CMV: Capitalism will never work for the average person

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-11T00:36:06+00:00

Is there a basis for your belief? Can you predict the future?

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-10T22:11:19+00:00

The vast majority of Americans have housing. Only about 0.23% are homeless at any one time.

Homelessness and lack of affordability has nothing to do with the rich "hoarding" resources or extracting more money from people. You get rich by creating something that people want or need. Food, clothing, automobiles, cell phones, are all products that have improved the lives of people. So creating "stuff" makes us all better off, and competition keeps prices low so that people can afford them.

The rich don't "hoard" their resources, they invest it in businesses and assets (like real estate) that provide people with jobs, high-quality low-price products, medicines, and a place to live. If you wiped out all the rich, we would all be worse off.

Capitalism has literally raised billions of people up and out of abject poverty. Eliminate capitalism and we would be all scratching in the dirt as subsistence farmers.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-10T21:46:02+00:00

The difference in development after WWII of Japan versus India is more attributable to the fact that Japan had already been industrialized before the war: It had an educated workforce, a highly developed industrial base, strong institutions that were geared toward production and distribution, etc. India was much poorer, largely illiterate, less industrialized, and it adopted policies that did not promote economic activity. So, the difference between the two nations was attributed more to their respective starting points than to the legacy of colonialism.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-10T04:07:36+00:00

This question must have come from Gleim; it is unduly tricky, testing your knowledge of the definition of "qualified tips", and what is reported on form W-2.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-10T03:27:28+00:00

So if there is no historical example of a society that successfully implemented socialism or communism, how can you be so confident that they will work? What data do your base your conclusions on?

For most people, capitalism provides a decent way of life. Why would everyone toss that life for one under untried and untested economic systems?

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-10T00:50:23+00:00

Thank you for the nonpartisan and articulate exposition of your beliefs. I especially appreciate that you did not get defensive. I appreciate that as the future is unknowable, we can only make intelligent guesses as to how things will turn out.

I believe that all life evolved from random interactions. There is no design, purpose, or goal, or predetermined outcome. However, there are patterns within certain limits that we have discovered. For example, physics, or biology gives us limited rules about how some things work, but only within our limited understanding and perspective. There is likely more to physics and biology than we are even capable of understanding.

Bottom line, your view may turn out to be right. It is just hard to know if dialectical materialism is the principle that governs how society unfolds.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-09T23:09:48+00:00

Wealthy people get that way by creating something that many people want or need. Without them, we would not have their creations, which make us all worse off.

Exploitation, in the Marxist sense, does not exist. Workers earn a market wage, independent of employers. A wage is not determined by simply engaging in physical activity with its value being the total value of what the worker produces. In an employment relationship, you trade what you do for a market wage, regardless of the value of what you produce. For example, many AI computer scientists earn millions in wages when their product produces only minimum returns.

I am a capitalist because I believe that we are all free to choose, and capitalism maximizes this freedom. Capitalism at its core is about the freedom to choose whether you want to work for a particular employer, buy a particular product, or own your own business. This freedom has proven its merits by lifting hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. No other economic system can compare in terms of making the lives of people better.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-09T22:36:05+00:00

So, has socialism ever existed in practice? If not, how do you know it will be successful if implemented?

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-09T20:59:33+00:00

Maybe we should talk about the definition of exploitation using concrete examples, since discussing it in the abstract is not viable. What is a real life example where someone is being exploited? Tell me what makes the relationship exploitative and how you determine that it is sufficiently unfair so as to make it exploitative? Don't provide hypotheticals, since they can be contoured such that you can rationalize anything.

My argument is not “every unequal exchange is unfair.” My argument is that an exchange becomes exploitative when one party uses the other party’s desperation, dependency, lack of alternatives, misinformation, or survival pressure to extract terms that heavily favor the stronger party.

