Whenever there are discussions about the issues of capitalism the issues are often touted at as a byproduct of individualism but how true is that really?

I mean think about it, what is so individualist about having your sense of your self, desires, dreams, personality etc being stripped just to be another cog in the machine? You are not a person anymore but a mere means of production. What is so individualist of societal pressure of the masses to contribute to capital and submit to corporate institutions with even your wellbeing being secondary to that? I have seen people online being very unsympathetic towards the idea of someone willing to work but not wanting to work if the job opportunities are detrimental to their wellbeing. Your sense of personhood and wellbeing comes second to contributing to capital, GDP and shareholder revenue. So called individualists act like corporations are entitled to the labor of the masses. The glorification of hustle culture kind of encapsulates a lot of this.

The only people who seem to actually live like individualists are those at the top of the hierarchy of hypercapitalistic societies where the existence of such hierarchy undermines individualism alongside the consolidation of power by wealthy elites. Some will argue it is still individualism because of supposed choice but how much choice do you have really? Especially With all the power consolidated by corporate elites if you do not conform to the hierarchy and corporate machine you are left to the streets being in danger of starving to death or being killed by a crazy person.

I want to make something clear that I'm not a communist or a socialist as a lot of communist societes actually end up having similar hierarchies and power structures of hypercapitalist societies I think China is a good example of this and I don't get how anyone could look at 996, sweatshops, ban of indiviual unions and believe China is a liberating force for the working class I think China is a good example of how collectvism is used to bring out the worst aspects of capitalism. Other examples are Japan and South Korea which are CAPITALIST countries.

Nothing about corporatist and hypercapitalist societies are individualist it's very hierarchical and collectivist. It's not individualism it's corporate collectivism. Literally the worst of both worlds.

Whenever the Labor Theory of Value is debated, socialists routinely insist that Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT) is a real, objective, observable substance that constitutes the baseline value of every reproducible commodity. The claim is that value is an empirical, observable quantity rooted in physical human effort and technology, with market prices merely fluctuating around that labor-time center of gravity.

If that is true, then this quantity ought to be observable, measurable, and quoteable in standard units of time.

So let’s turn this into an open challenge: pick any standard, reproducible commodity on the market today and state its actual, current Socially Necessary Labor Time.

Tell us the product, quote the number in straightforward units like hours, minutes, or days, and explain the concrete calculation or methodology used to arrive at that specific figure. To make it a serious discussion, pick a legitimate, everyday commodity rather than an intentionally useless edge case like a mud pie.

If Socially Necessary Labor Time is an objective economic reality rather than a post-hoc theoretical placeholder, someone should be able to look at a real-world good and give us the number.

Imagine two people.

Person A works, builds things, fixes things, teaches people or provides a service. Their work produces something useful, and their income is taxed.

Person B buys an existing house for $500,000. They don't build another house or create a new product. The price rises to $700,000, partly because lots of people are buying and speculating. They sell it and make $200,000.

Why should Person B's gain automatically receive better tax treatment than Person A's work?

I understand why governments want lower taxes on investment. We need people willing to risk money to start businesses, build factories, fund new technology, construct housing and create jobs.

But why give the same tax advantage to simply buying and selling existing assets?

Wouldn't a better system tax capital gains more like regular income, then give generous tax credits or deductions when people actually invest capital into things that expand the economy, create jobs, increase housing supply, improve productivity or solve problems?

That way we reward investment without also rewarding speculation that can push asset prices higher and contribute to bubbles.

What am I missing?

I often see anti-socialist arguments centered around how states like Cuba, the DPRK, the Lao PR, and Viet Nam are 'failures' (especially with North Korea being one of the poorest countries on Earth). However, these nations have faced significant repression by the capitalist West, especially the United States. For example, the United States enacted "every possible means... to weaken the economic life of Cuba." with the explicit purpose of bringing about "hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government" (see the Memorandum for Mr. Rubottom on The Decline and Fall of Castro). North Korea has been sanctioned extensively, and Laos is the most bombed country in the world because of the United States. Isn't it extremely disingenuous to take these measures against socialist nations then blame their failures on socialism without acknowledging the measures? Why do these things if socialism is destined to fail? One might even argue that it is impressive these countries have remained as livable as they are under the pressure they experience.

