Asklemmy

Nothing substantial to contribute ... just wanted to say that I came in here expecting a shit show (maybe I've been on mastodon too much :) ) and am genuinely impressed to see a bunch of polite and good discussion, not least from the OP!!

Because basic economics is never taught properly in schools. People don't understand what free healthcare/education/whatever costs. Because, at least in the US, universities are heavily politicized by anti capitalist mentality.

Capitalism is literally making our environment uninhabitable.

Because they've never seen well regulated Capitalism nor been educated on it as all we get in the US is Corporate propaganda on Capitalism to justify the hellscape the wealthy make the most money from.

The actual reason in most cases is because they think that abolishing capitalism would benefit them personally. Whether this is true or not is debatable, but that's ultimately beside the point.

I think capitalism is fine to an extent. It's when companies become too large that their scale and power enshittify things.

When you have a system that values profits over everything, it tends to (either by accident or design) exploit workers and destroy the middle class.

With capitalism, you’ll pay the absolute minimum needed to get workers, regardless of the value they create for the business and regardless of how much profit your business is making. You’ll collude with other businesses to keep wages down, because again that’s a way to increase profit. You WONT support any worker rights laws like weekends, PTO, benefits, minimum wage, etc.

You can argue that the free market takes care of itself, but we’ve seen that isn’t true. Companies constantly exploit customers and workers. They will raise prices and lower wages in ways that a pure “free market” theoretically wouldn’t allow.

Now this isn’t to say capitalism is all bad. I do think smart people and hard working people should be rewarded. But any sufficiently large system is going to have some corruption. I’d like to have a reasonable minimum standard of living for everyone before we run off and let capitalism give us multi-billionaires. If everyone was guaranteed enough for a decent standard of living, I’d be fine with the rest being as capitalistic as anyone wants. But we dont have that. Minimum wage is $7. Healthcare is shit and tied to employment. Etc. etc.

Capitalism is built on the exploitation of others. Slavery, Homelessness, and Pollution are all side effects of a profit driven market without restrictions.

Unchecked capitalism allows for the snowballing consolidation of wealth and power, and is therefore inherently authoritarian/exploitative of others. It is possible to have markets that encourage and reward creativity, novelty, and competition without allowing any person or entity to become too powerful (mind you, wealth and power are always the same thing - or more specifically - two sides of a single coin).

This is also why you will see leftists attacking liberals - because liberalism is simply an extension of capitalism: the allowance and encouragement of inequitable consolidation of wealth and power. An egalitarian ends must actively oppose, prevent, and even correct such consolidation. Capitalism and liberalism are the enemies of freedom, liberty, and justice.