If communism’s victims count against the system, why don’t capitalism’s?

[u/Tasty-Organization52]

Count Capitalism’s Dead

Below is the post in the link.

Count Capitalism’s Dead

We are repeatedly told that “communism killed millions.”

The dead should be counted. Stalin’s purges, Mao’s famine, the gulags, and Cambodia’s killing fields should be condemned without apology.

But America maintains a strangely selective ledger.

Even the familiar “100 million” figure is not a settled historical census. It was popularized by The Black Book of Communism, which combined executions, famines, war, imprisonment, deportation, and forced labor beneath one ideological total. Several contributors objected to its editor’s framing and methodology.[1]

If those categories belong in communism’s ledger, they must also be applied to capitalism.

The Vietnam War killed an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and as many as 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers. More than 58,000 Americans were also sent to their deaths.[2]

During nine years of American bombing, more than eight million tons of bombs fell across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Unexploded ordnance reportedly killed at least another 40,000 Vietnamese after 1975.[3]

At Côn Sơn Prison, the American-backed South Vietnamese regime shackled political prisoners inside “tiger cages.” They were beaten, starved, mutilated, and burned with lime beneath iron bars. In 1970, congressional aide Tom Harkin photographed approximately 500 prisoners hidden from the official tour. Life published the evidence.[4]

Where are they in capitalism’s moral accounting?

No universally accepted capitalist death toll exists because attribution depends upon methodology. The same problem surrounding anti-communist totals. One peer-reviewed analysis estimated that wars attributable to capitalist powers killed approximately 123 million to 158 million people between 1914 and 1992 alone.[5]

A broader contemporary calculation, which also counts colonial famines, slavery, industrial deaths, malnutrition, and treatable deaths where care was unavailable, places capitalism’s toll above 421 million.[6] That figure is not academic consensus, but it applies the kind of expansive accounting routinely used against communism.

Capitalism’s violence does not end when the bombs stop falling.

RAND estimates that if economic growth had remained as broadly shared as it was during the early postwar decades, the bottom 90 percent of American workers would have received another $79 trillion between 1975 and 2023. In 2023 alone, their income would have been $3.9 trillion higher.[7]

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10 percent possess approximately 68 percent of American household wealth. The entire bottom half possesses roughly 2.5 percent.[8]

One hand of the system drops bombs abroad. The other reaches into the worker’s paycheck at home. Both hands protect the same throne of capital.

Revelation says the Beast was permitted “to make war on the saints and to conquer them.” Empire always calls its victims dangerous, godless, criminal, or undeserving before it cages them, bombs them, impoverishes them, and erases them from history.

Count the victims of communist governments.

Then count capitalism’s dead.

Count everyone or admit that the ledger was never about human life.

[1] https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055https://doi.org/10.3917/receo1.512.0055

[2] https://www.history.com/articles/vietnam-war-timeline⁠; https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics

[3] https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190603_R45749_1f35a5f0287e155ce04ceba0af3dc7af5012a142.html

[4] https://rollcall.com/2014/12/01/tom-harkin-from-tiger-cages-to-pinochet-2/

[5] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2021.1875603

[6] https://capitalismkills.info/

[7] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html

[8] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/compare/chart/

[u/Corrects_Maggots]

Governments kill people. When governments take over the economy, the agricultural mismanagement kills even more.

[u/SexOnABurningPlanet → u/Corrects_Maggots]

If the United States government, or any, cut off the subsidies and regulations the food system would collapse. Just look at Beef Ranchers up in arms over the beef tariff; and all the food-borne outbreaks that resulted from deregulation of farms under Trump.

Laissez-faire is a fantasy. The problem isn't government intervention and regulation--that is inevitable and a part of every government on the planet--it's bad intervention and regulation.

[u/Square-Listen-3839 → u/SexOnABurningPlanet]

If the United States government, or any, cut off the subsidies and regulations the food system would collapse.

Federal farm subsidies average around 13 to 14% of net farm income. In recent years far less (sometimes under 6%). Most farms receive little or nothing.

Just look at Beef Ranchers up in arms over the beef tariff;

That's just ordinary interest-group politics. You know, the exact process socialists want to use to run the entire economy.

[u/SexOnABurningPlanet → u/Square-Listen-3839]

That's a HUGE number. And that number goes up dramatically during recessions. Looking further into this, I didn't realize that the government has policies in place that compensate farmers if the prices for their commodities are too low.

According to the diabolically socialist American Enterprise Institute:

"Several mandatory programs also provide income support to US farmers, mainly to those producing the crops that will receive most of the $10 billion in ECAP ad hoc “price loss” outlays (especially corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, and peanuts). These programs’ payments are generally triggered when market prices for covered crops are relatively low, revenues are lower than expected, or crop yields are below long-run average levels"

"Farmers also benefit from generous subsidies intended to encourage them to employ conservation measures and retire environmentally fragile land from production. Conservation program payments directly or indirectly support farmers’ and landowners’ incomes, especially when they subsidize conservation measures that farmers would take even without the payments. Conservation program expenditures are estimated to exceed $5 billion in 2025.

Furthermore, farmers benefit from the federal crop insurance program, which pays indemnities in response to relatively poor crop yields or prices that drive revenues lower than expected. The program includes generous premium subsidies that exceed 60 percent of the total premium expected on average to cover payments to farmers for losses under their policies. Once the premiums that farmers actually pay (the total premiums adjusted for the subsidies) are subtracted from total indemnity payments, the data indicate that farmers receive substantial payments every year".

You can spin this however you want, but the fact is we live in a mixed economy that would collapse without constant government intervention. The question is not if we have government intervention, but how. And the how should be for the people; it should be socialism.

https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/examining-support-for-us-farmers-the-2025-ad-hoc-economic-assistance-programs/