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Comment by jennyholzer2 | Hacker News Reader

> capitalism is essentially evil

even though nearly every post on this website makes this point, the commenters here really do not like it when you state this explicitly.

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This argument seems to be a) intentionally provocative and intending only really to ruffle feathers, not actually put a coherent argument forward

And b) about on par with saying "water is evil" because if you drink too much of it you'll die.

they do not.

what gets me is trying to make the argument that market economies are not necessarily capitalist economies. it seems plain over time that capitalism works to destroy markets. As an American I'm pretty pro market, but that means at this point I'm an enemy of capitalism.

Which seems wild to what I was taught growing up.

It doesn't help that the people who say that prove an understanding of capitalism is about as thin as a single layer of varnish and their collective ideas for workable alterations would fit on a single index card after it was already ripped up by hand.

Painfully true and somehow it's everywhere on this forum. To these people, capitalism and markets and money are all the same thing, and the only finite resources in the universe are those whose distribution is gatekept by the evil, evil capitalist overlords.

> To these people, capitalism and markets and money are all the same thing

Many more capitalists than anti capitalists claimed this in my experience.

Everybody's experience is different. I've found experientially that anybody who can actually define and describe these things with any degree of seriousness is, at least, aware of the resource constraints that make up the real world and have opinions that at least run in approximate sync with reality, which definitionally excludes them espousing real Redditor crap. I'm willing to engage with anti-capitalists who have at least put in the work to understand capitalism, but it seems like there's not much overlap between "understands" and "disagrees" for that segment.

> anybody who can actually define and describe these things with any degree of seriousness

You meant true Scotsmen?

No, and in case you stopped reading partway into my comment, this type of useless gotcha counts under Redditor crap. I don't think it's controversial that understanding something is a pathway to criticizing it appropriately. The average anti-capitalist cannot begin to describe exactly what it is they hate, which is in my opinion one of the defining valuable features of capitalism - that many people can benefit from it without understanding it one lick, and can in fact ineffectually hate it while benefiting from it.

This is the website of a bunch of rich capitalists who got rich by doing capitalism. Of course you can't call the owners of the website evil on that website.

Of course you can. They just get really mad about it.

You actually can't. They hide your post and ban your account.

Practically-speaking, there are limitations to even the most despotic of modtocracies.

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