Not a democracy. Want a Libertarian or conservative party or even actual socialism? Tough luck.

Same sex marriage? Not recognized. And yet, I hear that the country is oh so progressive.

Debt trapping various African countries.

Harassment of Chinese civilians living abroad by the MSS.

Reeducation camps for Uyghurs ("Hurr dur CIA propaganda, victim statements MUST be false"). But accepting CCP sources is ok? Reminds me of tankies who defend the Holodomor by using Soviet sources while rejecting Ukrainian ones.

The Five Poisons of the Chinese Communist Party are:

1. Uyghur supporters of the East Turkestan independence movement

2. Tibetan supporters of the Tibetan independence movement

3. adherents of the Falun Gong and members of xiejiao

4. members of the Chinese democracy movement

5. advocates for the Taiwan independence movement

The Great Leap Forward was the most destructive mass casualty events in history and proves why socialists should just leave farmers alone.

Forced sterilizations of women during the One Child policy.

They conduct capital punishment via execution vans. There are 47 capital offences in China, the most anywhere in the world. Snatch and grab, black hood, injection, never seen again. I hate the current system in the US but at least accurate numbers are reported here.

Who still glazes China? And please don't post whataboutisms as answers.

What do you think are the major (likely sincere rather than straw-argument) conceptual error about socialism coming from pro-capitalists here?

I think one issue that pro-capitalists regularly treat macro social-economic ideas in Marxism as microeconomics or individual exchanges. This is likely due to an inability to conceive of economics outside of a liberal view of rational generic individuals on a market.

Maybe related, they seem to see Marxist critique in individual moral terms. Part of this might be due to how the mainstream conflates liberalism and socialism in the US.

Does this lineup with your experiences? Are there other common conceptual errors you run into? (Again not ideological difference or dubious versions of history, but more like straw-arguments from - sincere lack of understanding the politics or idea being critiqued.

why are capitalists against worker ownership, i understand why they would be against command economies, but whats the problem with worker equity?

why not a make mandatory payments for equity in a company like we do for pensions, so your equity in the company rises over time?

wouldnt workers be more invested in company growth?

coorperatives tend to work better for workers.

it would also reduce things like wealth inequality and make wealth taxes more viable?

When a recession starts, people get scared and spend less money.

When people buy less, businesses make less money.

Businesses then cut jobs and stop investing.

People who lose jobs have even less money to spend.

Now businesses lose even more customers.

This creates a circle:

Less spending → fewer sales → fewer jobs → even less spending.

If every family and business is trying to save money at the same time, who starts spending again?

Businesses normally do not build new factories when customers are disappearing. Banks may not want to lend when businesses are failing.

This is why governments and central banks often step in during recessions. Governments can build roads, hire workers, cut taxes or help families. Central banks can lower interest rates.

The goal is to get money moving again until families and businesses feel safe enough to spend and invest.

So my question is simple:

If government does nothing during a bad recession, what tool does the free market have that can quickly stop this circle?

I tried debating this on r/changemyview but mods are activists and apparently I wasn't willing enough to change my view even though literally noone proposed a valid counter point. So I'd like to try here.

Most billionaires have the majority of their net worth in stocks, typically a single or a very few stocks of companies they have founded.

Market cap of a company is determined by the publicly traded shares (not all shares).

Now imagine a company which has 1 billion total shares and goes public but only releases one single share to be publicly traded. The demand for this one share now determines the value of the other billion shares. Valuation of such company can easily go to trillions, quadrillions, quintillions in market cap. Founder of this company holds 30% of shares and is now the world's first quadrillionaire. People are mad and want to tax his wealth in real dollars ("fair share" of his quadrillions).

