Hi all,
I’m seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I’m wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I’m pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.
If this isn’t the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I’m happy to take this somewhere else.
Cheers!
You say that people at the bottom go with less and less, but that doesn’t seem to match what’s actually happening in the world.
People used to be able to afford homes, so yes, it definitely is happening.
Have you seen the housing market lately? Capitalism was great for the boomers pretty much in every developed country. Now millenials and zoomers encountered this ripe form of it where everything is consolidated under a massive corporate entity optimizing only for profit.
I remember even a couple of years ago renting a place straight from the owners who moved to someplace bigger and after a year they just said i can live there however long i’d like with a month notice. Same rent for five years. Now every year i renew my lease through an intermediate management company and every year they hike the rent.
Groceries are getting more expensive, ads are fucking everywhere and every news outlet lies or creates mostly sponsored shit. We are surrounded by soulless corporations and we “work” for them at our bullshit jobs providing nothing of value. Feeling down? Why dont you install a fucking subscription app for therapy.
Boomers had a fairly well regulated capitalism, which they benefited from greatly.
Then they deregulated it because they got theirs, so fuck everyone else.
The boomers were adjacent to the two generations that started the neoliberal disaster. Reagan and Thatcher and Friedman etc weren’t boomers. The Clinton and Bush jr crew enthusiastically joined in, but they didn’t start it.
There are enormous government pressures against new construction. That’s not capitalism at work it’s centralized economic planning suppressing the supply of housing.
Ummm. Im in bed right now with two construction sites nearby waking me up. The whole city is in cranes and development companies make a killing. Still a basic 40m² place costs as much as a house outside of the city cost 5 years ago.
There’s more overall for everyone, but the people at the bottom are getting a smaller and smaller share, and a lot of important things, like housing, not to mention with things like streaming, and online stores, we don’t really “own” most of the media we consume anymore, we just pay forever to rent it. Fast fashion and planned obscelescence means that our clothing is worse than what people used to have, and our machines don’t last as long, so we have to keep replacing both of those.
What we do have is designed not to last, and more meaningful, life-long purchases are out of reach. Meanwhile the people at the top of the pile who do literally nothing but “have wealth” sit around on their yachts blissfully ignoring the people starving to death on the streets.