this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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See, I think capitalism can work, we just need way more controls. Taxes that prevent billionaires from ever happening. Incentives for corporations to invest most of their profits into R&D.
Make smaller profit margins necessary to stay afloat. That means they either need to cut prices and/or invest in people (which is essentially what R&D is).
Actually enforce antitrust laws. Make forming a corporation, let alone a conglomerate, unpalatable compared to forming an NPO.
The biggest poison is the profit-driven media landscape (traditional and social). Particularly "news". Something needs to happen there, first.
Put a 500% tax on political contributions from PACs and a hard cap on total political donations from an individual (that's actually enforced and loopholes closed up).
Capitalism without corporations. Without billionaires. With strong regulation and very limited lobbying. It could work. It'll never happen, but it could work...and it's probably a necessary stepping stone to full blown socialist utopia.
I totally agree with you. Its obvious to anyone that "capitalism" as most people know it is super simple on the surface: I have thing or skill. You want things or skill. Depending how many people want thing or skill, I get paid fairly for it. To be honest, for me (healthy, able bodied and have a support network) I don't mind working and getting paid fairly for my skills; its a normal part of human life to work to get food. Granted, I'm in a VERY lucky minority. There needs to be Norway style welfare for the old, sick, and unable to work. As far as dumb/ignorant people (be honest, you've met them) who are able bodied but just can't do anything useful, I'm not sure what to do about them.
But then we have money in politics, monopolies, 1 person (fucking Rupert) owning every media outlet, and the system quickly falls apart.
This is famously not how capitalism works. What you're describing is primitive manufacture as it happened in medieval workshops: a class of tradespeople who owned their tools and their workshop and sold the fruits of their own labour by themselves.
Capitalism works differently because the people with the skills don't own the tools or the workshop, the workshops and tools are owned by people who happen to have generational wealth, called the capitalist class. These people don't have skills, they have money, and with this money they acquire means of producing things, like factories. Then, the skilled workers who don't have the money to buy such factories, enter into "free and voluntary" contracts (not so free or voluntary when unemployment exists) in which they get paid not according to how much they produce, but according to how much they can manage to scrape from the capitalist owner, which always gets a profit from the labour of said people.
This has been well-understood for 200 years since the first formal definitions of capitalism appeared, what you're describing is 13th century primitive capitalism