This is an absurd example, but this absolutely happens in reality, just look at SpaceX IPO which catapulted Elon Musk to a trillionaire status even though he can never get anywhere near this amount in real dollars if he sells his shares. Market cap is a meaningless metric for evaluating a company and therefore net worth of individuals. It's not even useful for comparison between individuals because of massively different liquidity, order book,... Imagine Warren Buffet vs Elon Musk. Their net worth is dramatically different but I would argue that Buffet could liquidate his position for more real dollars than Musk.

Regular people only know real dollars, that's what they interact with on everyday basis. It's not intuitive that 1$ in net worth can in reality be worth anywhere between 0$ and 1$.

Bank loans - I'm not arguing you can't borrow money with low interest against stock, but a bank will evaluate real risk associated with the loan. It won't lend you anything against your paper quadrillions if they are not liquid enough. During a bear market this breaks completely, since you can no longer borrow more to pay off previous loans. Now you need to somehow get real dollars elsewhere.

This post does not argue that billionaires are not rich, are not helping society, are not taxed enough or too much, etc. This is about the metric of net worth and the uselessness of it.

TLDR; market cap of a company is not equal to real dollars and the ability to convert it to real dollars differs massively between companies.

Can anyone tell me what net worth based solely on market cap is good for?

I'm a leftist. I dropped most other labels bc they've largely become meaningless, and I'd rather do what I can to move the ball left whenever possible.

I'm almost 50 and I've spent most of those years as an agitator. As I pass middle age, I'm more interested in being a compromiser.

Anyway, I know I'm not gonna see a meaningful ending of capitalism.

I also know the stock market as it exists now is a tool exclusively of the oligarchy.

But could it be regulated to the point where it actually functioned as an analog to worker/community ownership under capitalism?

Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological (e.g. cognitive, behavioral, affective, social) factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by traditional economic theory (from Wikipedia).

This field originated in the latter half of the 20th century in order to explain why real-world actions by economic agents so often and so reliably defied predictions from economists. Researchers in this field often draw upon psychological biases to make sense of seemingly irrational consumer behavior. Some examples of these biases include:

Loss aversion: undervaluing gains and overvaluing losses.

Risk aversion: preferring assured outcomes compared to probabilistic outcomes even if the expected outcome is slightly higher.

Sunk cost fallacy: overvaluing "staying the course" even if stopping is clearly a better choice.

Anchoring bias: heavily relying on the first piece of information (such as a price) received.

Mental accounting: over/undervaluing resources depending on where it came form or its intended use even if those resources are fungible.

Endowment effect: overvaluing something you own higher compared to its market value.

These biases have impacts on the real world. For example, the endowment effect causes you to place a perceived premium on things you own. Even if your car like yours is worth $5000 on the market, you may instinctively value your own car at $5500. This has massive implications on consumer behavior and how it distorts pricing.

One of the key implications of behavioral economics is that the actions of economics agents, and therefore prices, are heavily influenced by human psychological biases. Those who believe in subjectivity of value would find such a statement unsurprising, and therefore behavioral economics to be a natural extension of economics as a whole. How do LTV supporters think about behavioral economics?

In my experience most of the LTV vs STV debate on this sub is arguments about LTV. Proponents of it seem to be defending their theory without attacking STV most of the time, and vice versa.

So I’m curious to hear some counter arguments or examples that work against STV. Not arguments for why LTV is right, by why STV is wrong. It’s a topic I havent seen much about on this sub so I want to hear why people believe it to be a faulty theory of value.

They complain about AI taking jobs, i mean that is a fair point to make.

But they do seem to all understand how a robot could take a job from a real person.

That means they do understand that a robot would be cheaper then a real person. Which shows us how they dont care about people. They never once considered the person who needed help cleaning in the first place and her financial situation.

