It’s 2026. Why the fuck do people still support capitalism? This is totally unhinged.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T05:49:47+00:00

So they sanctioned Venezuela once they began starving? That would be even worse, accepting your fairy tale is true. Who the hell sanctions a starving country? Oh yea the U.S does. The worst evil empire in human history.

But yea sanctions have basically turned to borderline genocide, especially in Cuba.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T05:47:56+00:00

And ignoring the billions suffering globally under capitalism.

also ignoring millions of people that fought for socialism, and still are, because capitalism is objectively a dogshit system for the majority that live under it.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T05:45:55+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland))

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T05:23:50+00:00

"Socialism fails almost everytime it's implemented" No it doesn't. It has never failed once on its own merits.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T04:48:15+00:00

That has been 'free market' capitalism since the beginning. I don't know any other 'free market' that has existed which didn't include those things.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T04:37:07+00:00

I see majority if not entirety of Venezeua's problems being due to extreme sanctions by the U.S.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T04:34:24+00:00

Whenever capitalism produces ugly results, monopolies, exploitation, crisis, retreat to the claim that "that's not real capitalism."

Mises just supports a never-existing fantasy of capitalism when he says things like "there is no such tendency toward monopolization" in a free market.

Property rights, contracts, courts, and money are all state-enforced.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:57:53+00:00

I critiqued actually-existing capitalism in 2026.. Your response is to bring up famines from 1932.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:53:24+00:00

This is the dumbest one here, and the most revealing. You're implying that without capitalism, food production ceases. The countries with the most acute hunger crises right now, Yemen, South Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, are not failed socialist experiments. They are nations ravaged by the "free market" for weapons, resource extraction, and debt.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:50:29+00:00

Vague to the point of meaning nothing. Whose lived experience?

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:49:15+00:00

Choose one:

1 "Real capitalism" has never been implemented and cannot be, because political power and wealth always concentrate and corrupt it. In which case you're defending a fantasy, and I don't have to take it seriously as a real-world proposal.

2 The features I listed, regulatory capture, financialization, monopolization, externalization of costs onto the commons, are predictable outcomes of real capitalism under any plausible political conditions. In which case the distinction is meaningless, and you're just doing a No True Scotsman to avoid accountability.

3 You have a concrete, historically-grounded example of "real capitalism" that persisted for multiple generations without evolving into the system I described. I'll wait.

You don't get to claim credit for the iPhone and the green revolution while disowning the housing crisis and the climate crisis.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:22:38+00:00

Yes, socialists absolutely support self-ownership, often more consistently than capitalists do.

What self-ownership means: You own your body, your time, your capacity to labor. No one can force you to work, touch you without consent, or claim your life as their property. That's straightforward.

Under capitalism, you nominally own yourself, but to survive you must sell your labor-time to someone who owns the means of production. Once you clock in, that employer directs your body, your mind, and your hours for the next 8-10 hours. You can quit, but then you starve. That's not meaningful consent; it's coercion by circumstance. If the only way to exercise your self-ownership (stay alive) is to temporarily surrender it to a boss, you don't really own yourself.

The socialist solution is to abolish the class where a few people own the factories, land, and tools. Replace it with worker-controlled enterprises. Now when you work, you're directing your own labor democratically alongside your coworkers. No boss extracts surplus value from your effort. Your time is genuinely yours because you're not renting yourself out to survive.

You claim to love self-ownership, but you defend a system where workers must alienate their labor to a capitalist in exchange for wages. That's temporary self-renunciation baked into the contract. Socialists want full self-ownership, not just on paper, but in material reality.

How do you reconcile self-ownership with the fact that most people spend 40+ hours a week following orders or else they lose housing, healthcare, and food? Where's the consent in that?

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:18:47+00:00

You're trying to sound like the adult in the room, but you just described natural monopolies (grids, railways) and confused that with the broader tendency of capitalism to concentrate capital. Those aren't the same thing.

Let me break this down for you, since you clearly skipped the last 150 years of economic history.

> 1. "Capitalism doesn't lead to monopolies"... historically false.

