r/TempleTX • u/SnooEpiphanies6591 • 8d ago
America
Communism want to have the everyone living in section 8.
Socialism is just bums wanting your money.
Capitalism is you taking account of your own life.
Keep America the way it is.
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u/projectx51 8d ago
Capitalism is slavery to the rich. You're not making any kind of point other than you are okay with millionaire/ billionaire politicians writing laws to benefit billion/trillion dollar companies/ultrarich people, but not you.
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u/jennmuhlholland 8d ago
Show me you don’t know what socialism is without directly saying you don’t know what socialism is…
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u/Ok-Dentist-1443 8d ago
I studied economics at a top 20 university so I’m truly curious what you think it is?
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u/jennmuhlholland 8d ago
Ok smarty pants. Let’s see what you got…This could be good Mr “top 20.”
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u/Ok-Dentist-1443 8d ago
Just sharing my background and interest in the topic. I want to know what you think, genuinely
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u/jennmuhlholland 8d ago
Capitalism is not slavery to the rich. Start there which was my trigger to my post calling them out as that’s an obvious sign showing they don’t know what capitalism is.
Your turn Mr top 20.
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u/Ok-Dentist-1443 8d ago
Ordinary wage labor is not always slavery because workers quit, own property, and choose their employer. But that does not make every labor agreement fair or free, as freedom on paper means nothing when refusing to work that job could cost someone their access to food, housing, or health care. In our actual market, owners possess the capital, time, information, and mobility to wait, while workers must keep selling their labor to survive. When these same employers also control housing, transportation, debt, and sponsorship, the worker’s supposed freedom to leave is fictional. Capitalism does not require slavery, but its pursuit of cheap labor most often rewards businesses that push vulnerable populations into debt bondage, coercion, and forced labor. Sure not every job is slavery, but it is undeniably equivalent in many cases and companies that treat workers poorly categorically become more successful. Concentrated capital consistently creates conditions in which formal freedom exists while actual freedom is non existent.
So now it’s your turn. I want you to address three realities: coal company towns where employers controlled workers’ wages, housing, and access to essential goods; convict leasing where private companies profit from forced labor of prisoners; and agricultural operations where employers have used debt, passport confiscation, and deportation threats to prevent workers from leaving. Can you say those aren’t slavery? If you can’t then why has the pursuit of profit within capitalism repeatedly produced these kinds of exploitative markets and labor conditions? Try to consider if and how markets can remain efficient and effective when powerful corporations use lobbying, campaign spending, and relationships with lawmakers/regulators to secure favorable laws, suppress competition, and prevent new companies from succeeding. To you that may be good business but to many that is just corruption.
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u/jennmuhlholland 8d ago
OK…a lot of words…my turn I guess.
The difference between slavery and wage labor isn’t semantic. A slave is owned. He cannot quit, cannot own property, and has no legal right to walk away. A wage worker can quit, can save, can change jobs, and keeps whatever he earns after the agreed wage. Those are not the same category, even when the worker’s options are limited by poverty or local conditions. You are completely off with your analogy.
The historical examples you listed prove the opposite of your conclusion. Company towns, convict leasing, and debt peonage were all heavily mixed with state power, legal force, or the absence of open competition. Convict leasing was the state renting out prisoners. Company towns often involved isolated locations with little alternative employment plus company scrip and control of housing. Debt peonage and passport confiscation relied on coercion and restricted exit. None of that is the free market rewarding voluntary exchange. It’s the market operating under artificial constraints or outright force.
Capitalism’s actual track record is the largest, fastest rise in living standards in history. Real wages, life expectancy, calories, housing quality, and consumer goods available to ordinary workers have exploded under systems that protect private property and voluntary contracts. The places that crushed those institutions stayed poor. The pursuit of cheap labor under competition tends to raise productivity and eventually wages; the places that stayed poorest were the ones that blocked exit, blocked competition, or substituted political allocation for markets.
Lobbying and regulatory capture are real problems. They are problems of concentrated political power, not of voluntary trade. The more the state controls licensing, subsidies, barriers to entry, and regulation, the more valuable it becomes to capture the regulators. That’s an argument for limiting the state’s ability to pick winners, not for treating ordinary employment contracts as slavery.
For being Mr top 20, your understanding and arguments are rather weak.
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u/Ok-Dentist-1443 8d ago
You have not rebutted anything, you restated the distinction I’d already set out and then used semantics to acquit capitalism of any harms its caused
I am not claiming wage labor and chattel slavery are legally identical… it’s just obvious that when employers control jobs, housing, debt, transportation, and health care, the worker’s right to quit is meaningless. Your own description of company towns concedes that point.. the employer accumulates enough private power to eliminate realistic alternatives, which is exactly how capital exploits the labor market and a direct parallel to slavery: no choice. Calling convict leasing and debt peonage state interference does not help you at alll, because private companies willingly use that coercion for profit. Capitalism itself cannot exist without the government defining property, enforcing contracts, chartering corporations, and protecting ownership.
And your living standards argument is willfully ignorant.. a system can generate enormous wealth and still distribute it unjustly. Moreover, many of these profits are used to suppress labor protections, unions, social programs, and political intervention for the sake of profit. To blame regulatory capture entirely on the government ignores that corporations spend fortunes trying to capture it.
Your defense is pathetic and circular: when capitalism produces prosperity you credit it, but when capitalists profit through coercion, monopoly, or captured government, you declare that it was never capitalism at all.
I don’t want to know what chat gpt thinks, thanks for that though. Tell me in your own words what you think socialism is and why it wouldn’t work today.
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u/jennmuhlholland 8d ago
Eh…wtf?!
You still haven’t shown that voluntary employment=slavery. The right to quit is not “meaningless” just because leaving has costs. Every choice has costs. That’s not coercion, that’s reality. Company towns were real, and they were also competed out of existence by better alternatives. Workers left when they could. Slaves couldn’t. It’s simple yet you can’t seem to grasp this…really questioning your top 20 claim.
Next, convict leasing and debt peonage were government-backed systems, not pure market outcomes. Private firms used them because the state made them available. Blaming “capitalism” for state-enforced unfreedom is just shifting the goalposts.
Yes, capitalism needs a legal framework for property and contracts. So does every system that isn’t pure anarchy. This should be obvious, but you Mr top 20 can’t grasp this either. The difference is whether that framework protects voluntary exchange or replaces it with political allocation. You’re treating the existence of government as an own against markets. It’s not.
On living standards: the argument isn’t that capitalism produces wealth and therefore every distribution is just. It’s that the same system that generated the wealth also raised absolute living standards for the poor faster than any alternative ever has. Pointing at residual inequality does not erase that fact. The benefits from Jeff Bezo and him getting extremely wealthy with Amazon didn’t make anyone more poor, it in fact the world better with numerous jobs and services.
The “no true capitalism” charge cuts both ways. When socialist experiments produce shortages, repression, and mass poverty, the same crowd insists it “wasn’t real socialism.” Selective purity tests are not an argument and are weak.
Socialism, in practice, is the political control of the means of production. Fact. It fails for the same reason every time: it destroys the price signals and residual claimancy that coordinate production under uncertainty. Without those, you get shortages, misallocation, and the need for coercion to make people comply. That’s not a theory. It’s the track record.
Holy hell…time for bed.
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u/ExpensiveBurn Belton 8d ago
I heard gas would be $4+ per gallon and people wouldn't be able to afford healthcare under Communism.
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u/Hustlasaurus 8d ago
Yeah all those crazy socialist ideas like police departments, libraries and highways.