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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

I hope people get the right message from this, which is:

The way people talk about "Capitalism" is most often silly and counterproductive because most of the time -- the person that hates capitalism and the person that loves capitalism are talking about nearly entirely different things.

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Also, should we capitalize the "C" in "Capitalism"? One might think we should, because C is a capital letter. But capital itself is lowercase, and therein lies the paradox.

Capitalism was a term coined by Marx, so not really surprising that most using it are anti-capitalist.

According to Wikipedia the term basically wasn't used by Marx at all, and was coined by other anti-capitalists.

I have NEVER SEEN A MORE PERFECT distillation of modern casual economics discourse than the last two comments. Hilarious.

I think it’s productive because it serves to stabilize the society by giving it an ideological underpinning.

Roughly: there’s no better alternative to capitalism and we have capitalism therefore we have reached optimal society.

just in case anyone else misunderstood this comment on their first reading, kubb is not praising capitalism here

Eh, he's either praising or being condescending, seems like?

Read the second half sarcastically. It makes more sense that way.

I think you're doing the thing I'm literally railing against; I believe the tendency to turn a relatively simple concept like "we should have a society that has peace and also favorable trades" into IDEOLOGY is precisely how we end up with overreach.

Ideology isn't something you can avoid. It's always present in a society to support the power structures. Conflating "just having markets" with the current form of capitalism in western countries is exactly the kind of work needed to uphold the "obvious truths" that keep things going.

Doubt it. Explain China?

China has its own ideology which upholds the power structures over there. It's very different from its western counterpart.

Part of it is that yes there may not be freedom of expression, but thanks to the Party's competent guidance the great Chinese nation is restoring its rightful place as a world leader.

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