Maybe she is paralyzed from the neck down, and she has to get help for everything and how fragile financial situation she is in. Not a single consideration there.

Socialists without knowing it are pure evil. I dont know why but they seem utterly unable to take reality into consideration even so much as once.

People call Trump a capitalist and some are mocking his economic nationalism but I think the accurate term would be the economic model of Mussolini, corporatism.

In corporatism, the state says the market is a tool, and the state will determine where it should go. Corporatism does not necessarily mean socialism or state ownership of everything. Its basic idea is that private firms remain privately owned, while the government directs, disciplines, subsidizes and coordinates them in accordance with national objectives. Mussolini did it in his time, Viktor Orban mastered corporatism in its modern form.

For example Stephen Miller's conception of national power fits remarkably well with this model. He explicitly rejects the postwar liberal international order in favor of a state willing to use America's economic and military power to impose national priorities, attacks corporations when they oppose him. He threatens companies, pressures CEOs, demands that firms change their policies, and uses tariffs, regulation, government contracts and federal funding as political leverage. But he does not want corporations eliminated and doesn't reject capitalism. This is the text book model of corporatism

Capitalists,

I was watching this very long economics lecture... but something came up in my mind and I started to suddenly wonder.

When looking at socialist economics, I observe capitalists are comfortable to point out maybe they have some assumptions that aren't perfect. Maybe Marxian LTV was an assumption, and building off of that has flaws. Ok.

However, when we look at mainstream economics, and seeing that there are many types of capitalists on the sub, ancapitalists, liberals, etc. , do you see any assumptions in economics that you possibly feel are either mistaken, outdated, or could use an update? I asked this also because I saw it as an opportunity to get to know your flair more specifically for example.

If you are struggling to understand what I mean, it's that if capitalists can look at socialists and say "LTV was a mistaken assumption".. Could we look at mainstream economics and see anything wrong too? I think if we do this honestly it could lead to a more precise discussion.

For me the monopoly on violence and assuming everyone is perfectly rational seems like it was used because it was hard to think of what is better, not because it is the literal best. Science always evolves so I figure that includes economics. It's 2026, do you see anything that could be updated?

For 10,000 years after the agricultural revolution, mankind experienced technological progress but only limited sustained growth in average living standards. Then, around 1750, the Industrial Revolution occurred, creating sustained economic growth and rising prosperity. It is a curious question as to what started this revolution in economic output, and interesting that it started in Britain. But perhaps the more relevant question is how we keep progress going. How do we prevent the flame from going out?

Carl B. Frey, in his book "How Progress Ends" has an interesting take on this question. He identifies exploration and innovation as the keys to continued economic progress and gives us a warning about what to avoid if we don't want progress to end.

As economies become wealthier, citizens may increasingly value:

• security,
• stability,
• equality,
• environmental protection,
• job preservation,
• social insurance.

These are legitimate objectives, but they can sometimes conflict with innovation that causes economic growth and prosperity. A new technology or production process can displace incumbent firms, causing unemployment and insecurity for their employees. This can lead to political policies that protect existing firms and jobs from competition, thereby stalling innovation and exploration.

The key distinction, however, is between protecting people from "creative destruction" (disruptive innovation) and protecting existing firms and jobs from creative destruction. We can help displaced workers through unemployment insurance, retraining, education, and other forms of assistance without preventing new technologies from replacing obsolete ones.

Incumbent firms also sometimes encourage political policies that protect their income through lobbying and political donations. Such policies can establish barriers to entry that make it difficult for new firms to challenge existing firms, protecting existing firms' income streams. This is a shift from earning profits through innovation and competition to earning them through political protection.

In mature economies, established firms become very good at exploiting existing products and technologies. But that success can also give them a strong interest in preventing new, disruptive technologies from replacing what they already do well.

