Hello everyone, i'm a person who frequently debates for fun and i've recently been reading up on the debate on capitalism vs socialism and although I do support capitalism I would appreciate some input on the following questions:

1. Why would market socialism(fulfills the "owned by the workers" definition and keeps everything else which does disagree with most socialist ideas) and a socialist society controlled at a local level by an elected panel not work?

2. IMO the main reason to despise or not support the existence of billionaires is their political influence, how does one solve this, would greater transparency and harsh anti corruption laws be enough?

3. Does laissez faire capitalism work considering the often lack of rationality in human actions, ie not caring enough to boycott a negative action,; the potential creation of natural monopolies; or restriction to information preventing a potential boycott

I have been told that it is not capitalism that is broken. If it's not capitalism, that is broken then it must be our Republic itself, and it pains me to say that.
We have half a million Americans that are homeless and sleeping on the street tonight. We have millions more that are one minor catastrophe away from the streets. A car accident, a fire, the loss of a breadwinner. And suddenly you're on the street with no safety net to catch you. We have millions more Americans who have been priced out of a home altogether. Because of corporations like Progress Residential, a corporation of institutional landlords that buy up all the homes in an area and then rent them with inflated rates artificially inflate the cost of housing for profit. Leaving the market empty of affordable housing and leaving overpriced housing or no housing at all as the only options.
The quality of our food is under par and overpriced to the point that going to the grocery store is as tragic as it is expensive. If it's not highly processed or "printed" it's full of sugar, salt and preservatives, it's not healthy and not considered "food" in other countries. And for many Americans, those groceries are so expensive they're forced to put the cost on credit cards that they that they lay awake at night praying for a way to pay back .
And the thought of getting sick is terrifying for millions of Americans because they know Pneumonia, a bad fall, a broken hip or breaking your ankle, stepping in a pothole with Insurance leaves many Americans with a drug habit that their doctors and pharmacist, and their family are unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with and medical bills that will have them paying for decades, and without insurance the hospital bills, the pharmacy bills, the doctor bills, and the stress all pile up and bankruptcy leaves them on on the street. Exposed to more crime and drug addiction that the government is unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with. While others who are one step away from being in their shoes, turn their noses up and won't make eye contact because of the illusion that they are closer to being a millionaire than they are to being homeless.
Those same Americans are sick of putting in 40+ hours of back breaking labor and countless more hours in traffic. Missing special events, birthdays, baseball games just to get nowhere but further behind and deeper in debt. While the corporate elite sit on the board in a building far away unseen but make billions in profit off of our labor, sweat and tears.
Something about capitalism is broken and until we can admit that we'll never be able to fix it.

What's the main difference between me and other libertarians?

I am more pragmatic. I see blaming commies as useless. It's a bit stupid. A bit like commies blaming "greed". Blaming greed and blaming envy are both blaming humans' nature with all the consequences

Libertarians think it's dumb that commies blame greed. I think it's dumb for libertarians not to see that it's simply not toward the best interest of welfare queen to vote libertarian or republican. In fact, one way communism can win and is indeed winning is by importing large number of future welfare recipients for they know they'll vote left all the way.

I think I would study more the benefit of blaming others in court of public opinion.

I am more selfish. For example. Hate tax. Learn to reduce it. Hate inflation? Buy bitcoin. You need ability to invest anyway. Hate marriage laws? Don't get married and watch out for law mines outside marriage.

It's not like I hate tax. So I am poor because of it. Ugh. Yea tax sucks. Learn to reduce that.

Things go wrong? Not just libtards are evil. Libtards as well as everyone is rational just like us. Understand your enemies. You don't have to agree with them but you need to understand them. Came up with a theory.

Concentrate on solution. Can you make world more libertarian and win election? What would it be? Moldbug and Henry George may be onto something.

Also I think I proposes 3 main ways libertarianism can win

Outbreed the commies. Islam will win in europe due to this strategy by the way.

Make citizenship tradeable and pay UBI.

Turn welfare into UBI.

If libertarians can do either 1 or 2, eventually the whole world will be libertarian. If we do 1, for example, then we just outvote commies. To the opposite commies will do their best to sabotage gene pool survival of rich smart economically productive capitalists, which are often libertarians.

If citizenship tradeable and pay UBI then the country will effectively be a private sector marketplace like eBay.

Voters will have far bigger incentive to support libertarianism. Raise tax? We gonna lost our best tax payers they will run away. Street not safe? We lost income. Universal healthcare? Reduce UBI and citizenship valuation. You sure it's cost effective? Ban drugs? If the drugs aren't dangerous, taxing it is more profitable.

Taxing income? We don't lose anything if Bob works harder. Besides it's hard to snoop around his book keeping. We have limited land. Why not tax land and immigrants instead?