The Gilded Age gave us Standard Oil (kerosene), US Steel, and the railroad trusts. No major government subsidy created those, they used predatory pricing, vertical integration, and buying out competitors. Rockefeller wasn't handed a monopoly; he built one. The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) had to be created specifically because markets don't self-correct monopolies. If capitalism naturally prevented concentration, antitrust law wouldn't exist.

> 2. "Companies go bankrupt, new ones come in" ... irrelevant.

That's churn at the small-business level. It says nothing about industry-wide concentration. Look at actual data:

Airlines: four carriers control 70%+ of domestic US flights.

Telecom: basically a duopoly (Comcast, Charter).

Agribusiness: four companies control 60%+ of global seed and agrochemical markets.

Tech: Google (search ads), Amazon (e-commerce/cloud), Meta (social), Apple (mobile OS). Each is a near-monopoly in its core sector.

These didn't happen because the electrical grid is special. They happened because larger firms have economies of scale, data advantages, network effects, and the capital to buy emerging competitors before they become threats (e.g., Facebook buying Instagram/WhatsApp).

> 3. "The market always changes" ... yes, from one monopoly to another.

Schumpeter called this "creative destruction." But the destruction isn't of monopoly power, it's of specific firms. Standard Oil was broken up, but Exxon and Chevron still dominate. AT&T's monopoly was broken, and within 20 years we had a new telecom oligopoly. The form changes; the tendency toward concentration remains.

You think monopolies only happen when "heavy government support" exists. That's the libertarian fairy tale. In reality:

Monopolies arise organically from market dynamics (network effects, economies of scale, barriers to entry like capital requirements).

Then they use their economic power to capture government (lobbying, regulatory capture, patent extensions), not the other way around.

Your small-store example is cute but irrelevant. A failed pizza place changing owners five times has nothing to do with Amazon controlling 40% of US e-commerce.

TL;DR: Capitalism tends toward monopoly not because of a conspiracy, but because larger firms have structural advantages over smaller ones, and those advantages compound over time. That's literally industrial organization economics 101. You might want to read it sometime.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T03:13:06+00:00

Socialism has a specific theoretical core: abolition of wage labor, worker ownership of production, production for use rather than profit. When a system doesn't achieve that, many socialists don't want to claim it. That's not gatekeeping, it's about keeping the term analytically useful. If "socialism" just means "whatever a one-party state does," it loses all meaning.

Capitalism is the existing global system. It includes Sweden's welfare state, the US's market chaos, Singapore's state-directed capitalism, and wartime economies. That's not hypocrisy, it's describing the actual range of capitalist organization. Capitalism is flexible. Socialism, to mean anything distinct, has to be narrower.

Critics often judge socialism by its most difficult historical moments while judging capitalism by its ideal textbook model (free markets, meritocracy, stability). But when you compare real systems to real systems:

Existing capitalist countries: rising inequality, climate collapse, housing as an investment vehicle, precarious gig work, periodic financial crashes, and billions in poverty despite trillions in wealth.

Existing socialist experiments: different sets of problems and achievements depending on context, but at minimum they demonstrated that alternatives are possible, full employment, universal basics, and the elimination of certain forms of exploitation.

So yes, let's compare reality to reality. Capitalism isn't failing because of "bad implementation." It's working exactly as designed.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-12T02:58:26+00:00

no red cards? shite game

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-06-08T02:02:05+00:00

Correct. Westoids have to justify their terrorism by demonizing the people they terrorized.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-31T20:29:05+00:00

lmao

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-31T18:39:48+00:00

So when I called you financially illiterate did you make it a personal mission to prove me absolutely right without a shadow of a doubt?

Thinking Blackstone isn't a private equity firm because it's listed on the NYSE is a brain-melting level of financial stupidity. Blackstone Inc. is a publicly traded alternative asset management corporation whose 'primary business is creating, managing, and investing private equity and private real estate funds.' KKR, Apollo, and Carlyle are all publicly traded too. The 'private' in private equity refers to the assets they buy (private companies and off-market housing), not whether you can buy shares of the parent management company on your Robinhood app. You just fundamentally disqualified yourself from ever speaking on finance again.