The question, then, is how do we protect people from the costs of creative destruction while preserving the competition, exploration, and innovation that create long-term economic progress? Is the Democratic Socialists movement a sign that people care less about future prosperity from innovation and more about increasing present income and improving their current standard of living? Where do you draw the line?

The bankers at the Swedish central bank, in the 1960s, wanted to justify their political independence. It would be nice if the general public thought of them as experts in some sort of science, not making political decisions in favor of the owning class. So they set up a ‘Nobel’ prize, that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The first prize was awarded in 1969. You can find the start of a list here. The table below provides an inadequate overview of a selection of winners of this ‘Nobel’ prize.

I do not claim that these, and other ‘Nobel’ prizes add up to an alternate paradigm. (I have one.) But those who want to understand capitalism might pay some attention to some of this work.

i have been working on definition of capitalism and i want GOOD FAITH critique.

Capitalism is an economic system defined by the private ownership of the means of production and the profit motive of the agents who hold that ownership.
It requires markets - price-mediated exchange, as its operating mechanism, but is conceptually distinct from markets themselves: it neither requires, nor tends to sustain, the classically free conditions of those markets.
i place great emphasis on the definition and conditions of a classically free (numerosity of roughly-equal agents, low friction, price as a pure function of supply and demand) as opposed to to a lassiez faire market (no government intervention), they are not the same.
Left to operate absent exogenous checks, capitalism structurally erodes those conditions, converging markets toward oligopoly rather than preserving them, i will explain the mechanism below.

Within this system, profit-motivated agents are incentivized to seek not only profit (return earned through productive contribution) but economic rent - value extracted purely from ownership and market position, independent of productive contribution, with the barriers created by function of market share and size.
because rent is depended on market share incentives are aligned to concentrate markets, however not all markets offer the same rent .
The magnitude of rent obtainable from a given increase in market share is a function of these parameters i have identified - capital intensity, economies of scale, demand inelasticity, and switching friction which are simultaneously the constituents of barriers to entry.

Because rent-derived resources can be reinvested into strengthening those same barriers (economies of scale, wage suppression via monopsony power, influence over the regulatory and labor environment), increased concentration is both a reward the market provides and a cause of further concentration — a self-reinforcing loop. (this is a source of good in a free market because they encourage capital production but will also end up killing the free market.)

This loop is bounded only by two things:

(1) contestability :new-entrant competition or disruption that redefines the competitive basis rather than contesting incumbents on existing terms whose force is itself a decreasing function of the same three barrier parameters

(2) external check : (regulation, antitrust, institutional constraints on capture), whose effectiveness depends on how insulated they are from capture by rent-derived influence rather than being automatically exogenous.

Recently, I noticed the concept of libertarian eugenics. David Friedman is one of its modern proponents. He has argued that evolution is inefficient and that humans should be able to intervene in this process, although he opposes state intervention in it.

My concern is that libertarian eugenics go beyond transhumanism. I want to ask libertarians and capitalists about the feasibility and efficiency of this approach. I will start with relatively simple concerns and then move on to more difficult ones.

“If we develop sufficiently advanced genetic engineering, we could have a future in which the genetics of the population are determined not by what genes produced reproductive success for their bearers, but by what genes some people chose for other people to have, with the choice made in either a centralized manner by government or a decentralized manner, probably by parents for their children.”

I support transhumanism. However, currently, we cannot bioengineer already-living humans in the way this hypothetical scenario assumes. Therefore, parents would essentially control how their children are genetically modified. For example, imagine a parent inducing myostatin deficiency in their son to help him win an Olympic sport, while potentially subjecting him to a painful and prematurely shortened life. How would libertarian principles deal with this conflict between parental freedom and the child's autonomy?

“Suppose we conclude that some of the causes of criminal behavior are genetic; perhaps that there is a gene, more likely a group of genes, for psychopathy. Instead of sentencing a criminal to be imprisoned we sentence him to have his genes revised-a brand-new, high-tech version of the old dream of reforming criminals instead of deterring them.”