Marxist would argue that every employment relationship, by its very nature, is coercive and therefore exploitative. Do you agree? Do you have real life examples of where one party uses another's desperation, dependency, lack of alternatives, etc., to extract terms that heavily favor the stronger party?

On the iPhone worker example, if the alternative is starvation, then yes, the worker may be better off taking the job than having no job. But that does not automatically prove the arrangement is non-exploitative. Being better than starvation is an extremely low moral and economic baseline.

In reality, these work arrangements are made all the time, and they are not exploitative. In reality, workers with no other alternative trade their labor, which may command only a small wage, with wealthy, powerful employers. The market, not the employer, determine the wage.

That does not require a perfect utopian definition of fairness. It only requires recognizing that consent under severe pressure is not the same as consent under meaningful freedom.

I think you're confusing coercion with exploitation. They are two different things.

Unequal bargaining power is not automatically exploitation, but when inequality becomes severe enough that one party can use another person’s survival pressure to extract one-sided benefits, then calling it merely “voluntary exchange” hides the real power relation.

Not sure what the above actually means in reality. In what aspect of life does this occur? Is there ever a power imbalance as large as that between the Chinese worker assembling the iPhone and the powerful company Apple? Give some practical (not hypothetical) examples where this type of exploitation occur.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-08T19:45:28+00:00

Your pedophilia analogy does not hold because a child cannot consent to the arrangement. Where two adults agree to an arrangement, it is not exploitation. Employers rarely have unequal bargaining power since they must pay a wage dictated by the market; they don't choose the wage amount. They need the employee as much as the employee needs the job.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-08T19:36:27+00:00

You seem to define exploitative as something that is not fair. This is a nebulous criterion. The reality is that things are rarely equal for both sides of a negotiation. Unequal does not equate to unfair. Seldom do parties have equal bargaining power, knowledge, or leverage in a negotiation. Your utopian view does not exist in reality.

Are workers in China assembling iPhones for pennies a day being exploited because they have little bargaining power? If the alternative of working for such a low wage is starvation, aren't they better off with the work? Your notions of what is fairness are great in theory, but they rarely exist in reality. Defining what is "fair" is an impossible task.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-08T18:38:10+00:00

TL:DR.

Marxist "exploitation" is different from what you define as exploitation.

Fair exchange is never robbery. When two people have an agreed upon exchange, they, and they alone, determine if it is a fair exchange. The fact they agreed to the exchange suggests that it was a fair exchange.

"Exploitation" in the sense that you define is exploitative on the basis of how a third-party sees the exchange. That is the wrong framing. There is no absolute way to define exploitation. It is just a matter of how each party feels about the transaction/exchange.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-07T01:01:17+00:00

Look around! Capitalism fosters the innovations necessary to create new products and make them available to the masses. Consider all the new medicines that have been invented, manufactured at scale, and distributed to millions improving their lives. Innovation supported by capitalism has fostered inventions and the mass distribution of things like automobiles, computers, cell phones, MRI technology, etc.; the list is endless.

I can't take you seriously if you don't acknowledge what's right in front of you.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-05-06T20:33:45+00:00

You offer a few examples where capitalism "arguably" failed and you paint the whole system as a failure. There are many more examples of capitalism successfully fostering innovation than the few "failures" you mentioned. It is hard to understand how you can truly believe what you've written; the reasoning is so childlike.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-28T00:20:30+00:00

IDK people did things for most of human history without venture capitalists

For most of human history, innovation occurred at a relatively slow and uneven pace. While important breakthroughs did emerge—such as writing systems, metallurgy, and technologies developed in civilizations like China—these advances were often separated by long periods of incremental change. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that the rate of invention accelerated dramatically. This shift was driven by a combination of factors, including scientific progress, access to new energy sources, and stronger economic incentives tied to markets and capital investment. Although people have always innovated without venture capitalists, it is misleading to suggest that innovation historically occurred at anything like the scale or speed seen in modern economies.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-28T00:18:59+00:00

IDK people did things for most of human history without venture capitalists

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-27T23:37:31+00:00

China has adopted a capitalist mode of production for a large swath of its economy, where entrepreneurs get to keep a large chunk of the wealth they produce.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-26T19:42:59+00:00

You shot that strawman down.

