Do you like shovels? What an inane question. Capitalism is a tool. It works for some things and not for others. If you want to achieve the things it doesn't work for, you don't use it and use a better suited tool instead.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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It's our fault for "using capitalism" guys
I keep reading one or another form of "regulated capitalism is the goal" or "in small countries work" or "the problem is people". Regulated capitalism sounds great, but it is like saying "sanitised street pond". You can try and sanitise it all you want but in the end it is by its very design gonna be an undrinkable mess.
There is no great moment of the US. Even when you had wealth, it was on the backs of the rest of america, both the country's second class citizens, and the rest of the continent. You're obsessed with empires, meddling in other countries' governments, controlling resources in other countries, glorified violence, dominance, and individualist hero idealism. Even compared to other powers like China, count how many military bases you have vs the rest of the world. You've been historically bullies, obsessed with hustle, profit over life, status and personal achievement. Every time you have an increase of wealth is at the cost of someone else. The problem is you have lived so long in this bubble of entitlement that you have no idea how it impacts everything around you. Somewhere there's a totalitarian regime where they'll murder people with guillotines, and people will rush to buy stocks in companies selling sharp blades. There is no ethic in capitalism, capitalism does not care about people.
as an american anti capitalist, i agree with so much of what you just said and still want to punch you in the mouth.
we became obsessed with glorified violence after SAVING EUROPE FROM THE FUCKING NAZIS. we began to worship our individual heroes after PRODUCING SO MANY OF THEM WHILE FIGHTING THE FUCKING NAZIS. we got into meddling in the affairs of other countries because of our paranoia over preventing A GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR APOCALYPSE, a consequence of FIGHTING THE GODDAMNED NAZIS.
europe produced the problem and we solved it. the spoils of that war just happened to be the entire fucking world. sorry for winning. maybe we should all focus on KICKING NAZI ASS AGAIN.
A slight issue with your comment about meddling in affairs of others, that started long before the Cold war. Lookup what we did in Guatemala in the early 20th century and the Philippines. And Hawaii. Check out the book Overthrow A Century of Regime Change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_(book)
you're right. we've always had fat cat capitalists manipulating the system, but remember that FDR did a lot to curb that AND help win WWII. you can't just paint all of american history as a bunch of villains.
my entire point is that sometimes it takes a hero, and you can't win wars by being a pacifist.
Please be satire
it's the fucking truth. capitalism may have hijacked it all, but rugged individualism produced a form of military organization that allowed the US to be extremely effective and is now copied by the rest of the world.
if people hadn't gotten on boats to escape a rotting europe, there wouldn't have been an america with boundless resources to produce the military hardware to save your asses.
our history is very tainted, but you guys were the model for colonial expansionism. we were just better at it.
get off your fucking high horse and recognize that being the dominant brute can be the only thing that saves everyone from the other dominant brute. it's not about the power, it's what you do with it. let's combine our powers and kick some nazi ass again instead of endlessly bitching on the internet about how it's all somebody else's fault.
You keep saying you, as If I am European.
Get off your fucking high horse and recognize that the US didn't just valiantly roll in with a superior military force and win WW2. Russia was a much larger contributor to the collapse of the Nazis. The US's primary front wasn't even the one the Nazis were on. The US got fucking lucky that it was geographically extremely difficult for otherwise occupied forces to attack, and therefore didn't get bombed into rubble, and due to that had all it's industrial infrastructure intact at the end of the war so it could immediately turn it around to rebuilding all these places, and thus having a massive influx of economic activity by virtue of placement on the globe. The military we built was based on the French, however the thing our culture did inform was the Nazis, we were a wonderful case study on how to execute an ethnostate, and genocide.
Jesus fucking christ it is like you took the movie Team America: World Police as a historical reality.
The US got fucking lucky that it was geographically extremely difficult for otherwise occupied forces to attack, and therefore didn’t get bombed into rubble, and due to that had all it’s industrial infrastructure intact at the end of the war so it could immediately turn it around to rebuilding all these places, and thus having a massive influx of economic activity by virtue of placement on the globe.
which wouldn't have been possible without a certain kind of 'rugged individualism'.
but you're right. russia fought and bled far more to defeat the nazis. credit where credit is due. both the US and russia are bullies. there will always be a bully. BE THE BULLY AND YOU GET TO DECIDE THE FATE OF THE WORLD. be a pacifist and somebody else will tell you how it's going to be. wake up.
The reason we got here wasn't "rugged individualism". It was part of a large, long effort, to find a better path to india. We weren't even the first Europeans that made it here. The reason we kept coming here is because aristocrats demanded people go there, and colonize to expand their empires. The reason the US and Canada aren't in a state more like Israel, is that the people we colonized had little defense to the diseases we brought. In fact, Desoto's campaigns to find more precious metals in the Appalachians, where he killed, raped, and enslaved his was through the region, in the name of Spain, happened long before the first solid colonies developed here, and this triggered an apocalyptic event to the people living their from the disease that the Spanish spread.
This bully theory is horseshit, and reducing reality down to a binary of you are either a bully or a pacifist is fucking stupid. Bullying is how to garner thin, short-term, control. People get tired of the bully, and turn on them, and the bully finds out it is now all alone when everyone is turning on them. That or everyone else grows and progresses their lives, while the bully stays as they are, and just fades into irrelevance.
you make salient points but so do i, and as you said, the truth isn't exactly binary. maybe we're both right. maybe we're both wrong. the fact remains that the tool that makes the change is raw power in whatever form it takes. you either wield it or someone wields it against you.
i'd love nothing more than to participate in a big old kumbaya love fest, but i can't do that until the goddamned sociopaths are in the ground.
Capitalism requires consistent growth and most non-economists think it should be left unregulated. However I distinctly recall one person recently who pushed to add government controls and even said they didn’t care about the stock markets and what companies felt was best, and instead were doing what they felt best benefitted Americans.
So why is no one asking Trump the same question when he’s clearly going against (American) capitalism?
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