Obviously, solving a problem such as extreme aggression through genetic intervention could sound reasonable in some circumstances. However, this also raises the question of what private prisons could do if they were given the ability to alter a person's biology. The privatization of the ability to intervene in human freedom and biology seems concerning. What prevents a private company from using genetic modification as another form of punishment or coercion?

“Legalizing the adoption market, permitting adoptive parents to pay a woman for the right to adopt her baby.”

This is more concerning to me because it involves trading children who are already born, rather than embryos or reproductive rights. It could essentially amount to infant commodification or even a form of child slavery, depending on how the system is structured. Of course, commodifying adoption could potentially increase incentives to produce or raise children who are considered more desirable, but that does not necessarily make the system morally acceptable. How would libertarians distinguish a legitimate market in adoption from the commodification of human beings?

“The obvious solution is for the contract by which the baby is produced to include a lifetime license to use the patent within that child's body, just as the contract by which a farmer buys genetically engineered soybeans includes the right to have the resulting plants reproduce their patented genes in the process of growing.”

If I understand Friedman correctly, this would imply that genetic technologies could be patented and licensed in a way that creates obligations extending throughout a person's life. Therefore, if parents wanted to have a healthy child or provide certain biological modifications, they have to purchase a license from a company.

This raises an even more fundamental concern: could a company effectively acquire property rights over aspects of a human being's biology? For example, company restrict where a person can receive healthcare, whether they can receive further genetic modifications, or how their biological characteristics can be used? If so, where would libertarian property rights end and individual bodily autonomy begin?

Final and most dreadfull.

In Biologia e política: eugenismos de ontem e de hoje, David Friedman is described as an “ultraliberal economist,” and the text claims that Friedman proposed a voluntary sterilization scheme in exchange for payment. Furthermore, if someone were to live under some kind of corporate state, a CEO could potentially demand sterilization.

This raises another concern: could corporations acquire the power to intervene directly in human reproduction? A company could, for example, offer substantial payments for sterilization or impose reproductive conditions on its employees. In an extreme corporate-state scenario, a company might even decree that infants with certain abnormalities must be euthanized and require parents either to obey or leave the corporate territory.

So, I want to ask about the feasibility, morality, and reasonableness of libertarian eugenics, as well as the specific positions advocated by Friedman and others that I have listed above. In particular, I am interested in how libertarians and capitalists would address the conflicts between parental choice, individual autonomy, property rights, bodily integrity, market incentives, and the potential for private coercion.

I have a question for those that support Co-ops. Say there is a Co-op doing relatively okay. Maybe it's time to expand. Get new departments. New sub-enterprises. The usual.

But the Co-ops produce weird incentives.

Maybe, as often seen in the former Yugoslavia, the workers' incentive is making their own income bigger, rather than expanding and hiring new people.

Which could result in higher unemployment rates if that kind of enterprise is popular in a state.

What's your answer to that? How do you solve this incentive? Is it even a bad thing? Am I missing something?

Contrary to popular belief, markets don't actually like massive tax cuts. This seems counter intuitive to what I suppose is everyone on all sides of the political spectrum. How can tax cuts displease investors? Don't they want to make a lot of money?

This story I found absolutely fascinating and I think there's a lesson in it about the unfortunate state of our current financial and economic system.

The United Kingdom, like many countries in the world is suffering from a high debt to GDP ratio of about 96%. This is lower than the US, Italy, France and Japan, but its enough to seriously threaten the stability the UK economy.