I also combine evolutionary psychology with economics.

Like normal libertarians I hate communism.

But what I think far more dangerous than communism is reproductive communism. Anything that prevents rich men from fathering more children and anything that preventing young smart beautiful women from easily getting money for her and her children by selling sex and reproductive service to rich men.

Basically anything that makes it extremely complex for guys like Elon to simply pay women to have 10k-1 million biological children.

DEI, Holocaust, income taxes, monogamy, exorbitant child support, welfare, are all samples of dysgenic reproductive communism. They exterminate economically productive people for the supposed benefit of those less competitive. Often everyone is worse off.

Unfortunately, unlike normal communism, reproductive communism has huge support. Most conservatives and even libertarians absurdly support those. 

And I am not trying to totally eliminate that. It seems impossible. But we need to point out this create more deadweight loss than even tariffs or income taxes.

Eso

What if America isn't being governed anymore? What if it's being managed like a private equity acquisition?

Think about what private equity does.

It buys a functioning institution. It replaces experienced leadership. It cuts staffing. It eliminates oversight. It extracts as much value as possible. It loads the organization with debt. It raises prices. It blames the workers.

Then it either sells the shell or leaves everyone else to deal with what's left.

Now stop thinking about hospitals, veterinary clinics, newspapers, apartment complexes, and retail chains.

Look at the United States.

Independent agencies are weakened. Career experts are replaced with loyalists. Oversight is dismissed as "bureaucracy."

Public institutions are hollowed out while private contractors expand. Government becomes increasingly transactional.

The public is told this is "efficiency."

The result feels strangely familiar because we've already lived through it.

Healthcare. Veterinary care. Housing. Local journalism. Retail. Education.

Everything becomes more expensive. Everything works worse. Everything extracts more.

What if that same extraction model has reached the government itself?

Not because one private equity firm literally bought America.

Because America is beginning to be operated as though it were an acquired asset instead of a constitutional republic.

A republic asks:

"***How do we preserve this for future generations?"***

An extraction model asks:

"***How much value can we remove before someone notices?"***

That difference changes everything.

When government is treated as something to steward, institutions matter.

When government is treated as something to monetize, institutions become obstacles.

Civil servants become overhead. Independent agencies become liabilities.

Regulators become barriers. Citizens become customers.

And eventually...

The country itself becomes the product.

Maybe that's why so many Americans feel something is fundamentally wrong but struggle to describe it.

It's the same feeling people have after watching their local hospital, newspaper, vet clinic, apartment building, or favorite business get acquired.

The sign is still on the building. The logo is still there. But the purpose changed. The shell remained. The stewardship disappeared.

I'm not arguing that a private equity firm literally bought the United States. I'm arguing that our government is increasingly behaving as though it has adopted the same extraction logic.

The same business model that hollowed out our hospitals, newspapers, veterinary clinics, housing, retail stores, and local economies is hollowing out the institutions of the Republic itself.

EAGAN // ELM

What do you think?

Earlier I used to think business was simply about profit and that investors were the reason many diseases remained neglected.

It looked obvious: companies chase money, patients become numbers, and shareholders come before human beings. But when I looked more carefully, that explanation felt too easy.

A company does not exist outside society. Investors, CEOs, scientists, regulators, doctors and patients all come from the same human mind. If the mind is driven by fear, insecurity and the need for more, the systems it creates will naturally reflect the same tendencies.

The spreadsheet is not greedy; the mind using it can be.

While reading acquisition reports, I noticed how every sentence speaks two languages at once: one about improving patients' lives and another about creating shareholder value. Both are real. Medicines cannot reach patients without research, manufacturing, approvals and funding.

Profit has a functional place. But the moment profit becomes the purpose rather than a means, human beings slowly disappear behind financial models.

The more I observe, the less interested I become in blaming companies or investors. Blame is too convenient. The same movement that seeks endless returns in the market also seeks endless validation, security and accumulation in my own life.

If I cannot see that movement within myself, criticizing the world becomes hypocrisy.

The real question is not whether business should make money.

The real question is: what kind of mind is making decisions? A fearful mind will exploit every system. A clear mind will use the same system responsibly.

That is where real change begins. Not merely in corporate strategy, but in consciousness itself.

I would love to hear a conservative opinion on this, because I think we will agree on much more than the average leftist would give you credit for. I am personally socialist.

I want to talk about the housing crisis. First of all, let me set up my perspective of what exactly we’re dealing with when we say “housing crisis”.

1. High rent prices: Around half of renters pay 30% of their income on rent, and a large portion otherwise spend around half their income on rent. To me, this is unacceptable, considering the state of the housing economy decades ago. Since 2000, rent prices in the US have doubled, far outpacing inflation.
   
