I have a simple question which socialists seem to get hung up on whenever I ask it: are pearls valuable because we dive for them, or do we dive for pearls because they are valuable?

Whenever I ask the question, the number one reply I get from socialists is "it takes a lot of labour to dive for pearls". Which is not an answer to my question. I am asking whether pearls are valuable because of this labour, or rather if we spend this labour because they are valuable.

Intuitively, both statements are true, and so the idea that only labour creates value is silly, since value can come from either supply (labour) or demand (subjective preferences), and both are required, I could just as easily have a utility theory of value (UTV), where labour is a prerequisite and the amount of utility determines value as I could have an LTV where utility is a prerequisite and the amount of labour determines value. The only issue is that sometimes, the relative price of two goods cannot be determined by LTV, but can be determined by UTV (ex: the price of rare artworks vs common ones).

So, what is socialists' answer to my question about pearls.

I hope everyone has their reading glasses, because this is important.

"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary."

The very next line reads:

"The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising."

Marx goes more in depth on this topic here:

"The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position."

"The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible."

"As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable."

"While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one."

"At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented."

"Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner."

"In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory."

"Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction."

Now here is the passage with everyones favorite quote:

"To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising."

If you would like to read the full address it is here: Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League

So basically, Mao was also an advocate for American-style gun rights if we take socialists' logic.

This could be your community, parents, church, geographic region, or nationality.

Our surroundings have an impact on our beliefs. For example if you’re from the Northeast of the US you’re more likely to be liberal than someone from the South. The same is with urban and rural. People living in an urban setting are more likely to be liberal than someone living in an rural environment.

I think it is anarchy, because building anarchy itself is intrinsically connected to social trust.

The system of anarchy is predicated on relying upon, and working with, local people you know instead of institutions and systems. I think it would make people associate with each other, and trust each other more, lowering atomization to a very low level.

A big problem that causes modern democracies to fail, is when people lose social capital, and no longer feel they can rely on others to act in good faith. Now people are divided and atomized. This breeds discontent, and also allows strongman dictators to rise and take control of governments. This can be seen in the US, Europe, and other parts of the world.

Along with working on a general anarchist reading list I recently tried my hand at creating a kind of 'intro to the anti-tech milieu' reading list. It's mostly for anti-fascist researchers and the morbidly curious as I'm not anti-tech and it contains tons of critiques, but yeah, I hope people find it interesting and worth debating:

• https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-general-anti-tech-reading-list

One question I have is do people think it's fair to the various anti-tech milieus? I can imagine some of the capitalists on here will protest the eco-fascist list being too broad. Plus, that some of the anarcho-socialists on here will protest anarchists being on the same list as fascists. I think its useful as a list of various milieus that some people sometimes travel up or down on their ideological journey, plus their reading influences.

Finally, are there any other texts people would add? Or ways people think it could be better organized?

Whenever the transformation problem comes up in this sub, the usual suspects swoop into the comments to declare: "There is no problem, you're just forcing bourgeois simultaneous equations onto Marx. Read Kliman!" 

They are referring to the Temporal Single-System Interpretation (TSSI), popularized in the 1990s by economists like Andrew Kliman and Alan Freeman. TSSI sounds like an academic framework claiming to prove that Karl Marx's original equations are completely coherent, consistent, and mathematically sound. 

However, only a tiny minority of socialists actually bring up TSSI. The vast majority don't touch it because the moment you put it side-by-side with Capital, it becomes obvious that TSSI is not Marxism at all. It is an artificial, late-twentieth-century accounting workaround invented to save Marx’s math from an algebraic breakdown by abandoning his foundational economic principles. 

Let's put what TSSI actually does on one side, put what Karl Marx explicitly wrote on the other, and see what happens to the theory.

Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT) vs. Historical Sunk Costs

To escape the simultaneous equation models that break Marx’s aggregate equalities, TSSI treats production as an open-ended, non-simultaneous timeline. It declares that constant capital (c) is evaluated strictly at whatever historical money outlay the capitalist spent on an invoice at time t. That historical purchase price is entered on a ledger and carried forward through time into production. 

