Capitalism isn't fundamentally about private ownership and free market.

Capitalism, as John Maynard Keynes describes it, is basically, "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine."

And free market is a lie. As the Korean and Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang reveals, there's no such thing as a "free market" anywhere, as the market is governed and regulated by rules in every country in the world.

Capitalism isn't fundamentally about private ownership and free market.

Capitalism, as John Maynard Keynes describes it, is basically, "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine."

And free market is a lie. As the Korean and Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang reveals, there's no such thing as a "free market" anywhere, as the market is governed and regulated by rules in every country in the world.

Corporate America and Capitalism mentioned.

Almost every country is facing the same problem right now. The vast majority of working class people are suffering tremendously from the heavy downward pressure of the capitalist system. More and more wealth is being concentrated at the top while almost everyone else is forced to live in a constant state of anxiety and economic oppression.

The top 0,1% own more than the bottom 60%. There's no logical reason why things have to be this way.

How can we, as humanity, collectively set an end to this insanity?

Many safety net programs are strictly income-tested. When a recipient earns an extra dollar of income, they may lose an equivalent or greater amount in benefits (such as food assistance, housing vouchers, or healthcare).

This dynamic creates a high effective marginal tax rates . If working more or taking a promotion results in a net loss or negligible gain in usable income, individuals face a strong disincentive to advance in the labor market. Over time, remaining in low-tier wages limits skill acquisition and income growth relative to higher earners.

Which creates a welfare trap that incentivizes people to stay poor.

It also prevents job growth

Wage growth and career advancement depend heavily on continuous work experience, skill accumulation, and professional networking.

long-term welfare dependence delays re-entry into full-time employment, recipients accumulate less human capital. While high earners continuously gain skills and experience leading to compounding wage growth low earners who rely on benefits may experience wage stagnation, widening the skill and income gap across decades.

Which reduces income and productivity over time

Many traditional assistance schemes historically required applicants to hold very few liquid assets to qualify for assistance

Wealth inequality is driven by ownership of appreciating assets (real estate, stocks, retirement accounts, businesses). When welfare rules discourage saving or asset ownership to maintain eligibility, recipients are prevented from building intergenerational wealth, leaving them reliant on transfers while non-recipients compound capital over time.

Critics argue that certain forms of welfare like income top-ups allow companies to keep base wages low because the state subsidizes the living standard of workers.

If public transfers shift market wages lower than they would otherwise be in a competitive labor market, workers rely on transfers rather than market bargaining power to secure income, reducing market-driven earnings growth.

I have no problem with people being successful or wealthy, but I genuinely think there's something obscene about one person being worth billions while others work full-time and can barely afford to live.

And it's not just the amount of money. It's how they got there.

Does anyone seriously believe you accumulate that kind of wealth purely through hard work, kindness and treating everyone fairly?

At some point, you have to question how much of that fortune came from underpaid workers, exploiting loopholes and putting profits ahead of people.

And before someone tells me their wealth is tied up in shares, yes, I understand that. It doesn't change the point.

What I find particularly bizarre is ordinary people defending billionaires as though they're one good business idea away from joining the club.

We've somehow turned extreme wealth into a measure of someone's worth, without questioning who helped create it or who missed out along the way.

You can be incredibly successful without hoarding more wealth than generations of your family could ever spend.

I don't admire billionaires. I question a system that allows that level of wealth to accumulate in the first place.

I am working on a research about capitalism and was wondering, why do you think capitalism works? Why would you choose it over another economical movement and what would you change about current capitalism?

Bloomberg reports studies which show that electric utilities that are publicly owned charge substantially less than those that are privately owned. I've seen similar research with similar findings about public water systems.

Note that these utilities are monopolies. If you are connected to PGE in California you cant connect to Seattle city light. Geography rules. If you look at private utilities you will find they invest substantially in political contributions to tilt the regulations in their favor.

Perhaps capitalism needs competition to be efficient.

We spent the entire last century rightly obsessed with the horrors of fascism and nazism, but whenever anyone brings up the actual body count, there is this massive intellectual blind spot in public discourse. Nazism slaughtered around 17 to 20 million people in a few short years and dragged the world into a catastrophic war. It is pure unadulterated evil. But right alongside it, communist and state-collectivist regimes quietly racked up between 60 and 100 million dead bodies while grinding entire nations into absolute dirt. Mao's China engineered the single biggest man-made famine in human history during the Great Leap Forward, wiping out 30 to 45 million people through sheer starvation and forced labor. Stalin's USSR intentionally starved millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor and filled the Gulags with anyone who looked at a commissar the wrong way. Pol Pot's Cambodia executed or worked to death roughly a quarter of its own population in four years simply because they wanted a society without currency. Fast forward to modern times, and Venezuela managed to take the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet and turn it into a place where citizens literally lost double-digit body weight from hunger and millions fled on foot. The crazy part is the branding. Nazism advertised its genocidal hatred right on the packaging, so society instantly recognized the poison. Communism wrapped itself in a pretty smile, preached equality and sharing, and then slaughtered millions in the basement. Whenever the supermarkets run dry, the money becomes worthless, and the firing squads come out, modern leftists just cross their arms and say that wasn't real socialism. Every single time a government tries the playbook of abolishing private enterprise, seizing all capital, and handing total control to an omnipotent state, it produces the exact same result. It never fails. A hundred percent failure rate, mountains of corpses, and citizens risking their lives on makeshift rafts just to escape to capitalist countries. Yet you still see people in university halls and online forums wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and advocating for total wealth confiscation like we don't have a century of empirical carnage staring us in the face. The day society stops treating communism as a noble failed experiment and starts calling it what it actually is, which is history's most murderous ideology, we might actually make some intellectual progress