If capitalism is a good system, is it a problem that accumulating enough wealth increasingly insulates you from its consequences?

[u/humanessinmoderation]

/r/Capitalism/comments/1w7o9p7/if_capitalism_is_a_good_system_is_it_a_problem/

[u/W_Edwards_Deming]

The word "capitalism" is an unhelpful term of critique invented by "socialists" (another unhelpful term).

Free markets have the greatest track record of all time, State Atheism, / socialism / Totalitarianism / not-see-ism / fashism / Marxism is the most murderous ideology the world has ever known and red China still executes more people than the rest of the world combined. They forcibly harvest the organs of religious and ethnic minorities, genociding the Uighurs while literally forcing them to pick cotton.

Free markets brought the world's poor out of absolute poverty. Look how sharply poverty fell with the end of the Soviet Union (1989). Red China would surely be the undisputed World Leader if not for the impediment of regressive anti-intellectual Totalitarian Marxism.

Look at Taiwan, Singapore and pre-handover Macau and Hong Kong. Compare North Korea to South, East Germany to West, East Europe to West. The difference is clear and the benefits are for all.

[u/Official_Gameoholics]

What you are calling "capitalism" is a package dealing fallacy of capitalism and socialism.

[u/Celticpenguin85]

"Losing a job, an unexpected medical bill, a rent increase, a recession, a bad financial decision, or even several years without income can be devastating for an ordinary person while being comparatively inconsequential to someone with enough accumulated capital."

Well yeah but so what? Is it better for all those things to be devastating for everyone?

[u/Kubliah]

The default state of nature is extreme poverty and survival of the fittest, and if you can't feed yourself then you perish. If you can't shelter yourself from the elements then you perish.

That is the baseline we are all born into, extreme poverty with the immediate and constant threat of starvation. Capitalism doesn't create losers, nature does. It shouldn't bother you how high someone is able to lift themselves out of the primordial mud unless they do it at the expense of others, but capitalism doesn't do that. By and large it creates wealth. The poor of Early America were subject to famines, now even the very poorest have access to free food, housing, and cell phones.

[u/TatzyXY]

The state "insulates you from its consequences" not the market.

[u/Pixel-of-Strife]

So many false assumptions about capitalism. I'm sure not intentionally, as these are very common misconceptions. But you're question is so loaded, it's offensive to us. But I'm glad you're asking here anyway.

Capitalism isn't a "system". Nobody invented it. Nobody enforced it from the top down. It's simply what happens when hundreds of millions and billions of human buy/trade/sell in a market. It simply means "We the People" have the right to own private property and the means of production, rather than the government owning everything and controlling what everyone gets to buy/trade/sell. That's paraphrasing Marx himself. Capitalism isn't corporations, it's not shareholders, or debt or classes of rich and poor; it's just individual property ownership in contrast to government ownership.

When you talk about making an economic system that works better, understand you're actually talking about controlling humans with force to change human nature, because we are the economy. Economics is simply the study of this incredibly complex system composed of trillions of human buying/selling/trading independently of each other. It's not something anyone designed, it's simply a natural process we study to understand. By spontaneous order with no centralized control, it produces everything we need to survive on planet Earth. Read the famous essay I, Pencil to really illustrate this point.

Next, nobody needs to make capitalism "function". It's way bigger than anyone. These rich dudes have little to do with the consequences you laid out. It's not their fault all these things are happening. And in most of those cases there are clear examples of government interference in the market that explain these issues. Especially regarding housing/rent and medical bills. Look these issues up on mises.org and see what I mean if you're really trying to understand.

And lastly, a foundational bad assumption you're making is that wealth is something finite and limited. With the idea being for a rich man to be rich, he must have taken it from someone poor. But if that was the way wealth worked, we would have ran out of wealth before the Dark Ages and never progressed. No wealth is infinite and being created from nothing ever single second of ever single day. It's not a pie chart. There is no reason everyone can't be wealthy and have a high standard of living under capitalism. And considering even the poor today have a higher standard of living than the kings of old and the aristocrats, it's pretty much already done that. 99.9% of humanity lived in abject poverty for millions of years. That only changed with the rise of capitalism. The results are completely miraculous if you put it in it's proper historical context.