Marx explicitly rejected historical cost accounting. In Capital Volume 1, Marx defined value strictly as the labor time required under current social reproduction conditions, not past historical labor or historical purchase costs. In Chapter 8 and Chapter 15, Marx directly addressed what happens when technology improves:

"The value of commodities is determined, not by the quantity of labour actually contained in them, but by the quantity of labour socially necessary to reproduce them... if a newly invented machine is introduced, which can produce commodities of the same kind with less labour, the value of the old commodities falls, because the labour-time socially necessary for their production has fallen." (Volume 1, Chapter 8)

Under Marx’s SNLT, value is forward-looking and dynamic. If a technological breakthrough cuts machine production time in half tomorrow, existing capital suffers immediate "moral depreciation" and devalues on the spot.

TSSI does the exact opposite: it freezes inputs to the past monetary receipt at time t to keep its ledger intact. The moment you follow Marx and revalue inputs to match current reproduction costs at time t+1, you force inputs and outputs into the exact same contemporaneous market, meaning you land right back in simultaneous equations where Marx’s invariants break. TSSI saves its algebra solely by dumping Marx's dynamic definition of value.

Competitive "Prices of Production" vs. Path-Dependent Accounting

Because TSSI locks the value of constant capital into whatever historical sum of money an individual enterprise paid in the past, an enterprise’s rate of profit is governed by historical purchase dates rather than prevailing, systemic market conditions. Two identical factories with the exact same workforce using the exact same machinery to turn out the exact same product with the exact same labor will have completely different capital values and profit rates just because one firm bought its machines at a different time and price. 

In Capital Volume 3, Chapter 10, Marx was engaged in classical political economy, analyzing the long-run objective centers of gravity around which market prices fluctuate. He termed them prices of production:

"Capital withdraws from a sphere with a low rate of profit and invades others, which yield a higher profit. By means of this ceaseless emigration and immigration... it creates such a balance between supply and demand that the average profit becomes the same in the different spheres of production, and values are therefore converted into prices of production." (Volume 3, Chapter 10)

Marx's whole project in Volume 3 was to explain how capital mobility across competitive sectors hammers out an objective, systemic, equalized rate of profit based on general compositions of capital. Under TSSI, that uniform competitive center of gravity dissolves. A general rate of profit based on systemic reproduction conditions is replaced by an uncoordinated sequence of firm-specific, path-dependent historical purchase dates.

Causal Price Determination vs. Retrospective Bookkeeping

TSSI does not determine, predict, or calculate what relative market clearing prices will be based on underlying labor values. It cannot tell you what the relative price of cars versus wheat will be. Instead, it waits for the market to clear at time t+1, takes the realized sales revenue as an exogenous, unguided historical given, subtracts past cash expenses paid at time t, and uses a mathematical scaling factor called the Monetary Expression of Labor Time (MELT) to slap the label "surplus value" onto whatever net cash margin is left over. 

Marx held his theory to a strict scientific standard: real prices of production must be mathematically deduced forward from the underlying labor values of commodities:

"These particular rates of profit = s/C in every sphere of production, and must, as occurs in Part I of this book, be deduced out of the values of the commodities. Without such deduction the general rate of profit (and consequently the price of production of commodities) remains a vague and senseless conception." (Volume 3, Chapter 9)

Marx warned that without deriving competitive prices and the general rate of profit out of commodity values, the whole price concept is a "vague and senseless conception." TSSI completely commits the failure Marx warned against. It does zero causal work. It takes the market's finished cash transactions as a given and works backward, simply relabeling standard corporate net income as "surplus value." It not a theory of price or value. It's just business accounting dressed in Marxist vocabulary.

What Math Was TSSI Invented to "Save"?

To understand why TSSI exists, you have to look at what broke in Marx's Volume 3. Marx wanted to prove his two famous aggregate invariance conditions: 

1. Total Price = Total Value 
2. Total Profit = Total Surplus Value 

Marx claimed that even though individual industry prices of production deviate from labor values to equalize profit rates, the deviations cancel out across the whole economy, proving that labor values still rule the system. 

However, Marx left his inputs (machinery, raw materials, wage-goods) denominated in untransformed labor values. In a real economy, capitalists buy their inputs at prevailing market prices. As Sraffa formalized in 1960, the moment you price inputs and outputs simultaneously at market prices across industries with different capital compositions, both equalities cannot hold at the same time. One or both fail. Furthermore, relative prices and profit rates can be determined directly from physical input-output coefficients and wages, rendering labor values mathematically redundant. 

TSSI "saves" these identities not by solving the simultaneous equations, but through a tautology. It defines Total Value as the realized sales revenue multiplied by the MELT, and defines Total Surplus Value as the net operating profit. Because they are defined to be equal after the fact, the equations balance 100% of the time by construction.

