5 ms·

> am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society. I don't think I am that unusual in this respect. I see people acting very capi

> am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society. I don't think I am that unusual in this respect. I see people acting very capitalistic to operate community gardens with the maximum margins. I see highly trained experts volunteer as educators. I see well-paid doctors and lawyers raking up leaves for their neighbors. I see accountants freelancing to keep the blind center afloat. Charity won't save us, and all these "good" and "moral" people actively resist any change that could actually solve systemic issues, like progressive tax.

freeopinion 5mo ago
Charity is the only thing that can save us. Tax is just a different take on charity. We all agree to pay into the community chest to provide for a pubic commons. Resistance to progressive tax is resistance to a type of charity. One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. If charity won't save us taxes never will.
- anjel 5mo ago
  Isn't empathy the better term here?
- ako 5mo ago
  Tax is not charity, tax is payment for community products and services. You have things you pay for individually, and things you pay for as a community. Charity is when you pay for things you dont need yourself, tax is when you pay for things you need being part of a larger group.
- gopher_space 5mo ago
  > One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago. I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.
  - freeopinion 5mo ago
    You might think that my brain is broken, but I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive. I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. I think that people can act in a way that they think is in their best self interest when it actually isn't. Also, "self interest" can have qualifiers like "near term", "long term", etc. Self interest is frequently complicated. Sometimes socialism can provide solutions that are in the best <qualifier> self interest for a particular issue. In those cases, a good capitalist will choose socialism when <qualifier> is their priority. I would expect that a good socialist would utilize the principles of capitalism to execute the most cost-effective socialist solutions.
    - blinkbat 5mo ago
      "I am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society." sorry, but these cannot coexist. you are deceiving yourself.
      - NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
        There is social market economy which can be cosidered to operate within a capitalist framework to some extent, but also to operate within a socialist framework to some extent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy. So it is worth to also think about it as continuous phenomena and not as binaries. But I agree with you: "I'm a devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society" made me think selfdeception, too.
    - komali2 5mo ago
      To be honest I think you're conflating terms. > I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. Acting out of self interest has results that can be described in many ways, but is too unrelated to the economic structure of capitalism to draw the thread I think you're trying to draw. Capitalism is a very simple definition: private ownership of the means of production in service of capital accumulation. It's a system that rewards selfishness, but selfish behavior alone doesn't lead to capitalism - there were selfish people in gift economies, and there were selfish Party leaders in the Soviet Union. The fact is, the charity stuff you do is in spite of capitalism. It's suboptimal behavior under this system. Every dollar you donate could have instead been invested, and then leveraging compound interest, used with higher effectiveness sometime in the future. Also, in giving money away, you harm yourself as a capitalist actor - for no return of investment for your capital accumulation, you spend money. That's suboptimal behavior. It's certainly POSSIBLE to behave this way under capitalism, you and I both are doing it, however meanwhile a lot of corporations and people aren't doing it, and because capital == power, those corps and people will have more capability of directing the systems that cause whatever issues we're donating to ameliorate. Donating time to dig wells in a town whose rivers are polluted by mine waste? Meanwhile, the mining company is buying politicians to let them spew more waste. Soon, a several hundred billion dollar oil and gas company is going to show up to frack, and now the wells are poisoned too. Spending money on groceries that you give to the homeless? The Walmart you bought it from will redirect capital to its lawyers and lobbyists that let it get away with paying such low wages that its workers need to be subsidized by food stamps and your charity in order to survive. Perhaps capitalism was necessary to get to where we are today. Marx thought so. I don't know. At this point though, it feels like we're industrialized enough that we don't need this "hyper optimal" industrialization economic structure to provide for our society. Look at how poorly resources are allocated: public health crisis in the streets of America while its billionaires horde and control truly unfathomable amounts of capital. Incredibly inefficient and ineffective system!
- freeopinion 5mo ago
  Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought. Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good. Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good or bad. It just is. Everybody takes advantage of gravity all the time to do things like walking. Some people build clever systems that explicitly rely on gravity. The current state of gravity is not making the world better or worse than the state of gravity did a million years ago. People are doing amazing things that seem to defy gravity. But they don't defy gravity. They still rely on principles of physics that include gravity. People who understand gravity can depend on it to make things like Burj Khalifa possible. Any interaction between people involves economics. Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both). Capitalism focuses on the effects of acting in self interest. But people have to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. That decision is independent of capitalism. I think it is best not to confuse that decision with capitalism. That might help better explain why I think capitalism is super awesome when informed by enlightened ideas of self interest. Your gripe doesn't seem to me to be against capitalism. Your argument seems to be that people have mistaken ideas about their own self interest.
