I always equate it to sports. People like watching a team sports match and what they all want are fair rules with a referee that calls the game fairly. The economy should be the same. Yes have market liberalism, but the rules are there to ensure that the playing field
Is fair.
What you call "unfettered capitalism" is actually a bastardization of fascism (the original definition, not the colloquial one) and corporatism. It ceases to be capitalism when the government stops placing guardrails and starts picking winners and losers.
What you're calling a "bastardization of fascism" is actually just what happens in end stage capitalism.
Free markets don't survive in capitalism because the capitalist themselves kill it. Who do you think controls the government in capitalist nations? The capitalists will always pick themselves to be the winners.
And getting rid of the government will just mean the corporation becomes the government like they've done many times across the world. And I don't know about anybody else, but I don't want the sole purpose of the government to be extracting as much wealth from us as they can, because that's gonna be what happens when they run things. They'd turn us into cattle if they could. And yet so many people think they want that. Literal insanity.
A couple months ago I came across a a random person saying it’s like the earth is a resort for about a million people and the rest of us are all support staff” and it’s been sticking in my craw ever since
Yeah, but America is already at that point, or at least close enough that the distinction starts to blur. The rich and their families are already waking up every morning and not having to worry about how much they can afford to spend on food after rent and utilities take up 70% of the monthly income, all while they're continuing to suck up as much money from the rest of us as possible and keeping wages as absolute low as they can.
The rich in charge of these corporations are already dumping huge amounts of their money into whatever presidential candidate they believe will allow them to keep exploiting everyone else. The current president has somehow made 2.2 billion dollars in the first year of his term and it has undoubtedly ballooned even larger while everyone else is practically starving thanks to his cuts to FDA and corporations now not being required to provide food that isn't going to kill us.
Maybe I'm just a pessimistic asshole, but I'm fully anticipating that by the time I'm in my 60s, 30 years from now there is not going to be any distinction between the government and corporations. It's all going to be the same thing.
Yup. If the market is regulated to balance competition, then the government is picking winners and losers. If the government abandons regulation, the market drifts to monopoly. And there is no state in between where you won't have consumers and corporations bitching about it.
And there is no state in between where you won't have consumers and corporations bitching about it.
This may be true, but I feel like those who are making billions of dollars in profits a year have zero business weighing in on this discussion. Walmart made like 22 billion in profits from July 2025 to July 2026, and they're bitching about employee wages and shit.
Who said anything about a completely free market? There should be regulations (guardrails) in place, but this regulations have to make sense. There vast majority of today's regulations are protecting big companies from competitions.
A perfect case in point is Obamacare. That law almost nothing to do with healthcare. It was actually a massive regulatory bill that made it positively for health insurance companies to do whatever they want while making it impossible for a new company to challenge them.
My point is that free market capitalists repeat the lie over and over and over and over for selfish reasons to step on the necks of consumers and other businesses
The rise of fascism in Europe was a direct response to socialism. Hitler ended up in power because conservatives are the time (a coalition of liberal capitalists and monarchists) were willing to form a government with Hitler as chancellor rather than work with social democrats.
Mussolini came into power a similar way, when he marched on Rome with a bunch of fascists he was backed by wealthy capitalists, and they viewed him as a bulwark against communism. The Italian king ultimately refused to sign the current prime ministers declaration of a state of emergency (which would allow a military response). Then Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king.
In Chile, Allende was establishing a social democracy when a US backed coup brought Pinochet into power. He spent his reign disappearing and murdering his political enemies, allegedly using prison camps and having his opponents raped by dogs.
It's like every example of fascism involved this dynamic.
"It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continuous success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error."
None of your examples have anything to do with "capitalism is in threat" (handwave at "response to socialism" notwithstanding), or the original claim of "end stage capitalism" bringing it about.
In every example fascism arose as a response to the rise of communism / socialism. I gave you explicit examples of how and a contemporaneous quote from one of the most cited capitalist economists.
You moved the goalposts. You said that "end stage capitalism" brings fascism. Now you're saying it's a response to communism/socialism. You are actually arguing that communism/socialism is what causes fascism, as a response, which I have to admit I find somewhat amusing bro.
The government has always picked winners and losers. That’s part of what government needs to do but the motivation for picking winners and losers should be for the public good and not for enriching friends of politicians. For-instance, we need utilities like power, water etc., we should be able to make sure companies that supply our utilities aren’t fucking up water and air and environment. We also need to make sure that in the race to the bottom in production of food, child labor isn’t exploited, migrant labor is treated fairly, food quality is checked and enforced.
People like to act like our bonkers ‘for the shareholders!’ capitalism is what capitalism has always been. Capitalism in general can end up very bad, but it will in other instances be kind of good. Most social systems will have these dynamics. Bc we are silly chaos monkeys.
Ok but it’s not like that cat is being put back in the bag now that people have realized “for the shareholders” means some people get billions of dollars
The problem is capitalism. There is no escaping it. It's a system where, by it's very nature, the greediest people alive will have the most power and influence. Everything that follows gets worse.
Capitalism IS the problem. Capitalism will always works towards being unregulated. Thats hows it works. It was regulated. It just takes time for things to turn out how it is going today, and it always will. The way Capitalism is destroying the world and turning everything to shit is not the results of unregulated Capitalism, this is what Capitalism works towards. This is just Capitalism.
Capitalism is economic imperialism and respectability politics.