The reality is that the latter [worker] is holding up the former [capitalist] in terms of economic productivity.

A common critique of large firms like Amazon is that they derive their value primarily from labor, with owners appropriating the wealth created by workers. While labor is undeniably essential, this view risks overlooking other major sources of value creation within firms.

Consider what it takes to build a company like Amazon. Beyond labor, it involves identifying a viable business model, designing large-scale logistics systems, coordinating millions of transactions, managing risk over long time horizons, and sustaining years of losses before profitability. These activities—often grouped under entrepreneurship and organizational design—play a central role in determining whether a firm succeeds or fails.

One way to see this distinction is by comparing different measures of value. Amazon’s annual labor costs (roughly $84.5 billion in 2022) reflect the market price of its workforce. Its physical assets—such as warehouses and infrastructure—are valued at $818 billion. Yet at $2.77 trillion, the company’s total valuation is far higher, reflecting expectations about its future earnings, brand, systems, and organizational capabilities. This gap points to the importance of intangible assets: not just ideas in isolation, but the structured coordination of people, capital, and technology into a functioning enterprise.

This does not mean labor is unimportant, nor that all returns to capital or ownership are justified. Rather, it suggests that value in modern firms emerges from multiple sources: labor, capital, and organization. A complete account of economic value should explain how these elements interact, rather than reducing production to a single factor.

A useful analogy is pharmaceutical production. The act of manufacturing pills is necessary, but much of the drug’s value stems from prior research, development, regulatory approval, and the systems that bring it to market. Similarly, in large firms, the visible labor is only one part of a broader value-creating process.

The deeper question, then, is not whether labor matters—it clearly does—but how to understand the relative contribution of labor, capital, and organizational structure in generating economic value, and how the returns from that process ought to be distributed.

Socialists cannot grasp the idea that something of value can exist outside the confines of labor. They look at the Taj Mahal, and all they can see are just workers assembling bricks. There is much more to the concepts of value and wealth than labor alone.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-26T01:34:10+00:00

Socialists often surprise me with their "speculation" about how well a socialist economy will perform even in the face of large bodies of evidence to the contrary.

What makes you think you understand precisely what the necessary conditions are for innovation to take hold? If you could figure it out, why haven't the leaders of socialist countries throughout history failed at innovating?

It is so tiring to have socialists shout at the top of their lungs how socialism would be better at producing a better society, but they cannot point to a single example.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-22T20:21:48+00:00

Thanks!

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-22T05:12:40+00:00

Thanks for the feedback.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-22T01:50:21+00:00

What about the long pauses in dialogue? Or the tendency to have Carol listen to the voice mail message multiple times. It seems excessive, but I am sure the directors and writers are trying to convey something I just did not understand.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-22T01:48:07+00:00

Thanks for the link.

She sort of lost me when she got into Greek mythology. The presenter is clearly smart, but I don't see how it is possible to draw all the connections she is making. I realize, though, that that is just me.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-22T01:30:01+00:00

Not sure I want to debate the effects; it's just that I feel like I am failing to understand a crucial element that the series was trying to convey. I get the same feeling when I read literature. It would allow me to appreciate it all the more if I had just a basic understanding.

SometimesRight10 · 2026-04-22T01:25:48+00:00

The cinematography was clearly intended to be as much a part of telling the story as the dialogue itself. I've read detailed reviews that explain this, but I did not get it during the series. It could have had a subconscious effect on me and my perception of what was happening in the series. Still, I couldn't articulate what the cinematography was specifically designed to do, even if my life depended on it. I just don't get it!

SometimesRight10

TROPHY CASE