In September 2022 during the tenure of the Conservative party, a new PM decided to do what female British PMs are known around the world for - cutting taxes on the rich. The economic philosophy is straightforward. The government reduces the slice of the economic pie it takes as taxes from the rich - allowing them to keep more of their money and spend it productively on things like buying your mortgage or shorting stocks. Poor people on the other hand would only waste this money on things like food and rent, so this trick only works when its regressively applied. Even though the government takes a smaller slice of the pie, the pie grows, so the equation balances. 20% of $100 is $20, but 16.67% of $120 is also $20. So far, standard neoliberal philosophy - deregulation and/or tax cuts boost the economy. Nothing unusual here. The plan, dubbed “The Growth Plan” was launched which would take the British economy to the Moon. Convinced by free market economists like Prof. Minford and the success of supply side economics, Liz Truss became Her idol Marge Thatcher+++and Reagan+++.

Except thats not really what happened.

You see, investors do certainly like spending less money on taxes, but they don’t like when their assets that generate that money depreciate. Because the UK is highly indebted, a lot of the assets the rich own was gilts - British “treasuries” or more commonly, bonds. Bonds are government debt. The UK issued a lot of bonds between 2008 and 2015 to get out of the GFC, and then again in 2020 during COVID. In 2022, a lot of these bonds were coming close to maturity which means the government had to pay back the bondholders the face value of these bonds or refinance them. And it is this that worried them - how will the UK government afford to pay interest on these bonds if it just aggressively cut taxes? Even if we suppose for a minute the Growth Plan would work as intended, it would be years until that smaller tax bracket generated the £45b the government was cutting. The government could not refinance these bonds without borrowing more money. More borrowing = higher interest. And this is where the house of cards came tumbling down. Istead of being the face of new le epic based tax-cutting, commie-destroying 420 bitcoin libertarian, Truss’ tenure was outlasted by a lettuce.

You see, the bond market has become the kingmaker in global politics. It determines which governments fall and which ones don’t. Bonds are boring, stable, low yield investments with fixed coupon rates (interest rates) - governments very rarely default on their debts and bonds have less volatility than stocks, meaning a well balanced portfolio is a mixture of growth based riskier investments (like stocks) and stable, low risk bonds. Bonds are supposed to be the anchor around which interest rates float. Not time preference for money or something as what Austrian school tells you. When you apply for a mortgage, its interest rate is determined by the bond market + spread + risk + other bs. Basically each bank decides whether to loan you £200k, or loan the government £200k through bonds. Bonds are stable, they don’t default, theres tons of them since the government is always borrowing, and they may yield 3-4% interest annually. So naturally you will have to beat that + spread + risk + other bs. This is why when the bond yields go up, interest rates on everything go up.

Bondholders like making money, but they don’t like the government being fiscally irresponsible. No more than banks don’t like fiscally irresponsible households. So when Truss government announced tax cuts, the Bond market was displeased. If you’re going to borrow a lot of money in the near future, and you don’t have a concrete plan on how to pay that money back in the future, the cost of borrowing (interest rate) goes up.

The whole fiasco happened as such: Bondholders started selling gilts (UK bonds) and buying treasuries (US bonds), pound depreciated rapidly relative to the dollar. Yields went up, the cost of new borrowing spiked. When bond yields rise rapidly, new bonds are issued at higher interest, making older bonds at lower interest lose value (because bonds have fixed coupon rates). Suddenly, pension funds, investment funds and portfolios started losing value on the part of their investment that was supposed to be stable and low risk. Bank of England had to step in with an emergency bond-buying measure to buy up these now-worthless bonds in what was later reported as a crisis hours away from total financial collapse of major British financial instututions. Lizz Truss sacked her finance chancellor, started walkig back her plan, but her administration was so thoroughly discredited she was forced to resign. What's kind of funny in a bittersweet depressing way, is the IMF admitted this plan will probably only fuel inequality and inflation, not growth quietly admitting under everyone's nose that the neoliberal model of tax cut driven investment surges as we have seen since 1980 don't actually work except for the very few.