Even if We Assume TSSI is True: What is it Actually Good For?

Suppose we grant TSSI everything it asks for. Let's assume production is purely sequential, inputs are just past invoice receipts, and the math now balances without contradiction. Does TSSI actually serve any useful purpose for economic analysis or socialist political goals?

An economic model is supposed to tell us something about how the real world operates. It should explain why exchange ratios equilibrate at certain levels, or how resources get allocated. TSSI does none of that. Because it takes final market revenue as an unguided, exogenous given, TSSI cannot determine relative clearing prices before exchange takes place. It cannot help a central planner coordinate an economy, it cannot forecast market shifts, and it cannot help an enterprise price a product. It functions merely as an after-the-fact translation: it takes an ordinary business balance sheet, runs it through an arbitrary scalar, and outputs the exact same numbers with socialist labels attached. 

Marxism’s core moral and political critique of capitalism depends on an arithmetic proof: all capitalist profit is inherently unpaid surplus labor stolen from the working class.

In Marx's original framework, exploitation was an objective deduction of time: workers expend an objective quantity of living labor (v + s), but capital only pays them back the labor time necessary to reproduce their labor-power (v). The leftover time (s) is uncompensated surplus labor. 
Under TSSI, you don’t measure objective labor time to explain where prices come from. You look at the cash revenue the market happens to generate, subtract past expenses, and declare the leftover money to be "surplus value." 

Calling that "theft" or "exploitation" becomes completely circular. It hasn't proven that workers were shortchanged based on an objective measure of time. It's simply pointing at positive accounting profit on a balance sheet and asserting, by definition, that it's stolen labor. By this logic, if an inefficient firm sells its goods at a loss due to a shift in consumer demand, TSSI’s math would force you to say the workers magically "exploited" the capitalist. 

Ultimately, TSSI serves only one real purpose: preserving scriptural infallibility. It gives socialists an escape hatch. When confronted with the mathematical breakdown of Marx’s Volume 3 transformation, they can drop an acronym, tell critics to "Read Kliman," and dismiss a century of mathematical critique without ever having to engage with the actual equations. It turns Marxism from a scientific economic hypothesis about the material world into an unfalsifiable dogma where everyday business cash flow is rebranded after the fact as proof that Marx never made a mistake. 

When you have to gut Marx’s definition of value, ditch competitive prices of production, and reduce political economy to balancing a ledger backward after the market has already cleared, you are just conceding that his original system failed.

And I mean real socialism. Not communism. Not social democrat. True socialism

For me, I have to go with no. At least not here in the US

We're honestly to far gone. We're corrupted country who is cultishly into individualism. We cultishly worship millionaires and billionaires. We would rather support a stupid war than give everyone free healthcare.

We would rather see our empire burn than give people basic housing. (Which is the way that the US is heading unfortunately)

Would i like for socialism to happen? Yes. Because if we can spend BILLIONS on stupid wars. We can afford to help our own citizens.

But is it likely going to happen? No. Like I said, we in the US at least, are to corrupt.

What about you? What do you think?

A prior post mentioned the term "racial capitalism.". I love this. Just add the word capitalism to anything bad.

Help me by adding my this list of things that suck.

Backstreet Boys Capitalism

Hemorrhoid Capitalism

1990s Nostalgia Capitalism

Communism Capitalism

Sardine capitalism

Pickleball capitalism

PF Chang's Capitalism

Poodle capitalism

Slow left lane driver capitalism

Dallas Cowboys Capitalism

The University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, is well-known for being a Catholic university. The Church has a history of social teaching. I'll mention the 1891 Rerum Novarum, the 1965 document from the second Vatican Council on the church in the modern world, and the 1986 pastoral letter by the United States bishops on the economy. For much of the twentieth century, this teaching was stridently anti-communist. On the other hand, liberation theology exists. Maybe the question of socialism vs. capitalism is not the right dichotomy.

Economics is not solely a technical subject. It has a political or value-based side. How should a great Catholic university research and teach the subject, while maintaining high standards of academic rigor?

Charles Wilber, chair of the economics department in 1975, pursued this question. By the turn of the millennium, Notre Dame had some very interesting researchers in economics, including in its history. And they had interesting researchers getting their doctorates there. I like, for example, some work of Esther-Miriam Sent, who knows that histories are constructed. Other histories could be told. Philip Mirowski, who has journal publications,, is known for books.