  - kelseyfrog 5mo ago
    > Capitalism is like gravity. This is a very reified stance. What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time. Capitalism is a product of human choices. It exists as a set of human behaviors and legal protections. It is not a natural phenomenon like gravity because unlike gravity, it didn't exist until the 14th or 15th centuries[1]. Capitalism would not exist if legal protections(namely the legal construct of private property) ceased to exist. Laws, like many other products of human production, are dependent on humans for their existence. 1. Depending on whether you want to start with the Muscovy Company or the British East India company.
- wolvesechoes 5mo ago
  No. Charity depends on good will. Taxes do not. Charity, helping the poor etc. is postulated for thousands of years, and didn't bring any effect. Do you know what did? Public policies and public investments, and proper tax regulations to finance them. Hell, good, progressive tax policy should even be seen as beneficial for those that praise capitalism for it's productivity and efficiency, as it creates incentives for investments and better wages instead of rent-seeking and fat-growing. Now, I am not against charity. There will always be a room for it, as there will be room for volunteering and communal activities. But it won't solve systemic problems, like growing inequality, poor housing, environmental issues, political corruption etc
  - NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
    Even Ford realised that it was in his best interest, for his workers to "only" work 8 hours a day, since their wellbeing was the prerequisite for the labour power (they were selling to him precisely at a price point lower then it's value) that was the basis for his value production and value extraction.
- NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
  You can decide to be ccahritable or not. But it is expected that you contribute to the society, from whose efforts, infrastructure, labourpower, guarantees of a legal order etc. you profit, if you are an entity that is about profit. You can also be charitable on top and for most people, that is what it means to be charitable. If you do give less then you would owe anyways, and work towards enabling yourself to do so, it's quite a framing to then call it charity. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/06/us-exemption-oecd-global-tax-deal-multinational-companies https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/06/us-exemptio...
- ninalanyon 5mo ago
  The problem is that as a proportion of income the rich are much less charitable than the poor.
- timacles 5mo ago
  I’m sorry to get incensed but I’m shocked in 2026 there are people who think tax is charity. The decades of corporate propaganda and brainwashing and corruption have really played a number on society’s understanding of basic concepts. Tax is a mechanism for the distribution of wealth in a society. USA GDP is 38 trillion dollars and yet 85% of citizens own a tiny fraction of it. Where is all that money going? The government is on the verge of bankruptcy due to extreme debt.. to whom? Large corporations are bleeding the society and the government dry but tax is a charity. Please educate yourself and propagate this bs
  - freeopinion 5mo ago
    If it soothes you at all, you can think of it the other way around. All members of a society have a duty to pull their own weight. But everybody stumbles. So sometimes we have to pull more than our "fair share" and sometimes somebody else pulls part of our "fair share". But we all agree to it. Anyone who doesn't agree or who is deemed by the community to be dishonest in their contributions is exiled from the society. When we codify like that, we call it a tax. Now, nobody expects the 95-year old cancer patient to chop their fair share of firewood for the winter. So we can levy a tax to pay somebody to chop for them. Or we can just schedule a community chop for next Saturday and try to make sure everybody has enough wood. What do we do with the slackers who don't show up on Saturday? We figured out a long time ago that cash is a very useful tool to facilitate trade better than bartering can. And we can extend that into community contributions. We don't have to track how many potatoes and apples somebody grew and contributed to the widow fund. We don't have to figure out if 5 carrots and two hours of wood chopping is a fair contribution. We can just convert it all to money and require everyone to chip in the same amount. Except for the cancer patient and the widow, and the guy who hurt himself chopping wood for the cancer patient. Oh, and the Microsofts and Amazons. They only have to contribute 1/100th of what everybody else chips in. But those are the rules. We just codified them so that we can stop feeling peeved because we haven't seen Ricardo at the last three community chops. So we started keeping score. And yet, somebody is always still feeling peeved. Perhaps they don't like the rules that let big corps off the hook. Perhaps they think wood chopper boy is faking that foot injury. Maybe they think cancer is a hoax perpetrated by big Pharma. People complained when contributions were an honor system. They complain when contributions are codified into a tax system. Some people dodged when it was an honor system. Some people dodge when it is the law.

