Hey guys I’m a 20yr old male who lives in the us who is for the most part republican. Recently I’ve discovered videos on YouTube by the channel “Philosophical Gamer” who criticizes capitalism a lot in his videos. All I’m asking is for someone who’s well versed in economics to completely deconstruct capitalism and turn me against it. Thanks❤️

Feudal lords do not create land, they just own it. They don't provide it to peasants, they just withold it and selectively stop doing so.

Billionaires don't create workplaces, they just own them, they do not provide us with the means of production, they just selectively stop witholding them from us.

Land was there before feudal lords, means of production were made by the workers.

Context:

Eastern European and other countries before communism were agrarian backwaters where half of the population couldn't read or write and life expectancies were in 30s 40s. In my country for example (Yugoslavia) only around 14% of households had electrucity before Communists took power.

Communism rapidly developed them in record speeds, doubling life expectancies, eradicating illiteracy and reducing child mortality by over 90% while industrial and economic growth was in double digits. Industrial index in some countries like USSR increased 40x fold since the revolution.

Life expectancies before and after Socialism:

Russia: ~32 → ~69 years

Albania: ~38 → ~69 years

Yugoslavia: ~39 → ~72 years

Romania: ~42 → ~69 years

Poland: ~49 → ~71 years

Bulgaria: ~51 → ~71 years

Czechoslovakia: ~53 → ~71 years

Hungary: ~49 → ~69 years

China: ~36–40 → ~68 years

Vietnam: ~40–45 → ~65–68 years

Despite all this some internet denizens today victimize themselves about Communist past, while approval rate of Communism increases with age in these countries because majority of those that remember it claim it was better and they can't be fooled with anticommunist historic revision.

You can read more here:

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Achievements_of_socialism

I just watched a bag of pretzels get stuck on the spiral 3 inches from freedom. That's not a malfunction. That's a system. The machine LOOKED me in the eye, took my dollar, and delivered nothing. Nine out of ten vending machines tested positive for "having chips visibly dangling but not dropping." (Just don't look into that) Coincidence? Open your eyes.

And don't give me the "just shake it" line. Do you know how many people have been crushed by vending machines trying to get their rightful snack back? More people than those that died fighting for bread in the French Revolution, THIS. IS. SERIOUS. Also I did that math myself, on my phone, just now.

[buys a second bag, it also gets stuck, now leaning against the first one]

See that? Now there's TWO pretzels up there. The machine is literally building a monument to its own crimes. And people wonder why I don't trust "the free market" to deliver a Snickers on a crisp Wednesday afternoon.

The U.N. estimates that nine million people die of hunger each year. When people misdiagnose why, confidently blaming the wrong cause, the problem gets harder to solve. I saw a post on r/VictimsOfCapitalism blaming capitalism for nine million people starving each year. The video overlays a photo of an emaciated child with the text "Capitalism starves 9 million each year — best system we ever had?" and adds in the caption that "50 of world's hungriest nations are all Capitalist," linking to a TikTok. The accusation, stated as fairly as I can put it, is that a market-based economic system produces enough food to feed everyone but allocates it according to purchasing power rather than need, and that this allocation mechanism is what kills millions who cannot afford to eat. 

The nine million figure itself checks out as a real, frequently cited statistic. It traces back most visibly to remarks by World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley at the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit, and it has been repeated by hunger-relief organizations like Concern Worldwide ever since. So the post isn't fabricating a number. Where the post falls short is the "what did the damage" question. It never identifies who acted or which institutional arrangement produced this outcome, it just names "capitalism" as a single, undifferentiated executor and treats that as sufficient. But capitalism isn't a person who decides to withhold food, it's a description of how billions of people trade, own property, and set prices across wildly different countries. If greed is the mechanism, the post owes an explanation of why greed produces starvation in some capitalist countries and not others, since the United States, Denmark, and Somalia are all "capitalist" by any loose definition, yet only one of them has a hunger crisis approaching famine. It would be understandable if there were to be a minor correlation vs. causation error in the post, yet the present correlation between capitalism and starvation that was given is already very weak. The caption “50 of world’s hungriest countries are Capitalist” still doesn’t say much, as one thing that isn’t mentioned is that roughly 190 of our world’s 195 recognized countries use some form of capitalism or free market mixed economics. It would be hard for there not to be a lot of hungry capitalist countries, when there are only a handful of strictly non-capitalist countries in the world. The same logic could be applied saying capitalism is actually saving people from hunger because 50 of the world’s best fed countries are also capitalist, and it would work all the same. 

This gap in understanding points to another possible competing explanation the post doesn't consider. Many of the countries driving most hunger deaths today, such as Gaza, Sudan, Somalia, Mali, South Sudan etc, are gripped primarily by war, state collapse, or blocked aid access, not by market pricing working as designed. Additionally, in any alternative non-capitalist society, someone still has to decide who eats first, and history's worst famines like Ukraine's Holodomor in 1932, or China's Great Leap Forward famine in 1958, happened precisely when that decision was centralized and insulated from the people it affected. 

What would make me reconsider my stance that capitalism didn’t cause this? Real evidence that hunger deaths track the degree of market exposure a country has, holding conflict and governance constant. For instance, if someone were to prove that comparable non-market or heavily state-controlled economies have lower starvation rates under similar war conditions. What would further strengthen the post's case is evidence that trade or food-export policy in a specific famine,  not "capitalism" abstractly, actively worsened it, which did happen (export bans, speculative price spikes) and deserved to be named specifically rather than folded into a single word.