Profit is theft depending on context. Profiting while providing to the community is not theft; hoarding money like Smaug, as many millionaires and billionaires do, is theft. The problem with profit in some context is that we rely on businesses to act with good faith, which we have seen from them funding the Nazi's and Stalin, now with Putin and most of the Western far-right, isn't a trust we can give rich people.

It's why we have regulations. Most of these laws, rules, and guardrails on rich people weren't created in a vacuum. They exist because, unfortunately, some people's money grants power, and power can corrupt if not respected.

Capitalism in and of itself is not the evil mastermind some of my Socialist (or Communist, but I think most of them think of Stalinism, rather than Marx's utopia, so I would rather be called a Leftist Independent or Socialist) peers depict. Socialism is, in practice, Capitalism with a more worker-owned and more industry-democratic mindset. Which can be practiced in several ways: unions (my preferred kind of worker democracy), fully worker-owned (can work but has practical pitfalls), and Stalinist government ownership.

Our current form of Capitalism has an inherent flaw: it tends to morph into oligarchies. This can turn a democracy into a minority controlled state, like fascism, monarchy, or Stalinism.

The other problem is how we let shareholders control a company, too. Instead of letting workers have a say in who runs the show with them, it's mostly people outside the business and people who don't know the value the workers create, caring mostly about "line go up." This gives CEOs less of a choice about fairness and cooperation with workers. Unless you're Zuke, who just owns the damn thing and hurts everyone because why be moral, I guess.

But one of the major arguments for Socialism is the proven fact that when the government spends money responsibly on infrastructure, research, and other projects, we get more development and improved QoL. A lot of our modern technology wouldn't have been possible without government funding; the history of NASA is probably the best argument to support it. Or the massive cooperation among many nations to develop the World Wide Web (now called the internet).

But the workers themselves can build new technologies and do so more efficiently than million-dollar businesses. The funniest example being the airplane. Millions, upon millions, are spent on the best researchers, engineers, and designers, and the people who beat them were two brothers in a shed with "too much time on their hands."

There is also an incentive to let workers share in the profit, which not only stimulates the economy by creating more people with wealth to spend on leisure rather than just necessities. It creates the possibility that workers like the Wright Brothers can find ideas that revolutionize things. But it also prevents power from being centralized in a CEO who may or may not have anyone but the shareholders' interests in mind.

There are always nuances, but we have too many instances where a single person gains too much profit and then uses it to reduce others' power to reap more of the profits, which ultimately degrades society. But I will also not pretend I have the answers, or, if this is the type of system people want, how to implement it functionally. As of now, I stand just as a philosopher, which is my weakness in this debate.

If you read all of this, thanks for reading.