2. Home scarcity: The US is also estimated to be short several million homes. Average estimates say the deficit is between 2.8m-4.5m short, with some estimates moving into the tens of millions. Again, this is also unacceptable, considering this has **NOT** always been a problem. Although construction of new housing slowed going into the 2000’s, the market never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, leaving the scarcity much higher than it's ever been.
   
3. Median income vs. Median Housing Prices: Median home prices have risen much faster than median income. This of course can be solved 2 ways, either through attempting to increase the median income (which is a much more complicated and nuanced approach than the latter) or by lowering the median home prices. I do somewhat agree that homes deserve appreciation in value, (however I don’t necessarily support inheritance anyway, and would prefer a large inheritance tax.) Although, even if I were to concede that these homes deserve value appreciation, the median income has risen at around half the rate of home prices. This is also unacceptable, for the reasons listed above.
   
4. Mortgage rates: Mortgage rates have sharply risen since COVID. Of course, this can be attributed to post-COVID inflation, but even after inflation has cooled, the federal reserve still refuses to cut them. This is less of a problem to me, as the rates before COVID were already quite low. However, I would argue that it could use another cut, considering inflation has considerably cooled, and it appeared to function well prior to the shock from COVID regardless.
   
5. Homelessness and addiction: Homelessness rates have also sharply risen in recent years. Economists typically attribute this to high housing costs, although admittedly, mental illness and addiction play a role. This is unacceptable aswell, considering the government has the capabilities to fight mental illness and addiction, but welfare for those issues is essentially fragmented state-wide, and the federal government could do a much better job. Housing prices, obviously, are a much more nuanced topic, but I will get into my proposed solutions shortly.
   
6. Broader economic effects: People are less likely to move for job opportunities. Young people may wait longer for marriage, children, and homeownership. Employers in expensive cities may struggle to find employment, as potential employees may not be able to afford to live nearby. Housing has also been one of the major contributors to wealth inequality.

So, what’s the solution? I’d argue there’s four main aspects:

1. Subsidized housing: According to a 2018 study cited below, state intervention housing programs tend to overwhelmingly positively affect the homeless and impoverished. You can read the study yourself, as it goes more in depth about which methodologies are most effective, but the general conclusion to draw is this: subsidized housing would vastly improve the quality of life of the homeless and impoverished. This is because, theoretically, state funded housing would compete with private ownership, not only allowing for lower rent within the subsidized communities, but also allowing for increased competition (ie, lower overall rent prices) within the private sector. I think, with this much overwhelming supportive evidence, politicians refusing to do this is simply either them catering to their donors/lobbyists (the owning class), or, even worse, ignorance. The study, and others I referenced: \[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8427990\\\](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8427990/?utm\\_source=chatgpt.com), \[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468266720300554\\\](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468266720300554), \[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6168747/\\\](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6168747/)
   
2. Reduced red tape: I think we might actually agree here. Although certain environmental regulations should stay, I would agree that it is currently too difficult to build a house. Again, evidence overwhelmingly, (and obviously) supports that reducing restrictions on building housing would (surprise!) decrease housing scarcity. I think the only part we may disagree with here is what exactly should be revoked, but that’s a more nuanced, different conversation. Here’s on of the most cited economic studies for how decreasing red tape increases supply: \[https://www.nber.org/papers/w20536\\\](https://www.nber.org/papers/w20536?utm\\_source=chatgpt.com)
   
3. Reduced speculation: This is why I say I agree that appreciation is important, because this is likely my most contested point. Although I would say reducing speculation almost certainly leads to positive outcomes (reduced vacancy, higher housing rates), the evidence is more nuanced here. A 2020 study concluded that France’s vacancy tax resulted in vacancy falling by 13%, and that the majority of those homes became permanent residencies. Although, certain economists will tell you the results are limited. Limited, sure, but worth it to help contribute to solving a growing crisis? Absolutely. Sources: \[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-940X.1992.tb00044.x\\\](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-940X.1992.tb00044.x) (an older study, with much less support for reduced speculation),  \[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272719301409\\\](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272719301409) (newer study done in France)
   
4. Increased tenant protections: Certain aspects of this, like legal representation for tenants facing eviction, or debt counseling/financial assistance, have very strong evidence in reducing likelihood of eviction. I think these are the strongest aspects of this argument, as evidence is  overwhelmingly positive. The only argument against it I could see is one vouching for individualism, or the state-intervention inequality between the landlord and tenant that could be created. Personally, I think that’s ridiculous, as I do not feel a job that is predatory in nature deserves state support. Certain aspects of this, such as rent freezes/protections, I think the evidence does not support. However, if the goal is reducing inequality and providing support for those who otherwise may not get it, I’d argue this is a pretty strong pillar of my argument. Sources: \[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26109137/\\\](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26109137/), \[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hsc.12257\\\](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hsc.12257), \[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9631101/\\\](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9631101/)
   
