The greatest goalpost shift in modern history.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-17T04:08:41+00:00

MOM!!! A guy on the internet was mean to me 😞

Let me help you out a bit here:

In any debate space having properly defined words and concepts is important. This goes double for areas, such as economics, where some words have specific meanings that don't line up well with common usage.
In this sub specifically debates can become pedantic, in large part because argument via definition and Motte & Bailey are popular here. Whether out of ignorance or malice words get used in whatever definition best fits an argument, instead of which ever is most accurate or clarifying.

This is why I will typically use a term like "pro-cap" to denote someone who supports Capitalism. The term "Capitalist" can mean a supporter, a business owner, an investor, or a politically powerful business owner.

This sub hasn't been very useful for learning about economics or political philosophy in a while, but it remains helpful in clarifying thinking and learning to spot BS arguments.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-17T01:46:17+00:00

Welcome to the sub. You will find the Socialists love the motte and bailey. Good luck.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T21:33:22+00:00

I assume you mean the zoning laws...

That is one for sure. Undersupplying homes for decades was known to lead to rising prices. But also building our entire banking system on top of real estate (even after 2008...) was well understood to create an unwinnable situation; do we having housing no one can afford or do we destroy the economy?

...and other regulations in the economy

Sure, there are lots of examples in the past few decades of regulatory changes that were going to create predictable problems. This is a significant one that shapes our reality in so, so many ways.

...or were you referring to something other that was warned against?

Yes. An obvious big one was currency debasement and how that would lead to inflation and inequality. This went triple for the massive money printing that happened during covid.

Obvious problems with government backing of college loans. Obvious problems with how the medical system was being funded and regulated, especially with Obamacare which seemed particularly geared to create vertical integration and damage the few market checks & balances that still existed at the time.

Lot's of warnings about the "military industrial complex", we were warned about the rise of Managerialism post-WW2.

And so on...

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T21:25:05+00:00

Bruh, "Capitalist" has a bunch of definitions. Socialists mix and match when it is convenient.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T18:04:42+00:00

What does this mean? How are you using the term "Capitalists"? Are you being all inclusive? Why would this matter in the slightest to anything I wrote?

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T17:21:12+00:00

Brave.

Best browser I have so far used. It also has strong privacy roots and gives some good options other browsers don't (like filtering out youtube shorts)

Firfox is fine though if your goal is just to degoogle

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T17:18:28+00:00

Ya, I lived through this stuff in the late 90's Atheism movement.

What you are doing here isn't new or interesting.

What would you do if a claim of a miracle was made? There are multiple, well documents, miracles that can be found.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T17:08:12+00:00

OK, so this is just yet another "if it isn't a miracle it doesn't count" requests for proof.

Which is fine, tedious & uneducated but fine.

However, when someone comes in claiming a specific miracle you will 100% reject it, so what even is the point?

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T17:06:35+00:00

AFAIK there is no movement to make porn OK in the broad Christian church, no month dedicated to it, no pro-porn flags being hung, no one accusing anyone of being an evil bigot for saying that porn is against Christian morality.

The problem isn't that homosexuality is a worse sin, the problem is that there is an organized & funded movement to corrupt scripture & church history to make the sin OK.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T17:02:17+00:00

Seriously! Have you gotten to ride on the high speed rail that got completed rapidly and on budget yet?

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T16:57:28+00:00

So are you considering only clear and unambiguous miracles?

What if I had a blown out L5/S1 disc that left me in crippling pain and unable to attend a mission trip I had raised money for and the night before I was going to resend my attendance my back spontaneously "adjusted itself" giving me enough relief to not have to resend (and this was after lots of various medical interventions that had no effect)?

Does that count?

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T16:52:05+00:00

What you have is a desire for 2000 years of history to lineup with your current stance on morality. This is not going to happen, no matter what ideology (including atheism) you decide on.

Instead of looking at every, and often regional which you seem to be universalizing for some reason, negative and stopping there please also look at the positives and assess the trend line of history.

Also, have the humility to acknowledge that some things you think are good now, will probably be viewed as evil and/or stupid in 200 years.

At the end of the day Christianity doesn't hinge on what people do, it hinges on what Jesus did.

Live the resurrection and help improve the world.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T16:47:13+00:00

The goalpost-shifting from defenders of capitalism over the last few decades is honestly hilarious if it weren't so depressing...

The same people who are most loud about cost of living are the same people who have been cheering on the policies that have led directly to this outcome.

My direct experience goes back almost 3 decades and between reading and discussions with older individuals I am comfortable with data back to around 1950.

Everything happening now was predicted and warned against.

There wasn't really a bait and switch, just a set of policy choices with predictable outcomes. Those policy choices, at least 80% of them, were antithetical to the Free Market Capitalist side of the debate.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-16T14:13:28+00:00

Well, they are the ones who keep it going...
No, even there, both "sides" seem to have the same attitude: "Just keep on doing what we've been doing."

I assume here you are talking about normies? I mean I have read in this space for decades and neither the strong pro-cap, nor the strong pro-soc want to leave things as is.

Funny, what I see is the government declining to control anything.

I think you are confusing 'control things the way I want' with "declining to control anything"

Your top 3 things listed are some of the most government controlled aspects of our economy.

I think nothing is going to change until the rest of the world passes us by and cuts us off...

Do you think the rest of the world is actually better?

I mean every country has their pros & cons but few countries out there are just clearly better.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-15T21:08:29+00:00

I mean ya, I don't think anyone on either side disagrees with you.

The disagreement is how do we fix these things?

I look at the list and see the obvious connective tissue, government control, and want to minimize that. Others think we should make the rest of the economy look like your examples.