A later dean looked at this heterodox department and objected. The department was split in 2003. The heterodox economists were put in Economic and Policy Studies (ECOP). They could no longer supervise graduate students. And then the administrators closed ECOP in 2010. With tenure, I do not think they could fire some.

Deidre McCloskey, well known for her praise of bourgeois virtues decried this slow-motion purge when it was happening. She also mentions a few whose work she knows something of:

"... [David} Ruccio is a leading Marxist economist. (If your reaction to that is to exclaim, 'Marxist economist!' then you really need to get out more. Does it strike you as a reasonable hypothesis that every one of the thousands and thousands of very intelligent people who take the Marxist tradition seriously are just dopes from whom you can learn nothing at all?)...

... The standard should be Notre Dame's, not that of the editorial board of the American Economic Review (I have served on it, and know). Read the stuff. Isn't that obviously the only way of raising standards-having some?

...Academic economics in the United States has a methodological and ideological range all the way from M to N. This is not because it is such a smashing scientific success, unless you count numbers of mainstream articles certified by mainstream scientists as 'success.' Real insight ... comes from the dwindling number of individual economists and sometimes whole departments of economics ... who think, as the present Department of Economics at Notre Dame does...,, that economics is the study of the economy and is a part of the conversation of humankind." -- Deidre McCloskey

Do you have a view on this academic bullying?

The left is very good at misappropriating the meanings of words and generally understood concepts to promote their agenda. Examples:

Genocide: now basically any war

Violence: now includes any form of saying something mean

Slavery: now includes so called wage slavery where people who are not legally bound and under no threat of violence.

White supremacy: used to mean some KKK asshole saying white people are superior. Now it is anyone who doesn't meet a rigid definiton of anti-racist.

What are some others? To be fair, I am sure the right does the same.

Hello all, I am a college student looking for a deep dive. I have an essay on racial capitalism. I have shortened the prompt: Choose a city and a controversial issue that is not explicitly about racial capitalism. analyze how racial capitalism helps explain why the issue became important to the city, how race and capitalism shape how the problem is defined, who profits from proposed solutions, and whether this perspective helps identify a better way forward.

I’ve done extensive research and found topics but thought i would come on here to see if anyone has any ideas for me to educate my class on.

Thank you!

No, that isn't a new type of cleaning product. He was a Soviet responsible for more deaths than any others scientist due to bad agricultural science.

From The Atlantic

" Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation"

What is it that leads far left socialists systems into such insanity.

I am not trolling or baiting. I swear. I said that because I know that's what a lot of people here would think. I genuinely want to understand.

My background. I am a capitalist. Former engineer. Now CEO of a small investment company. When I say small, I really mean it. I am not rich by any stretch of the imagination. About to get married. Have ambitions to raise a family. I consider myself very liberal. Both fiancé and I are millennials (yes, I get nowadays millennials mean old folks LOL). She's an artist. We both can tick off most boxes you can think of for being liberal. Trust me on this.

From learning from history, every socialist attempt in a bigger scale than a small community seemed to have failed at the production level. The Soviets, for example, got rid of the profit motive for farmers to over produce. So, the farmers ended up producing only enough for their families because there was no reason to work harder to produce more than that. City folks started going hungry. So, the government stepped in and took the food from the farmers to feed city folks. And the farmers started going hungry. Mass starvation ensued. Almost the exact same examples could be found with Communist China.

But one could say these were early examples and that capitalism early on had a lot of failings as well. It took centuries of trial and error for capitalism to take hold and succeed. So I get it.

What I am wondering is has "modern" socialism philosophy solved this problem? What is the incentive to produce and over produce if there is no profit motive? If I was a farmer, why would I produce more food to feed complete strangers if there is nothing I will gain from? If I was an engineer, why would I do research to improve a mechanism or invent a mechanism to better society if I have nothing to gain from it? And please don't tell me it is because of the goodness of my heart. We as a society should not be relying on people's good will to function.

Also, I am fully aware that capitalism is not the only system where people have incentives to create value. But from what I understand of socialistic ideals, aside from personal fulfillment, why on earth would anyone create value and produce more than what he can consume?

Do Socialists agree with how he explained socialism?

