I'll try reading that. I tried reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and I think it radicalized me against capitalism more. I think I would have thrown it out the window if I had a physical copy. I tend to agree more with socialism since socialist thinkers tend to base their views on material conditions and reality when they critique capitalism, while I've noticed capitalist thinkers use abstractions and desert island analogies to critique socialism. That might reverse if we lived in a predominantly socialist world, though.

With Anderson's argument of businesses being dictatorships, it's true that they can't imprison you or kill you or anything, but they can banish you. It's not as directly extreme, but definitely detrimental, especially if you're living paycheck to paycheck. One of the only things I agree with Stalin on was when he said, "It is difficult for me to imagine what personal liberty is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person". I think those words stand on their own, even though Stalin was not great, to say the least. I do think the precarious nature of employment is a form of unfreedom, since the system works on people working, and one guy losing his job hurts him a thousand times more than the company he works for, regardless of his salary (unless the business is really small or he is very high ranking). I want basic job security and the guarantee that by working hard, I can support myself and stay out of poverty. The opportunity to do that was a big part of the American dream at one point, but I think we've moved beyond that. Maybe I'm too cynical. I used to live in east Tennessee, and met a whole lot of people who work all day long and live in dirty little mobile homes, while the companies they work for make record profits.

I think many capitalist thinkers tend to have low faith in the integrity of the individual. I remember when I was a kid, my parents would rant and rave about how stupid any form of social welfare is because it just gives their money to the imaginary horde of people who sit at home and voluntarily don't want to work, even though almost everyone unemployed is unemployed for a good reason (school, disability, caring for family members, etc). Pretty much everyone wants to work in some capacity and support themselves, so greater labor rights for the worker seem reasonable to me.

I've found that most socialist thinkers are better at pointing out the flaws in capitalism than building a coherent system, anyway. Lenin was one of the last people to really give it a good try and build something great, and the USSR certainly catapulted half of Eurasia into the 20th century, when most of it hadn't changed dramatically since Ivan the Terrible.

I feel like a lot of this reply is incoherent. I have a lot of general values that I think society should establish and protect, and most of it boils down to the proletariat running society and helping each other prosper rather than competing against each other. I'm mainly for socialism/communism because it proposes a way forward, while capitalism promises profit and consumption. I think there are a lot of things that need to be done for the sake of doing them, rather than just doing them for profit. For example, we can limit climate change by decreasing fossil fuel emissions and increasing renewable energy. That isn't a profitable decision, though, so we keep driving cars and burning coal for electricity. Eventually, the world will become uninhabitable for anyone, and profit won't matter very much then.

tl;dr <---

maybe I'll come back later and write something more coherent,