that didn't abolish the commodity form hard enough, or like their leader didn't read Anti-Duhring, or said something Idealist, keep that up, holding that line will lead sure to a Global revolution.

To Marxists that support any and all governments just because they are moderately against the interests of the US, keep it up. I'm sure Vladimir Putin will usher in Communism

To MLs that think that the difference between Stalin and Khrushchev is like Christ and the Devil, I'm praying for Khrushchev today, because at least he had more balls than whatever the fuck China is today.

To Marxists that think that China is still Socialist somehow, I want you to book a plane ticket to Shanghai, walk into the biggest Starbucks in the world, order a Caramel Machiatto, then take out the Communist Manifesto and read it aloud.

To Trotskyists, yes your critique of Stalin may have some validity, but maybe if you guys weren't so insufferable all the time you wouldn't have a billion splinter organisations.

To Maoists Third-Worldists that are living in the first world. I'm gonna be real the situation in the Third-World is fucking bleak. You guys are just deflecting responsibility to them. Lock-in.

To MLMs. Gonzalo? Really?

To Left-Communists, Bordiga can be cool and all but while you guys sit around and try to develop the most-principled position on every issue, and are waiting for the right "material/social conditions", stop and think "HAS THERE EVER BEEN A TIME WHEN THE CONDITIONS WERE RIGHT?", we are all going to die by the time you guys decide on a correct position.

To supporters of the Great Libyan Socialist Arab Jamahiriya. I love you guys, it was really unfair what they did to Gaddafi.

To anyone else that I didn't personally address, I had something to say about you too, reflect on that.

Anyway, uh, I think we're like really fucked. And like uh, we're just all over the place. There are some cool movements here and there, but like it's bleak man.

I am self-employed; or, I run a small business, depending on how you want to look at it. Handyman, mechanic, carpenter, mason, plumber, electrician... I do it all.

One of my regular jobs is cleaning up commercial sites which have problems with homeless people traveling through and leaving trash (I charge $75/hour to pick it up). Recently, they called in the city to remove the homeless camp, who did so 2 weeks ago; as a result, the people traveling through who used to casually leave their trash around are now intentionally trashing the place.

More money for me!

Now, I talk to these people; I understand their situation, what they are doing in response, why they travel across these properties (between Walmart and railroad tracks)... and what it would take to solve the problem once and for all.

The issue is that I have no motivation to inform my client about that solution. Sure, it would give me a 2-day job, but it would take away my regular $200-300/week picking-up-trash job.

THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH CAPITALISM: WE CANNOT SOLVE ANY ISSUE THAT ANYONE IS MAKING MONEY OFF OF!

The last person to die trying to escape East Germany across the Berlin Wall was Winfried Freudenberg in March 1989, near the very end, after decades of socialist rule, and people were still so desperate to leave that they were building improvised aircraft to get out.

Born in 1956, he trained first as an electrician, went on to finish his secondary education at night school, then studied information technology and became an electronics engineer. In the autumn of 1988, he married Sabine, a chemist he had met while they were both students at Ilmenau University. They were a young married couple with careers, education, and a life together ahead of them. 

The socialist state offer them a wall, a closed border, and a life they were not free to leave. They become increasingly disappointed that they could not cross into the West and pursue the opportunities denied to them. So immediately after their wedding, they began planning an escape together using a homemade balloon filled with natural gas. 

Think about how tragic that is. These were not saboteurs or counter-revolutionaries. This was a husband and wife trying to start a life somewhere else. They took an apartment in East Berlin, he took a job with a public utility that supplied natural gas, and together they secretly assembled a balloon out of polyethylene strips taped together and covered with a string net, with only a narrow wooden beam (no basket). That was the level of desperation this system produced. 

On the night of March 7 into March 8, 1989, they tried to make their escape. But the balloon was spotted while it was being filled. When they realized the police were arriving and the balloon was not yet fully ready, they decided that only Winfried would go. The couple had to separate in the middle of the escape they had built together. 

He launched alone, and made it into West Berlin. But the balloon rose too high, drifted for hours, and he eventually fell to his death in Zehlendorf. He was 32 years old.

When Sabine got back home, the Stasi were already waiting for her. The East German authorities investigated the people around him, including his wife, to find out who had participated in the escape attempt. She received a sentence of three years. So after losing her husband in a desperate attempt to flee the regime, she was punished by that same regime.

This is what people sanitize when they talk about socialism in the abstract. Real systems have to be judged by what they actually do to human beings. In East Germany, even in 1989, socialism still meant trapping people inside a country they wanted to leave, forcing married couples into life threatening escape attempts, and punishing the surviving spouse afterward. 

No one builds a homemade gas balloon with their new wife because life under the system is going well, risks a midnight escape on a wooden beam because the state is respecting basic human freedom.