freeopinion 5mo ago

Charity is the only thing that can save us. Tax is just a different take on charity. We all agree to pay into the community chest to provide for a pubic commons. Resistance to progressive tax is resistance to a type of charity. One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. If charity won't save us taxes never will.

anjel 5mo ago
Isn't empathy the better term here?
ako 5mo ago
Tax is not charity, tax is payment for community products and services. You have things you pay for individually, and things you pay for as a community. Charity is when you pay for things you dont need yourself, tax is when you pay for things you need being part of a larger group.
gopher_space 5mo ago
> One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent. The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago. I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.
- freeopinion 5mo ago
  You might think that my brain is broken, but I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive. I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. I think that people can act in a way that they think is in their best self interest when it actually isn't. Also, "self interest" can have qualifiers like "near term", "long term", etc. Self interest is frequently complicated. Sometimes socialism can provide solutions that are in the best <qualifier> self interest for a particular issue. In those cases, a good capitalist will choose socialism when <qualifier> is their priority. I would expect that a good socialist would utilize the principles of capitalism to execute the most cost-effective socialist solutions.
  - blinkbat 5mo ago
    "I am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society." sorry, but these cannot coexist. you are deceiving yourself.
    - NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
      There is social market economy which can be cosidered to operate within a capitalist framework to some extent, but also to operate within a socialist framework to some extent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy. So it is worth to also think about it as continuous phenomena and not as binaries. But I agree with you: "I'm a devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society" made me think selfdeception, too.
  - komali2 5mo ago
    To be honest I think you're conflating terms. > I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. Acting out of self interest has results that can be described in many ways, but is too unrelated to the economic structure of capitalism to draw the thread I think you're trying to draw. Capitalism is a very simple definition: private ownership of the means of production in service of capital accumulation. It's a system that rewards selfishness, but selfish behavior alone doesn't lead to capitalism - there were selfish people in gift economies, and there were selfish Party leaders in the Soviet Union. The fact is, the charity stuff you do is in spite of capitalism. It's suboptimal behavior under this system. Every dollar you donate could have instead been invested, and then leveraging compound interest, used with higher effectiveness sometime in the future. Also, in giving money away, you harm yourself as a capitalist actor - for no return of investment for your capital accumulation, you spend money. That's suboptimal behavior. It's certainly POSSIBLE to behave this way under capitalism, you and I both are doing it, however meanwhile a lot of corporations and people aren't doing it, and because capital == power, those corps and people will have more capability of directing the systems that cause whatever issues we're donating to ameliorate. Donating time to dig wells in a town whose rivers are polluted by mine waste? Meanwhile, the mining company is buying politicians to let them spew more waste. Soon, a several hundred billion dollar oil and gas company is going to show up to frack, and now the wells are poisoned too. Spending money on groceries that you give to the homeless? The Walmart you bought it from will redirect capital to its lawyers and lobbyists that let it get away with paying such low wages that its workers need to be subsidized by food stamps and your charity in order to survive. Perhaps capitalism was necessary to get to where we are today. Marx thought so. I don't know. At this point though, it feels like we're industrialized enough that we don't need this "hyper optimal" industrialization economic structure to provide for our society. Look at how poorly resources are allocated: public health crisis in the streets of America while its billionaires horde and control truly unfathomable amounts of capital. Incredibly inefficient and ineffective system!
freeopinion 5mo ago
Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought. Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good. Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good or bad. It just is. Everybody takes advantage of gravity all the time to do things like walking. Some people build clever systems that explicitly rely on gravity. The current state of gravity is not making the world better or worse than the state of gravity did a million years ago. People are doing amazing things that seem to defy gravity. But they don't defy gravity. They still rely on principles of physics that include gravity. People who understand gravity can depend on it to make things like Burj Khalifa possible. Any interaction between people involves economics. Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both). Capitalism focuses on the effects of acting in self interest. But people have to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. That decision is independent of capitalism. I think it is best not to confuse that decision with capitalism. That might help better explain why I think capitalism is super awesome when informed by enlightened ideas of self interest. Your gripe doesn't seem to me to be against capitalism. Your argument seems to be that people have mistaken ideas about their own self interest.
