Americans – including many Republicans – are losing faith in capitalism

bediger4000

This headline indicates we should feel surprise that Republicans are losing faith in capitalism. That's a little odd, given the abrupt reversals of policy preferences we've all seen since 2017. "Law and order", free trade, free markets, low tariffs, personal responsibility, judicial restraint, checks and balances, the importance of character, all at least tacitly abandoned.

0cf8612b2e1e

Nothing quite dampens your belief in hard work paying off when you see an openly corrupt government self-dealing billions of dollars.

chermi

People losing track of history. No system will be perfectly for everyone, ever. One system has helped the most people ever in history. Fix what's broken, don't switch to something already proven worse. I never even experienced the shitty systems, but sometimes I feel some sort of immersion or shock therapy is needed to remind people. We have evidence. People have suffered and died to generate that evidence.

api

We have socialism for the rich, so why not for the poor? Edit: wanted to make this a little less low-effort so here's how I see us having socialism for the rich: Taxpayer-funded research being transferred directly to private companies, often with little to no compensation back to the government or taxpayer, and with all profits from this R&D being privatized. The entire Internet is an example of this. SpaceX getting decades of NASA research almost for free (plus contracts) is an example. Pharma companies privatizing taxpayer-funded university research. Endless examples. This one is a huge transfer of wealth, usually to people who don't need it. The old system (until the 1980s) was that those people pay it back through taxes, but they've successfully removed that part, so now we pay for the R&D and they keep the profits. The whole "too big to fail" phenomenon and bailouts. 2008 really showed this clearly, and it hasn't gone away. Meanwhile ordinary people are not too big to fail and will not be bailed out. Open regulatory capture, now institutionalized through a system that looks very pay to play. Direct government subsidies to companies that absolutely do not need it, such as state and local government offering huge "incentives" to get data centers that don't generate much local employment. These are basically handouts to the already rich. Tax cuts on things like real estate and capital gains and increases in consumption taxes like sales taxes and tariffs. All consumption taxes are regressive, meaning the poor pay a higher percentage of their income to them (because a higher percentage is consumption) than the rich. Tax cuts on property taxes and investments benefit the wealthy more than the poor. ... and so on. At this point simply flattening the system and making it neither progressive nor regressive would be a net move in the progressive direction. The current system is regressive. It's socialism for the wealthy paid for by everyone with privatized gains and socialized losses.

cregy

i lost faith in CNN way before. Why is politics/ communism being pushed on hacker news? You have to know, government is incredibly inefficient, so indifferent it can barely do its basic work. When you put it in charge of the details of the economy, everything breaks down, basics disappear, people starve. And then they start arresting people complaining about it, and they build walls so you can't escape. It has all the benefits of being in prison.

frogperson

I think I'm losing my faith in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the general rule of law more than I'm losing faith in capitalism. Capitalism is working as designed, all the money flows up. The rule of law is not working as designed. The rich have clearly different rules than everyone else.

effed3

Some faiths can survive only putting apart real facts, so treating capitalism or socialism like 'faiths' can bring to disasters, history docet, these things are only ideas, tools, models, not matter of faiths, and when real facts will begin to show up, the faiths will crumble, but ideas stands.. If surviving is adapting, changing as needed, actually the very few winning the greatest lottery in the world and history are very reluctant to agree to help change the rules, even minimal reasonable changes, because they have no needs actually. But when needs will rise, maybe; but there is enough time? This is the bigger doubt for me.

laughing_man

There has been a sustained anti-capitalist propaganda campaign in the last few years, so this isn't surprising. Most people are sheep.

bad_username

Ah yes, CNN, the trusted and unbiased source on capitalism, and especially republicans.