Capitalism, why are people against it?
It what makes America the most economically advanced country! Why prefer Socialism over Capitalism?
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TinyViolins · 31-35, M
When profit is the end goal, everything gets treated like a number. People, the environment, our health and well-being, etc. The competition to be the most profitable, or the pressure to give back to share-holders, creates a race to the bottom in terms of cutting-costs.
What it often means is that our time and contributions as employees are reduced to the lowest dollar amount the market is willing to offer, which far too often means many people have to struggle to get by in this devaluation. Wages have not kept up with productivity in decades, so the people at the top are getting richer from this rise in productivity while so many others are piling up at the bottom.
The environmental costs are also an externality driven by this pressure to maximize profit. Using cheap fossil fuels in lieu of more sustainable forms of energy is causing global temperatures to rise and directly contributing to more extreme weather, which inevitably kills people and destroys communities. Pollution, deforestation, ocean dead zones, smog, etc. are all factors that businesses fail to consider because it all amounts to lost profits. They are incentivized to not care.
Then you get to our health and well-being. Food products are often loaded with cheap corn syrup or sugar in order to become more addictive, which contributes heavily to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, among other things. News and social media sites are designed by algorithms to be as addictive as possible in order to maximize ad revenue and data collection, which has caused so many people to become addicted to screens, to outrage, and to self-righteousness. It's tearing the fabric of society apart and they don't care because it's highly profitable.
The problem with capitalism is that there is no incentive to care beyond what the market demands, and when these capitalist companies grow to be large enough, which they most often inevitably will as only a small number of companies own the majority of the products available for us to consume, they dominate the market and can set their own rules. It's good for them, but not so good for anyone else.
Without real competition, they have no reason to change what has been working for them, and that often comes at the cost of things that actually make life worth living.
What it often means is that our time and contributions as employees are reduced to the lowest dollar amount the market is willing to offer, which far too often means many people have to struggle to get by in this devaluation. Wages have not kept up with productivity in decades, so the people at the top are getting richer from this rise in productivity while so many others are piling up at the bottom.
The environmental costs are also an externality driven by this pressure to maximize profit. Using cheap fossil fuels in lieu of more sustainable forms of energy is causing global temperatures to rise and directly contributing to more extreme weather, which inevitably kills people and destroys communities. Pollution, deforestation, ocean dead zones, smog, etc. are all factors that businesses fail to consider because it all amounts to lost profits. They are incentivized to not care.
Then you get to our health and well-being. Food products are often loaded with cheap corn syrup or sugar in order to become more addictive, which contributes heavily to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, among other things. News and social media sites are designed by algorithms to be as addictive as possible in order to maximize ad revenue and data collection, which has caused so many people to become addicted to screens, to outrage, and to self-righteousness. It's tearing the fabric of society apart and they don't care because it's highly profitable.
The problem with capitalism is that there is no incentive to care beyond what the market demands, and when these capitalist companies grow to be large enough, which they most often inevitably will as only a small number of companies own the majority of the products available for us to consume, they dominate the market and can set their own rules. It's good for them, but not so good for anyone else.
Without real competition, they have no reason to change what has been working for them, and that often comes at the cost of things that actually make life worth living.