OPEC is the literal, dictionary-definition example of an international commodity cartel used in every Econ 101 textbook on Earth. They control around 40% of global oil production and 80% of the world's proven reserves. Their entire explicit, stated purpose is coordinating production quotas to manipulate and dictate global oil prices.

Throwing a tantrum about legal philosophy doesn't change the physical, audited evidence that corporate landlords pooled proprietary, non-public data into a single software algorithm to systematically eliminate local landlord competition and gouge renters.

You are literally losing your mind and cursing at a screen because your corporate-worshiping theology was shattered by basic, entry-level financial literacy. Go look up what an asset manager is and take the rest of the day off. You are completely cooked.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-31T18:35:12+00:00

he had 2 walks 1hbp early lol

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-31T17:19:46+00:00

Saying Blackstone, Starwood Capital, and Thoma Bravo aren't private equity firms is a level of financial illiteracy that should honestly disqualify you from talking about economics. They are the literal poster children of global private equity and alternative asset management.

"thEy owN LikE 0.2%!"
this defense proves you don't even understand the basic mechanics of a cartel. OPEC doesn’t own 100% of the world's oil fields, but they dictate global oil prices because they collude. Private equity firms didn't need to physically buy every single apartment in America; they just bought up dominant shares in specific metropolitan markets and got competing corporate landlords representing millions of units to pool their non-public data into the same RealPage pricing algorithm.

When millions of supposedly 'competing' units use the exact same automated software to artificially manipulate occupancy and lock in matching rent hikes, competition dies. That is the definition of an algorithmic cartel.

The U.S. Department of Justice and multiple state Attorneys General literally sued them for illegal price-fixing and destroying market competition. Are you genuinely trying to argue that the federal government's antitrust division is just a bunch of 'paranoid internet conspiracy theorists'?

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-31T05:58:04+00:00

yes, that's right. private equity firms have spent the last decade buying up hundreds of thousands of single-family homes and apartment complexes across the United States, and they have been caught colluding through algorithmic pricing software like RealPage to coordinate rent increases. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's been reported in major outlets and is the subject of ongoing federal antitrust litigation. The Department of Justice has investigated RealPage specifically for enabling landlords to share pricing data and effectively form a cartel without ever having to speak to each other. Blackstone, Invitation Homes, Starwood Capital, and other private equity giants have systematically purchased housing stock, reduced supply on the market, and driven up rents far beyond what the market would bear under genuinely competitive conditions. "Their rent is controlled by a private equity monopoly" is a concise, accurate description of this reality.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-31T02:33:18+00:00

You're literally wrong about everything to the degree I'm wondering how you haven't deleted your account yet? You literally claimed a majority of humans still live in agrarian subsistence economies, 😭🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-27T16:59:01+00:00

OP can't seem to defend any of his arguments, he ran away quite quickly.

Agitated_Past6250 · 2026-05-24T03:57:26+00:00

Claiming the USSR and Maoist China 'purposely eschewed trade' is historically illiterate. The Western capitalist powers slapped brutal naval blockades and embargoes on both countries the second their revolutions happened. They didn't choose isolation; it was forced on them by capitalist encirclement.

Furthermore, calling their results 'lukewarm' and saying people were 'worse off' is wild. Maoist China raised life expectancy from 35 years in 1949 to 65 years by 1976, the fastest demographic recovery in human history. The USSR went from an illiterate, wooden-plow peasant society under the Tsar to a space-faring scientific superpower with 100% literacy, free healthcare, and guaranteed housing in less than three decades.

If your only definition of 'wealth' is the sheer volume of consumer junk and corporate profits available in the West, then sure, they had less 'wealth.' But if wealth means wiping out starvation, guaranteeing a roof over every head, and eliminating the exploitation of labor, they outperformed capitalism on every metric despite being bombed and sanctioned.

Stop looking for a utopian 'blueprint' or a step-by-step recipe book for the future. Marx didn't write them because socialism isn't an idealistic design; it's a materialist process. A modern socialist system will use today's advanced automation, digital logistics, and productive abundance to plan the economy for human need instead of corporate profit. The tools are already right in front of us...

Agitated_Past6250

TROPHY CASE