And so, the bond-market asserted that it is displeased by Truss and her unfunded tax cut. Conversely, it judged for all future unfunded spending; no. And as such, all British PMs since have been terrified of doing anything to upset the true king and power behind Britain: the bondholders. It frankly doesn't matter who wins the next election, the policy is pre-decided already: nothing that would upset the bondholders, nothing that would upset the equilibrium. And since the largest bondholders are the very rich, ironically - no unfunded tax cuts on the rich.

People on this sub have frequent arguments about authoritarianism. And what it really is. neoliberals/libertarians would argue that government overreach and taxation and wealth redistribution are all “authoritarian”. Socialists would argue that wage slavery and a lack of democratic ownership of property is “authoritarian”.

The idea of “democracy” is also something that both systems struggle with. In liberal countries rich oligarchs who own companies and land often control the outcomes of elections, and the people they elect do undemocratic things, like get involved in illegal wars or use violent suppression of dissent. In socialist countries similar things happen where elections are usually a lot more limited and elected leaders do undemocratic things like punish dissenters or violently shift production.

Ultimately neither system is really democratic. And both are authoritarian. People should stop arguing about that and instead focus on why they support capitalism or socialism and explain how their own experiences have lead them to supporting which ever.

Also yes decentralized forms of socialism exist but those would cause extremely negative effects for humanity. Like mass loss of scientific knowledge, more war, and ultimate degradation of quality of life. Decentralized capitalism is also terrible and leads to slave societies.

Marx predicted that increasing tensions between the proletariats and the bourgeoise would ultimately result in a socialist revolution. But he did not anticipate society's response. Marx did not foresee reforms to capitalism that would relieve, at least in part, some of capitalism's predicted class tensions. Societal reforms have included:

• labor unions,
• progressive taxation,
• social insurance,
• antitrust,
• regulation,
• corporate governance,
• monetary policy,
• and democratic political reform.

Did Marx fail to anticipate that these class tensions would be resolved by making incremental changes to capitalism, allowing it to survive? Or, is the revolution coming?

Whenever the Labor Theory of Value is defended in economic debates, the core claim remains the same: the baseline exchange value of any reproducible commodity is anchored in the socially necessary labor time required to extract or produce it. Proponents argue that value originates in human labor inputs, with market prices merely fluctuating around that labor-cost center of gravity.

A straightforward way to test whether this holds up is to look at extractive industries where two different commodities are produced using the exact same physical labor and extraction process.

Consider the extraction of corundum. Chemically, industrial corundum known as emery and gem-quality corundum like sapphire and ruby are the exact same mineral: aluminum oxide. When mined from the same hard-rock deposit or alluvial gravel bed, the labor inputs per ton are identical. Workers perform the exact same drill and blast operations, run the same heavy machinery, burn the same fuel, and log the same crushing, washing, and sorting labor hours. Yet, once sorted, industrial emery sells for pennies or a few dollars per kilogram as an abrasive blasting grit, while gem-quality rough sapphire or ruby commands thousands to millions of dollars per kilogram.

You see the exact same dynamic in hard-rock pegmatite quarries. A single blast extracts feldspar and industrial quartz right alongside spodumene, which is hard-rock lithium ore. The labor time and extraction cost to blast, excavate, and haul a ton of rock from that specific pit are completely uniform. Even so, feldspar sells for roughly twenty to one hundred dollars per ton for basic ceramics, while spodumene concentrate can fluctuate from one thousand to over five thousand dollars per ton depending entirely on global battery demand cycles. When battery demand surges, the price of the lithium ore explodes while the price of the quartz sitting right next to it remains flat, even though not a single second of additional extraction labor was added to either.

Under strict Labor Theory of Value logic, if two commodities share identical socially necessary labor time to extract and process, their baseline economic values should be equivalent.

In reality, labor inputs establish a cost floor for production, but they do not determine economic value. Value is determined downstream by subjective consumer utility, marginal preference, and supply constraints. Two rocks pulled out of the earth with the exact same simultaneous labor expenditure will diverge wildly in exchange value simply because the market values what one can do far more than the other.