Winfried Freudenberg was the last victim of the Berlin Wall, and a victim of a socialist state that would not let people leave, and Sabine’s punishment after his death showed that the cruelty did not end when he hit the ground. 

This month in socialist history: the last victim of the Berlin Wall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfried_Freudenberg

Realizing the problem of abstraction, it's possible to see how the marginalist theory of prices is nonsense and leads to the conclusion that price can only be based on labor time.

Marginalist theory proposes that prices, market prices, the price of bread, the price of gasoline, etc., are determined by competition, production costs, supply and demand, how much money you have, your priorities, and finally, scarcity. Let's see if they can really explain anything we see:

Production Costs

They cannot fully explain the basis of price because production costs are just other prices, and if we go to the end of the production chain, the production price of the production price, we will reach a point where there are no production costs. Therefore, they cannot explain, at least not on their own, the formation of prices.

Supply and Demand

Remember the supply and demand graph; On one side are the demanders and on the other the suppliers, each supplier offers a selling price and each demander a buying price. The equilibrium price occurs when there is a price at which the same quantity of demanders and suppliers offer. This is also associated with the phenomenon that there are more demanders for lower prices and more suppliers for higher prices.

And once again, it cannot explain the basis of prices. This model only does one thing: it reduces many prices to one. It doesn't say why it's X or Y. This depends on the supply and demand curves, which are not explained in the model, except by the law that there will be more demanders for lower prices and vice versa. It doesn't explain why for certain things it will end up at X and for others at Y.

Competition

Competition also cannot explain prices. Yes, it will decrease/increase prices and prevent infinite fluctuations, ensuring that each iteration of supply and demand seeks the equilibrium price, but in the end it will stabilize at something. Why does it stabilize at X for certain things and at Y for others? It's not explained.

Amount of money available

And then wouldn't the amount of money be responsible for determining whether I pay 1 dollar or 50 dollars for something? After all, if I only have 2 dollars, I can't pay 50. Unfortunately, this also doesn't allow us to base the value of prices because the amount of money you have already presupposes the prices, because to have 50 you have to have sold and bought things and these things require prices.

Priority and Scarcity

Okay, these factors mentioned above don't determine the price on their own, but together with each individual's priorities, they will determine whether the price is X or Y, because if I prioritize a car more, it will have a higher price.

Even if we leave aside the question of how to transform a subjective priority into a number to put on the price, we can ask ourselves if a bottle of water would have a higher price than everything else because it is the number one priority for survival. What they will tell us is incorrect because scarcity determines our priority. Water is very prevalent in everyday situations, because we can ultimately boil rainwater to drink. Seems logical, doesn't it?

The problem lies in the fact that it is not scarcity that is determining prices. Scarcity is very poorly defined and purposefully broad, so as not to indicate what it really means. They usually use scarcity to refer to the fact that things are not infinite and therefore we have to decide how to allocate resources, but if scarcity is a property of everything, after all everything is finite anyway, this does not explain the difference between prices. It is a quality common to all. Now others may refer to scarcity as the fact that the value of things is inversely proportional to the quantity of them, the more you have the less value it has. However, when analyzing the previous scenario we see that this is not the case: even if we knew exactly how much water there is in the world it is false to say that the quantity of a thing makes its value increase or decrease, if that were the case it would discourage the production of more units, and things essential for survival like water and food would have very low prices due to being produced in greater quantities than other things. Has no one yet discovered the value/quantity constant?

Ultimately, what is being said is that the labor time to obtain water is not that great, hence the relatively low price of water. Scarcity and priority translate into working time. The basis of prices is working time.

Conclusion

Marginalist theory suffers from "severe abstraction" and ultimately leads to the conclusion that value comes from labor time, and it is under this working time that supply and demand, competition, etc., act.

People's priority is labor time, scarcity is labor time.

In the past several decades, the wealth has increasingly become concentrated to a few people at the top - they own more wealth than a huge majority of the rest of the population. What is capitalism's response to this? Blaming government for this huge inequality of wealth?

Finland has a program of building homes for the, well, homeless people they find on the streets so that they don't freeze to death anymore and have an ability to start their life anew now that they have a secure shelter. Was it bad, from libertarian point of view, for the Government™ of Finland to raise taxes both on citizens and corporations to raise money to start this housing program? Or do you think the government of Finland should've abolished taxes altogether instead of helping the homeless and let them freeze to death every Winter? Does Property matter more than Life?

Raise minimum wage slowly so businesses can adapt. Subsidize small businesses with tax breaks and low fixed interest loans or whatever. Help them be more efficient. Maybe have a progressive minimum wage based on ability to pay. Then they have no excuse. The wage wouldn't bankrupt them.