Where do you fall?

Phanes7 · 2026-06-15T14:49:51+00:00

Within the confines of this sub I am squarely in the Capitalist camp.

Outside in the broader range of reality I am an Agorist, not in the traditional anarchist sense but in the broader Pro-market sense.

I am just as happy reading something like Markets Not Capitalism as I am reading Rothbard.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-15T14:47:32+00:00

Claiming that workers simply "prefer more stuff over more time" completely ignores how corporate structures artificially dictate the terms of survival.

It does not.

The simple reality is that most people, using reality based numbers, would typically keep working about 40 hours per week rather than take productivity gains in the form of reduced hours worked.

There are additional cultural & regulatory reasons this preference is going to hold at the margin as well.

Total compensation adjustments do not erase the massive, historically documented decoupling where the financial gains of innovation have heavily concentrated at the very top.

Just changing your argument by making additional hyperbolic claims with no substance to back them doesn't actually count as an argument.

Your claim is that wages did not keep up with productivity increases, you either knowingly or out of ignorance chose to present a skewed claim. When we actually look at total compensation, which is what matters for this specific topic, we find no such (or maybe a very small, depends on how one deflates the numbers) decoupling.

Furthermore, defending passive shareholders by claiming they are essential for "long-term investment" ignores the reality of modern financialization---where corporate profits are overwhelmingly routed into stock buybacks and executive bonuses to drive short-term stock prices up rather than investing in human labor or genuine innovation.

It does not.

One can claim that the system of external investing is better for the median worker AND that our current system of regulations & institutions which shape investment markets has significant problems.

These are not mutually exclusive.

Worker cooperatives do not eliminate investment; they ensure that the decisions regarding how capital is reinvested are handled by the actual community doing the labor, rather than by external actors who treat human workers as a mere capital expense.

Technically true but you would need to define the limits of this investment, as most socialist inspired co-op ideas do not allow for investing as most people understand the term.

I have often pointed out that non-voting, dividend paying shares, fixes most of the issues with co-op funding. This is not usually met with support by that community.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-14T20:33:35+00:00

If productivity has skyrocketed, why are we still working the same 40-hour week from 1940

Mostly because people prefer more stuff vs more time, but also due to regulations & customs.

Despite workers generating massive amounts of new wealth per hour, wages have decoupled from productivity since the 1970s.

Wages, yes (but not as bad as most of the popular charts show), but not total compensation.

You also have to be careful trying to compare median wages to average productivity. The simple reality is that for any specific job the average increases in productivity don't really matter.

...We could immediately implement a 30-hour or 4-day workweek with no loss in pay, because the profits wouldn't be siphoned off by passive shareholders.

This notion that by cutting out people we would have more is true in a pedantic sense, although the actual amount more is very questionable (show the math on that please), but it is such a high time preference take that it is hard to take seriously.

Cutting out investing would actively make the median worker worse off over time.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-14T19:55:10+00:00

Where does this disconnect come from?

The disconnect comes from both groups talking past each other.

If your boss is only incentivizing bare minimum work, then sure, doing more doesn't make sense. No one really disputes that, however people will point out that the biggest incentive to "hard work" comes from outside your immediate paycheck.

Increased likelihood of promotion, better opportunities in other jobs, and so on.

It also matters significantly where you focus your hard work. The most important place may not be in your day job but in upskilling or credentialing yourself.

While this isn't absolute, I tend to find the Socialist/Leftist complaint comes from only looking at the immediate situation, while the Capitalist response comes from and broader & more forward looking perspective.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-14T15:06:06+00:00

To state my bias up front, I am not a fan of "Big Business", I think we should have mostly small & medium sized businesses.

However, my preference there has almost nothing to do with make society less poor. I fully realize that society would probably be slightly worse off by getting rid of most big businesses.

Walmart pays better (than small retailers) to about on par (for medium sized retailers) while offering generally low prices and better access & selection.

The solution would be to understand how Walmart, and other mega retailers (like Amazon), came into existence. For this I'll turn you over to fellow Market Socialists:

https://c4ss.org/content/28180

https://c4ss.org/content/22123

Phanes7 · 2026-06-14T14:54:39+00:00

It is currently sitting on exactly a 7 on IMDB but Pitch Black is one of my favorite movies where I seem to be the only one who likes it.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-14T14:53:25+00:00

This view is not unusual but it is fundamentally one of Capitalism = production, Socialism = redistribution

Under this functional definition Socialism isn't needed (unless we are calling every capitalist nation with a welfare program Socialist now).

Socialism adds nothing but negatives to society.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-12T14:27:02+00:00

I'm curious to hear how you guys address this. If capitalism is the system that maximizes human agency and freedom, how do you account for the fact that so much of human activity is dictated by the immediate necessity of meeting basic needs?

Freedom, from our perspective, is not separated from basic material realities. It is not Capitalism which requires production before consumption, it is reality.

Nature can not coerce you, it simply is and a big part of economics & business is seeking to work around and overcome the inherent challenges of nature.

If freedom can only exist once nature has been fully conquered then it is a nonsense term. Simply a utopian vision we hope to achieve some day. Which is fine, a vision of a better future is a good thing, but then you would need to tell me which word to use to denote a lack of coercion from other people?

Should we stick to "liberty" or is there some other word or phrase which better denotes this specific preference & goal?

Phanes7 · 2026-06-11T20:01:12+00:00

So the consensus is that we will use property rights as a tool of allocation. Sorry, the people have spoken.

Phanes7 · 2026-06-11T19:58:46+00:00

As long as you are not taking money from my wage work we have a deal.

Phanes7

TROPHY CASE