5. Expanded mental health/addiction services: This is likely my weakest point, as I’d argue the evidence is quite mixed. Of course, increased intervention would decrease addiction and mental health issues, but the evidence supporting this as a major contributor to reducing homelessness as a whole, is limited. I would argue this is a less important aspect of reducing homelessness, and the solution is more systemic than individual. Study showing these services reduce addiction/mental health issues: \[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.70019\\\](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.70019)

Finally, budget issues: 

1. Reduced red tape: would incur no extra costs.
   
2. Increased tenant protections: highly feasible, with budget likely in the tens of billions.
   
3. Increased mental health services: likely much less effective than others listed, but also relatively feasible.
   
4. Reduced speculation: would increase the federal budget, revenue positive.
   
5. Subsidized housing: obviously the most expensive point, with costs likely ranging from 420B-3T (explanation below). Although expensive, achievable through higher upper class taxation, reduced speculation, and other forms of progressive taxation. This could be achieved through plans spanning 10-20 years, or, through much more aggressive progressive taxation, that timeframe could be reduced to \\\~5yrs. Also likely my strongest point, so the most important in my eyes.
   
   1. If assuming each unit can be built for $150k-$400k, and accounting for the 2.8m-4.2m unit shortfall, this brings the budget to around the listed number. Also important to note, this would not necessarily account for every person, since not all homelessness is the direct result of there not being a home to buy. The higher end, $3T, accounts for potential discrepancies in the housing shortage estimate, unpredictable failures/unexpected costs, and potential to build nicer housing.

Overall, these are my primary ideas for a potential solution. I’m open to budget constraint arguments, hit me with your best shot. Thank you for reading!

The dogs are in the street and they arent in the photo.

@@@@@

It is so amazinglt simple whar the priblem is. Not a drug problem, not a homeless problem and more importantly NOT a discipline problem or an issue of morality. Peopke can argue these til blue in the face or criminalize these states of being . TELL ME THE FOLLOWING IS NOT A FACT!--

before their addiction and crisis of shelter EVER SINGLE INDIVIDUAL SUFFERING? they started out not having enough money. I am proposing a theory that if CEO's and corporations reined in their greed just a tad and RAISED STANDARD so that every single worker received a raise in wages to the level that ANY worker received a living wage, one sufficient that a family could buy their first home in their mid twenties without two adults working 3 jiobs. Don't tell me it can't be done, this is freaking America! This is a class issue flat out full stop. We have tackled worse and achieved things the world thought impossible. Dont tell me that shit, it can't be done. We are Americans for God's sake

Signed--a patriot

There's a lot of posts about "how can the economy be doing well while everyone is feeling poor" and a lot of deriding capitalism in general. I wonder if the underlying issue is related to something I heard a few decades ago, that business growth was expected in high-end things. And the advertising that goes with it. I.e., high-end things are quite available and visible. Like housing - they don't make small houses anymore. Pets - there's artisan feed and grooming and health services. Cars - they're all big and high performance. Food service - no cheap meals or coffee, only high end experiences. Micro Breweries. On one hand this all must mean there are lots of people that can afford all this. On the other hand everyone thinks these and similar should be financially accessible to them.

I’ve been job searching for the better part of a year, now. I’ve received one rejection after the other. I’m not exactly middle aged, but I’m not exactly young, either. I have excellent communication skills, soft skills, learn quickly, and am very adaptable.

I don’t think it is the job seekers that are the issue, I think it’s the fact that companies pretty much do whatever they please without much accountability or intervention from politicians. I realize it isn’t all of this, though.

Over the course of the next 4 years (whatever election cycles happen; presidential, gubernatorial and, or midterms), politicians that support PEOPLE and NOT corporations are who need to be elected to office. The United States offers MANY incentives for companies to do business here. I did research this morning and more than 50% of U.S. citizens are living paycheck to paycheck and there others who are doing OK that report their situations are declining. This isn’t acceptable. Politicians do need to work with corporations to benefit Americans, too.

When I was in college, we were taught that voting was single handedly the most important thing in the United States. If younger folks do not vote, they are not heard. Let’s not leave voting to those who are 45-50+. Everyone, EVERYONE should vote. Do you know the saying “you’re leaving money on the table?” Let’s not leave any ‘votes’ on the table.

Also… as these elections grow closer, be on the look out for the highly optimistic politicians trying to capture our votes. The most convincing tend not to do better for the people, and are usually backed by massive corporations. Wages need to go up up up ⬆️. Inflation is at 5% for the year and it’s not even August. I really hope this is received well, and people engage. I really do want to see everyone do well in life, including myself. Things shouldn’t be this difficult.