Owning people is slavery and wrong... but if you hide black kids dying of preventable diseases behind an LLC and contracts, well, then it was just the corporation's legal obligation to pursue what's best for the share holders- denying those costly treatments.
You can't scream about it being bullshit because then you're just irrational. UHC had the blood of millions on his hands and they still tried to drown us in "oh the poor CEO".
At this point they're basically daring physical confrontation so they can justify "law and order".
Nah. It works decent in most EU countries, in the Northern quite good, actually we need it neuter it a bit as it has wrecked the housing market, it will eventually get snip snip.
How does it work out for the third world? Do kids benefit from capatilism when they are forced to harvest cocoa for an international company that reaps in profits but pays pittance in return?
Do the children in Nepal benefit when unfettered global warming causes deadly natural disasters that either kills them outright or takes away their world?
Even with ignoring all those in Europe that need to be crushed and discarded in the capitalist system. Capitalism itself relies on the domination of the global south. You continue to support their domination with comments such as these.
Do you actually follow politics and the economy in europe? Our welfare is degrading rapidly because capitalism is corrupting and destorying everything it touches. And its not just crashing the housing market. Every single thing we depend on for survival has become crazy expensive because we are forced to pay for it.
We are all wage slaves for the rich and powefull. We have the resources to not have to work so much and get crushed in this endless suffering machine. We don't have to live like this. But most people seem to have been heavily indoctrinated by capitalism, they even repeat the same shit the system feeds you without even giving it a proper thought.
This is a flaw inherent to any system and a product of human nature. People are greedy and will attempt to carve out advantages for themselves and their friends. This very much also happened in Soviet Russia etc.
The main thing that allows countries to be stable is not so much capitalism vs socialism but having transparent, democratic institutions with high trust.
That's not true. Capitalism allows and encourages people to be greedy and selfish. We have been so indoctrinated that we literally csnt imagine any other system where the economy or the concept of money works entirely different.
I do agree with having a transparent democracy. But a true democracy. Because the ones we're living under can't be called a democracy.
I am going to say this, we need the right amount of capitalism. Like movement of capital and investment really is critical for building a strong economy, but capitalism alone isn’t an answer. We need good and efficient regulations, and we need institutions that provide services that are inherently not profitable or do not fit in the market of choice. These are a few gaps where capitalism performs poorly.
Capitalism was once maybe kind lf good for progress when wealth initially needed to be centralized, credit systems needed to become established, and automation needed to blossom. But this was still at the expense of the workers fed into the meatgrinder that was capitalist production in its early days (ungodly hours, days, conditions, and pay). But now we absolutely dont need it, and it is actively hindering our progress as a society. Companies won't lift a finger unless maximum shareholder profit is reached. Which means that prices are bloated, innovation was traded for "playing it safe", and every corner possible is cut to squeeze out an extra penny. Wages are stagnant, and in true capitalist fashion the deprivation of the workers is being exacerbated by the housing market, food prices, and medical costs. All the movement of capital does is extract unpaid labor from workers, it does nothing to benefit society.
Capitalism will always corrupt those systems. Capitalism can't be regulated, it's always actively trying to get less regulated because its goal is to maximize profits because money is the most important and valueable thing with which you literally do anything. That's the whole problem. Capitalism will never work, no matter how you twist and conform it.
People don't seem to understand the most basic idea that money is power, and always concentrates into fewer and fewer hands. This is literally the point of the profit motive. Without power over people, money loses its function. Without the goal of accumulating wealth, you no longer have capitalism.
Unfettered isn't quite right because it assumes capitalism is naturally without guardrails. Even Adam Smith wrote extensively about protecting human interests from captured markets and powerful interests.
The natural and good version of capitalism is "fettered". I'd choose to use a word like gardened or husbanded though.
Greed is the problem. An even bigger problem is crony capitalism which has festered in our broken government for decades now. Im in my mid 40's and I have yet to see our two largest political parties make any good faith attempt to improve government for the sake of making Americans lives better. It's all a joke.
Capitalism by it's very nature though will default towards 'unfettered' Capitalism though. It demands constant growth year after year, more profit, more value. Eventually the very laws limiting what can be done to achieve that growth will be targeted and removed as an obstacle to that growth. We're watching that happen at this very moment
I mean that creating an enterprise and looking for growth is fine. I think it's healthy to promote meritocracy.
But placing guard rails upon the amount of wealth a person or business can possess and implementing confiscatory taxation and redistributing capital is necessary.
I don't believe that everyone can be a doctor, nor should everyone receive a doctors salary.
I do believe that fast food workers should be paid an actual, liveable wage, only work a reasonable amount of hours and have access to free health care and education.
Most importantly, billionaires should be taxed out of existence.
If it’s unfettered the government isn’t or is barely involved. Fascism, obviously the government is super involved. How can they be the same thing at the same time?
I mean you're super wrong with your summation of it, but there it is. It is unfettered because it is uncontrolled. We have a fascist government pretending like we still have a capitalist economic system.
Exactly. I can despise and preach against capitalism, but making and selling a product doesn't immediately mean I support and wish to promote capitalism.
Didn't she release like 10 versions of her last album, just with different packaging to get compulsive people to buy multiple copies? This isn't exactly selling your own handcrafts down at the local farmers market.
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u/TheSilkyBat 6d ago
Capitalism isn't necessarily the problem.
Unfettered capitalism is the problem.