Asklemmy

When you have a system that values profits over everything, it tends to (either by accident or design) exploit workers and destroy the middle class.

With capitalism, you’ll pay the absolute minimum needed to get workers, regardless of the value they create for the business and regardless of how much profit your business is making. You’ll collude with other businesses to keep wages down, because again that’s a way to increase profit. You WONT support any worker rights laws like weekends, PTO, benefits, minimum wage, etc.

You can argue that the free market takes care of itself, but we’ve seen that isn’t true. Companies constantly exploit customers and workers. They will raise prices and lower wages in ways that a pure “free market” theoretically wouldn’t allow.

Now this isn’t to say capitalism is all bad. I do think smart people and hard working people should be rewarded. But any sufficiently large system is going to have some corruption. I’d like to have a reasonable minimum standard of living for everyone before we run off and let capitalism give us multi-billionaires. If everyone was guaranteed enough for a decent standard of living, I’d be fine with the rest being as capitalistic as anyone wants. But we dont have that. Minimum wage is $7. Healthcare is shit and tied to employment. Etc. etc.