Capitalism

I don't care for it. Defining it using Marx's definition as the pursuit of more capital for more capital. ¹ I think that there's a lot of misconceptions of capitalism as a rosy academic picture where everyone is a rightous actor always acting in their own best interest, honestly and fairly. I don't think that view comports with reality, if everyone's only goal is to make more capital why wouldn't they do whatever it takes to get capital? If someone gets away with theft then isn't that just getting something for free? Then any money made on what was stolen is just more capital for them. What's stolen doesn't necessarily have to be a physical object, it could be time, labor, or even the environment. The non-physical things are much easier to steal, because they can be much more difficult to quantify and track. Maybe capitalism could be better if the non-physical things could be accurately tracked and valued, but we don't have that and I don't know that it could ever be done well.

Some companies using their size and power to push out and comsume smaller markets. This just tracks with capitalism because creating more capital is the only goal, without care or concern for the externalities of their actions.

flowchart TD
  start[Starting to get this working]
  final[Getting it to work]
  start -->|Pushing boulder up hill| final

Footnotes

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ section 4.2 Labor Theory of Value ↩