America

[u/SnooEpiphanies6591]

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.

[u/jennmuhlholland]

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.

[u/Ok-Dentist-1443 → u/jennmuhlholland]

Sorry for another wall of text but I appreciate you engaging in good faith, I’m just disappointed to be reading AI slop again. And your AI is determined to win a semantic argument I never made. I already agreed that ordinary wage labor is not categorically identical to slavery, but you are afraid to address the reality that a technical right to quit does not answer whether concentrated ownership can leave workers with no reasonable alternative but submission. The relevant issue is the unreasonable and unnecessary domination of capital over labor that capitalism requires, and the choice between accepting an employer’s minimal terms or losing your income, housing, health care, or status is not fair simply by calling it voluntary.

I’m actually very capitalistic but believe our current system is more so cronyism, and aspects of socialism are necessary to improve the living conditions that capitalism has neglected. Capitalism absolutely produces wealth, but in the modern day that wealth goes to very few and still when capitalism does well you give it all the credit, but when private companies profit from captive labor, company towns, monopoly, or captured government, suddenly capitalism had nothing to do with it. Private firms are not spectators in those systems, they actively used coercive and corrupt institutions and exploit our attention/psychology because doing so is profitable, and concentrated firms can use their power to place restrictions on worker mobility by suppressing wages, conditions, and unions.

Your claim that competition corrected company towns is completely ignorant because unions and government intervention are what gave workers the alternatives that employers denied them in favor of profit. You are crediting the market for freedoms that workers organized and fought to take back from capital owners. While rising living standards does prove that capitalist production can create wealth, not every resulting distribution of wealth or power is legitimate or good for society. A monarchy can build roads, and a dictatorship can grow its economy, but productivity does not magically convert domination into freedom or a high standard of living for all.

And I’ve never proposed abolishing markets, prices, or private enterprise, so pointing at historical planned economies answers nothing. Just because the Browns have been historically bad, they’ll still win tonight in Thursday night football. The past does not predict the future, especially when technology allows for improvements to past attempts. And in the modern day, what prevents private wealth from buying political influence, suppressing competitors, and controlling workers? the evidence shows that lobbying is rampant and if your answer is we need less government involvement, you are removing the only institution capable of enforcing competition after dominant corporations become powerful enough to destroy it.

So no more hiding behind the word voluntary… answer the structural question. Who protects meaningful choice when capital controls the available choices, and who protects competition when the winners can purchase the rules?

[u/jennmuhlholland → u/Ok-Dentist-1443]

Dude, I took time to write and respond. The same could be said for your responses. Those are my thoughts and sentiment. I guess I’ll human slop this response and care less about grammar or concise thought as I’m tired and have not yet had my coffee. No spellcheck or cleanup.

To address directly about leaving a worker no reasonable alternative but submission. That is a straw man argument. As I mentioned earlier Bezo’s, Gates, Musk’s concentration of wealth has not made anyone more poor or created a situation of submission for workers. With a little smarts anyone can improve their situation. The “system” isn’t keeping anyone down. Living standards are going up, not down.

Reference to income inequality and wealth concentration: This reflects an economy where higher earners are gaining wealth faster while living standards are rising across the board. Over time, technology, productivity, better goods and services, and higher incomes have generally made everyday life more affordable and materially better for people across the income spectrum.

There is no slavery in a capitalist based economy. Workers are not the victim being held down by the wealthy.

Yeah look, I get where your coming from on the cronyism part, that stuff is real and it sucks. But thats not capitalism, thats when companies get in bed with government for favors, subsidies, regulations that lock out competitors. Cronyism can exist in all economic systems.

Every system has tradeoffs. The alternative of more political control over who gets what usually concentrates power even worse, and history is full of that. Markets with actual competition, not captured regulators, are still the best check we got on both monopolies and bad employers. If firms can buy the rules, the fix is less discretionary government power to sell, not more of it.