- kelseyfrog 5mo ago
  > Capitalism is like gravity. This is a very reified stance. What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time. Capitalism is a product of human choices. It exists as a set of human behaviors and legal protections. It is not a natural phenomenon like gravity because unlike gravity, it didn't exist until the 14th or 15th centuries[1]. Capitalism would not exist if legal protections(namely the legal construct of private property) ceased to exist. Laws, like many other products of human production, are dependent on humans for their existence. 1. Depending on whether you want to start with the Muscovy Company or the British East India company.
wolvesechoes 5mo ago
No. Charity depends on good will. Taxes do not. Charity, helping the poor etc. is postulated for thousands of years, and didn't bring any effect. Do you know what did? Public policies and public investments, and proper tax regulations to finance them. Hell, good, progressive tax policy should even be seen as beneficial for those that praise capitalism for it's productivity and efficiency, as it creates incentives for investments and better wages instead of rent-seeking and fat-growing. Now, I am not against charity. There will always be a room for it, as there will be room for volunteering and communal activities. But it won't solve systemic problems, like growing inequality, poor housing, environmental issues, political corruption etc
- NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
  Even Ford realised that it was in his best interest, for his workers to "only" work 8 hours a day, since their wellbeing was the prerequisite for the labour power (they were selling to him precisely at a price point lower then it's value) that was the basis for his value production and value extraction.
NonHyloMorph 5mo ago
You can decide to be ccahritable or not. But it is expected that you contribute to the society, from whose efforts, infrastructure, labourpower, guarantees of a legal order etc. you profit, if you are an entity that is about profit. You can also be charitable on top and for most people, that is what it means to be charitable. If you do give less then you would owe anyways, and work towards enabling yourself to do so, it's quite a framing to then call it charity. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/06/us-exemption-oecd-global-tax-deal-multinational-companies https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/06/us-exemptio...
ninalanyon 5mo ago
The problem is that as a proportion of income the rich are much less charitable than the poor.
timacles 5mo ago
I’m sorry to get incensed but I’m shocked in 2026 there are people who think tax is charity. The decades of corporate propaganda and brainwashing and corruption have really played a number on society’s understanding of basic concepts. Tax is a mechanism for the distribution of wealth in a society. USA GDP is 38 trillion dollars and yet 85% of citizens own a tiny fraction of it. Where is all that money going? The government is on the verge of bankruptcy due to extreme debt.. to whom? Large corporations are bleeding the society and the government dry but tax is a charity. Please educate yourself and propagate this bs
- freeopinion 5mo ago
  If it soothes you at all, you can think of it the other way around. All members of a society have a duty to pull their own weight. But everybody stumbles. So sometimes we have to pull more than our "fair share" and sometimes somebody else pulls part of our "fair share". But we all agree to it. Anyone who doesn't agree or who is deemed by the community to be dishonest in their contributions is exiled from the society. When we codify like that, we call it a tax. Now, nobody expects the 95-year old cancer patient to chop their fair share of firewood for the winter. So we can levy a tax to pay somebody to chop for them. Or we can just schedule a community chop for next Saturday and try to make sure everybody has enough wood. What do we do with the slackers who don't show up on Saturday? We figured out a long time ago that cash is a very useful tool to facilitate trade better than bartering can. And we can extend that into community contributions. We don't have to track how many potatoes and apples somebody grew and contributed to the widow fund. We don't have to figure out if 5 carrots and two hours of wood chopping is a fair contribution. We can just convert it all to money and require everyone to chip in the same amount. Except for the cancer patient and the widow, and the guy who hurt himself chopping wood for the cancer patient. Oh, and the Microsofts and Amazons. They only have to contribute 1/100th of what everybody else chips in. But those are the rules. We just codified them so that we can stop feeling peeved because we haven't seen Ricardo at the last three community chops. So we started keeping score. And yet, somebody is always still feeling peeved. Perhaps they don't like the rules that let big corps off the hook. Perhaps they think wood chopper boy is faking that foot injury. Maybe they think cancer is a hoax perpetrated by big Pharma. People complained when contributions were an honor system. They complain when contributions are codified into a tax system. Some people dodged when it was an honor system. Some people dodge when it is the law.