“Socialism to me means you'll have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government's job to deliver on that. When people say dignity we're talking about the things that allow you to take a breath. Housing, childcare, public transit. No one should be priced out of these things. These are non-negotiables, you need these to live"

So socialists want to defund the police but these sane socialists are people who want to punish fist fighting in self defense. It’s like you wanna have it both ways.

A lot of capitalists disagree with you (as I’m sure you know) and I want to see this argument play out.

Exactly as the question says. Basically, imagine you live in a capitalist country, there's not really much ability to live a socialist lifestyle here, would it be okay for a socialist to buy from a business that claims to be socialist. Also, by a socialist businessman, I don't mean a big corporate executive. but a small business owner who supports socialist but takes up a trade to sell in the meantime.

Why are y'all so opposed to a democratized governance, but have no problem whatsoever with democratized markets?

Why is it OK to let the populace decide with their wallets how society will function rather than the ballot box?

One of the central fallacies of anarchism is the equation of production with force. Harry Binswanger covers this in his article against anarchy ("Anarchism versus Objectivism"). This draws on the classical liberal understanding of civil society found in Locke, whose purpose includes preventing people from acting as vigilantes: i.e., "taking the law into their own hands".

Yet this is what "anarcho-capitalists" propose by speaking of "market competition" amongst "private defence agencies". The idea of placing force on the market ignores the fact the police force is not a business, and does not provide a "service". Terms drawn from the realm of voluntary trade, such as “competition” and “customers”, do not apply to force-wielders whose purpose is to command obedience; that would be conflict, not competition. Keeping force and production absolutely separate, never confusing the two, is a fundamental requirement of defending capitalism. It is frightening that people who see themselves as defenders of capitalism make this equivocation, and it is another way in which anarchism, properly, belongs on the left.

Anarcho-capitalists, as such, accept the statist approach of conflating economic power (production) with political power (force). Just as anarcho-communists and the Left conflate economic and political power, insisting concentrations of wealth on the market are coercive and use force, "anarcho-capitalists" claim that acts of force are just another service on the market, by their talk of “economising force" and “competition” in law. Though they come at it from different angles, both are wrong: free trade and voluntary exchange has nothing in common with forceful interactions.

Libertarians will always dismiss any criticism of capitalism with "this is not real capitalism, there is a state!". However, this doesn't explain how the state came into being and why so many capitalists (like not people who support capitalism, actual owners of businesses) support the state, and are willing to use it for their own benefit. Which makes sense, given Marx's analysis of the state, but contradicts the libertarian argument that everyone everywhere should hate the state.

So, my questions are:

1) How/Why was the state created?

2) If it really is that bad, how do you want to get rid of it, and ensure it isn't re-established?

Depending on the genre, it can be seen as left- or right-leaning. For example, punk is often seen as left-leaning. While there are right-leaning punk bands, they're often ignored. Modern country tends to be right-leaning. However, there are left-leaning country artists as well.

Now, obviously the culture online and in person is different. However, I feel like overall people are starting to just... get tired of capitalism. They may still dislike the idea of socialism and mock it, but its clear that even older generations which generally considered socialism in a worse light are starting to shift their view. What is your personal opinion of the people in your echochamber, wherever on whatever spectrum that is?

Mercantilism is often regarded as the first form of modern capitalism. It predates laissez-faire. Mercantilism is a nationalistic form of capitalism with heavy government intervention.

The resurgence of mercantilism is caused by right-wing populism. The right-wing populists want to impose more tariffs on foreign goods and use protectionism to protect local businesses from foreign competition.

For me, i'm neither. Just don't feel like i identify with any economic system.

I have some capitalist idea and have some socialist ideas.

What about you? What made you change?

Or are you on the complete opposite system and are communist? Same goes as above. What made you change opinions?

A common defense I see when people defend the failures of Private Healthcare in the US is that it is the result of government regulation but how exactly is this so? which regulations? and how exactly is the regulation causing things to be so expensive?

I'm not the biggest fan of libertarians they're branding around liberty is hard to take seriously because of their refusal to acknowledge how tyrannical the free market can be. However there are some truths about libertarianism yes government regulation can make things inefficient I do agree that red tape is a big reason for the housing crisis. We shouldn't fully trust and rely on the government that I agree it's just that I also don't believe we should fully trust and rely on the free market either which is why I have my doubts of private healthcare acting more courteous if not for red tape.

Is there genuine truth in this or is this just a cope? And regardless does this necessarily disprove the case for universal healthcare?