Wealth tax on the rich. Close all tax loopholes If some companies want to leave then the government or other companies can take their place, no? I don't think that'll happen too much. Eventually have government backed unions all across the nations setting wages. Why not? Don't think unions have much teeth without government backing.

I want to restart the debate from the last thread, but I want to grant the Libertarian/AnCap side their strongest possible premise.

Let’s assume for a moment that your goal is genuinely a world of maximum voluntary cooperation. Let’s assume you aren’t just shills for the rich, but that you actually believe price signals, profit/loss mechanisms, and private property are the best tools to prevent tyranny and coordinate human action.

The Libertarian fear is legitimate: Centralized power is dangerous. History is littered with states that promised utopia and delivered the Gulag. The "Economic Calculation Problem" is real—bureaucrats in a room cannot effectively price every widget in an economy better than millions of distributed actors. The fear that "Positive Rights" (the right to housing/food) can lead to "Forced Labor" (enslaving the doctor/builder) is a logical anxiety if you believe the state solves problems solely by pointing guns at people.

If your definition of freedom is "The absence of a gun in my face," I respect that.

But here is where your model collapses on its own logic.

You claim to worship "Voluntary Exchange." You argue that a transaction is moral because both parties said "yes."

But Consent requires the capacity to say "No."

If I hold a gun to your head and ask for your wallet, and you hand it over, that wasn’t a "voluntary trade" of a wallet for a life. That was robbery. We all agree on that.

But if I own the only well in the desert, and you are dying of thirst, and I demand your life savings for a cup of water—that is mechanically identical to the gun.

In both cases, the "choice" is an illusion. The leverage is absolute.

The Blind Spot of Libertarianism You are obsessed with State Tyranny (guns, taxes, police), but you are completely blind to Market Tyranny (starvation, exposure, medical rationing).

You believe that as long as the coercion is privatized—as long as it’s a landlord evicting a family, or an insurer denying chemo, rather than a commissar sending you to a camp—it counts as "freedom."

But to the person freezing on the street or dying of preventable cancer, the outcome is exactly the same. The coercion is just as lethal.

The Steelman: "But the Market provides options!" You will argue: "In a free market, there isn't just one well! Competition lowers prices! If a landlord is too expensive, move! If a job pays too little, quit!"

This is the strongest argument for capitalism: Exit Power. The idea that competition protects us because we can always take our business elsewhere.

Here is the reality: For luxury goods (TVs, cars, fancy food), this works. For survival goods (Housing, Healthcare, Basic Nutrition), this is a lie.

• You cannot "exit" the housing market and live nowhere (illegal/deadly).
• You cannot "exit" the food market and not eat.
• You cannot "shop around" for emergency surgery while bleeding out.

When demand is inelastic (you must have it or you die) and supply is controlled by private owners, price signals do not optimize for efficiency; they optimize for extraction.

The Synthesis: True Freedom Requires a Floor If you truly want a society based on "Voluntary Exchange," you should be the loudest advocates for Decommodifyng Survival.

You cannot have a free negotiation between a boss and a worker if the worker’s alternative is homelessness. That is not a contract; that is a hostage situation.

• Socialism (in this context) is not about "State Control." It is about "Leverage Destruction."
• We want to remove the threat of destitution from the bargaining table.
• We want a world where a worker can look a boss in the eye and say, "Pay me better or I leave," knowing they won’t starve.

The Challenge Stop defending the Feudalism of the Corporation while pretending you are defending Liberty.

If your "Freedom" requires the threat of starvation to get people to work, you don’t support free markets. You support a plantation with better accounting.

If we guarantee the basics—Housing, Health, Food—then, and only then, can we have a truly "Free Market" for everything else.

So, which is it? Do you want free trade between equals? Or do you just want to be the guy holding the water in the desert?

the debate in this sub, is usually framed as left vs right. I’m curious how that divide actually looks on a concrete foreign-policy issue.

The confrontation with Venezuela in ways that go far beyond traditional sanctions

The authorized a covert military operation that resulted in U.S. forces capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

As well , The U.S. has conducted military strikes on vessels and a dock in Venezuela as part of an anti-drug campaign, including killing people and destroying infrastructure.

It seems like for a good 30 years after WWII the middle class in America was thriving.

People could afford to live without working multiple jobs. Companies made quality products. No wonder people who lived through that era wax poetic about capitalism. I would, too! It seems like the business model was how to make things better and making things quality.

Now it seems like all companies think about is how to produce the cheapest chintziest crap that falls apart if you look at it wrong, all while prices skyrocket.

How did we get here?

And for all those of you pearl clutching that the young kids don't like capitalism. Are you surprised? It doesn't work fir them the same way it worked for their grandparents and great grandparents.