Why do people honestly hate capitalism so much now?

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Even when I was at my unhealthiest and my monetary income was $150/mo I didn't take anything I didn't earn (no welfare) but mostly because I felt like if I signed those papers I'd be giving up so refused.

The thing is, people do work for their money - it's simply that they're not being paid what they've earned. Too many people are being paid peanuts for wages while the boss/owner/shareholders take the lion's share of what the worker bees' labour earns the company. These have gotten to such extremes in the USA that something's gotta give.. hence many predictions that the USA is about to enter it's biggest labour movement in over half a century. Many industries will see unionization drives. That's what happens when you're still paying people $7.25/hr in 2023. Or some other very low wage, $10-12 or whatever. Like who in the USA can live on $14k/year for full time work? People are being exploited, pure and simple.

Even the $15.65cdn/hr min wage in BC is too low to be liveable. People survive, but everything is obscenely expensive here so they are very, very, poor.

There wouldn't have to be calls for redistribution of wealth if it was distributed more fairly when it was created - by fair wages. There wouldn't have to be calls for redistribution of wealth if high income earners were taxed at rates they have been previously, which encouraged spending, investment, hiring more people, R&D etc in order not to just pay it to the tax man. But instead things have shifted to the ownership class taking all the loot and now the pendulum has swung too far and the plebs are rightfully pissed.

In my experience landlords are a mixed bunch. They certainly don't all rake in loads of profit, and some of them are quite helpful when the tenant has problems with the house. Others can be quite horrible.

I suppose there's an idea in socialism that it's plain wrong for a private individual to own more housing than they need to live in, and to try to use the spare housing to generate an unearned income stream. Too much like the feudal landed gentry owning an entire county and collecting taxes off their tenants while giving little or nothing in return. And tenants can be in a poverty trap where they'll never be able to save enough to buy their own home because the money is going out as rent. At least if you own your home outright, you've got one less problem if you lose your job. But houses occasionally need repairing, which is expensive, so the owner isn't necessarily much better off in the long run. Tenants can be evicted or priced out of their homes, owners can't. That security is worth something. I never could agree with the socialist idea that nobody should own their homes, that we should all be council tenants. Councils and housing associations are no better than private landlords in my experience. They might not be allowed to make a profit (on paper), but that doesn't make them great people to rent from.

So for me it all depends on the individual landlord. I'd welcome new laws to stop the bad actors and to render an unearned income stream impossible, because I don't like this idea of individuals getting their wealth to "work for them" instead of working themselves, but the law can be a horribly blunt instrument, and nobody ever stops to consider the damage it does to specific individuals who were doing no harm. The due diligence required to look properly into individual cases is usually too much bother for the system to concern itself with.

I never much understood this fixation on this tiny segment of self-described socialists. Why fixate on people who are only into socialism because it is trendy? It's low-hanging fruit. What would you say then to those people who are socialists because they suffer in those same sweatshops? What do you say to those people who decide they're fed up with being treated like pack animals? "Just work somewhere else."? As if people can afford to just ditch a job that leaves them with almost no savings, in a country with minimal social safety nets; and as if there are actual opportunities for work that actually pays better which would actually hire them? The naivety on display from many capitalists boggles the mind sometimes.

It's this strange Morton's fork where, to the anti-socialist, no one can be a socialist for valid reasons. If you are a working class socialist, then you're just self-concerned and last. If you are a middle or upper class socialist, you're just virtue signaling and you don't actually care about the working class.


Another strange assumption that unskilled labor is so much less valuable than skilled labor. Both yield products people want or need, so why act as if one group deserves miserable poverty while the other does not? The idea of unskilled labor is something of a myth in itself. Who is unskilled exactly? A farmer? A mechanic? A cook? A construction worker? A custodian? You think any random Tom, Dick, and Larry can be grabbed off the street and immediately do the job just as well as someone with years of experience? Ridiculous. The only reasons those jobs are looked down on us because they are effectively still viewed as peasants' work. It's an attitude so backwards that it borders on medieval.

No one says the jobs are necessarily easy, but there is definitely a huge variance in skill and training required for many jobs.

Someone can be trained to be a janitor in a matter of days, whereas becoming a mechanic or electrician typically requires a 4-5 year apprenticeship.

Some jobs are low skilled, others are high skilled. Even on a construction site there are general labourers that just lift and move things or sweep floors etc, then some have skilled labourers that assist with more complex tasks like building tree fences etc, and then skilled tradesmen and their apprentices that do very specific tasks that take years to learn.

Is what it is, IMO. I didn’t want to be stuck doing the hardest physical labour for the lowest pay so I apprenticed a trade. I haven’t officially completed my apprenticeship, but there is no red seal for it and no one cares so long as you’re Good at it. The only place that cares is our commercial union and the ITA (Industry Training Authority) for official hours logged and training completed to determine union wage scale. But for doing my own contracting it doesn’t matter. The quality of my work is better than many Journeyman’s so w/e I can just post an ad and do my thing and make Good money doing it.

Not so much if I hadn’t decided to learn a skilled trade. Then I’d be stuck just lifting heavy things for a fraction of the pay vs doing higher value finishing work for sometimes 4x+ the pay.

I love capitalism despite its flaws.But then again I have reasons to favor capitalism because my parents are multi-millionaires and I have a lot of money in the stock market for retirement and I am a trust fund baby.

I think people are mostly frustrated with being stretched too thin. It can be very difficult to pay bills. In the US, at least, a hospital stay can completely wreck you financially if you're not insured.

People are angry at capitalism because they see this (not necessarily inaccurately) as the excess of a system that's devoted to economic growth at the cost of sustainable living. I think if we pull back some of these excesses, people wouldn't be as angry.

Also, people are less likely to know about how awful communist regimes actually were. I've met survivors and the relatives of survivors, and have listened to their stories. This makes it impossible for me to sympathize with communists. Which is not to say that capitalism is better, since it also has many horrific abuses. But communism is so tainted with its history that I won't consider it as an alternative. We should try to be better instead of just switching to a different flavor of awful.

(For what it's worth, I acknowledge and respect the distinction between full state communism and various levels of socialist policy, democratic socialism, etc.)

The biggest issue is climate change. Mass production and consumption looks to be creating an unsustainable situation. This means that we may have to drastically restructure our economy in order to survive. People are suspicious of capitalists who want to continue doing the same old thing because we may be reaching the limits of that (or have already gone past them). This is also another reason some people hate capitalism, and I don't consider them wrong for doing so.

I think the best answer is to simply introduce more socialistic aspects (government healthcare, improved minimum wage, environmental regulations) while we switch from a growth mindset to a sustainability mindset. If we get to that point, we'll see how things look and move on from there. This is all much easier said than done, of course.

Canada is a whole lot closer to this than the USA. Americans don’t have to go shopping very far to find a better system to implement and build upon.. it’s simply that those in power do not want to because it doesn’t serve them and their corporate interest friends.

I would consider becoming more like Canada in this respect to be a reasonable goal. The biggest ones, to me, are healthcare and environmental regulations.

No thanks. No, really.

The vast majority of westerners meet Maslow's basic needs (a roof over their heads and enough to eat, not being shot at and no famine/epidemic) When basic needs are not met as in France and Russia you had revolution that you speak of.

One way to look at the skilled vs. unskilled worker definition is how easy would one be replaced by automation. Robots and machines can be built to do many tasks, skilled or unskilled. The job that has the simplest task is usually the one who gets replaced first. The best way to protect your place/job is to become something that is hard to be replaced. Easier said than done. Even the most skilled jobs can fall to this future threat.

BTW - Sadly, I play a role in this situation. I fully intend on developing the next generation of advanced computer chip materials. The industrial connections that I have talked to are very excited to help push their development forward. AI would be developed to utilize their full potential is robots/machines. Those pieces may someday be used to replace me, but by then I will likely be gone and it will not matter. Do I feel bad about what that issue may do to some? Yes, but it will not stop the drumming sound of progress and time.

If not you then somebody else. We will all be replaced by AI eventually someday. We will simply spend 24-7 living out of home.

Not necessarily. If that were the case, you'd have had massive revolutions in places like North Korea or Zimbabwe. When people are struggling that much to even survive, they won't have the time or energy to organize an overthrow.

Unless the AI turns against us and we become the worker bees for it instead. Those deemed useless will likely become culled by the AI. If it learns human traits over time, that situation becomes a real possibility. Humanity might become extinct by our own design. I would prefer to not be the one that causes it to happen, but I cannot stop the process that is in play.

So you think eventually it will be like Wall-E where we just sit around and the machines and robots or whatever do the work?Will this happen within my lifetime?

Yes that's the movie I was trying to visualise.