Americans – including many Republicans – are losing faith in capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Americans – including many Republicans – are losing faith in capitalism

cnn.com

47 pointsrawgabbit38 comments

Nothing quite dampens your belief in hard work paying off when you see an openly corrupt government self-dealing billions of dollars.

> Nothing quite dampens your belief in hard work paying off

Such a belief was not grounded in data to begin with. Like a religion, its based in faith. Humans are tricky, emotion and vibe driven; suboptimal mental models die hard. Humans want to believe in free will, they want to believe that their success was because of hard work and not luck. Older cohorts benefited from a golden period in US macro history that will not repeat. They were born at the right time, acquired assets at the right time, and had little job competition with great comp and working arrangements (single income could support a family of four, a single family home, etc). We are in a much different, punishing macro now. Asset prices are high, opportunities for income needed above basic needs are low, and youth unemployment is higher than the aggregate.

Citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream#Literary_commen... ("The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse—the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters—has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment." -- Chris Hedges from his book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt")

49% of young adults live at home, up 12 points since 2019. An economist says the fallout will reshape marriage, kids, and home-buying - https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/half-young-adults-live-home-f... | https://archive.today/1uB8d - July 9th, 2026 (Federal Reserve survey: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2026-economic-we...)

> The data comes from the Fed’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, which found that 49% of adults ages 18 to 29 live with their parents, and another 47% of adults in that same age group received help from someone outside their household to pay an expense—money toward a cell phone bill, general living expenses, or housing costs. Notably, those aren’t the same population, according to Laura Ullrich, director of economics at Indeed Hiring Lab, who has studied household formation trends for years. “You’ve got to think about this as a Venn diagram,” Ullrich told Fortune. “Forty-nine percent of them are living at home. 47% of them are getting help from someone outside their household, which doesn’t include those living at home. There’s a lot of adult children getting financial support from their parents.”

42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48937288 - July 2026

31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025

The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025

Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025

Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025 (Report: https://www.lisep.org/mql)

Nearly half of Americans age 18 to 29 are living with their parents - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086622 - December 2022

https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... - April 14th, 2025 ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized")

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-... | Ref: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ("Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure")

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i... ("Analysis: If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it")

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-you-realize-how-much-... ("When you realize how much luck goes into investing, you might change your methods")

All of this macro only ever obfuscates the real picture. The rich are getting much, much richer. The houses are more expensive because people obstruct construction. The salaries haven’t kept up with CEOs salaries or productivity because the employers have more power. None of this is some mysterious inevitable macro, it’s a conscious choice of an oligarchic system to crush people and launder the blame.

No, people do not oppose construction. The very wealthy have chosen not to build for average people, but instead build for a higher net wealth demographic. Also, productivity gains are not shared downstream, which is a choice. Salaries and wages have not kept up with CEO salaries since the late 1970s--also a choice. It all adds up to a systematic shift of wealth upward at the expense of a healthy middle class, while foreclosing all social mobility to the working class.

All governments are corrupt even poster children like here in NZ, its all about degrees of corruption. however one system of politics allows you to call this out and potentially vote out the perpetrators, the other will suppress you, lock you up and, once you've fallen down that rabbit hole, never vote again.

Choose your poison.

Not only is the current US government on a completely different level of corruption, but it's also actively trying to suppress dissent in increasingly forceful ways. And they're working hard to export this anti-human ideology all over the world.

I agree with your sentiment but myself I'm not convinced that either politics or corruption are actually (in reality) one-dimensional as you're suggesting, despite fairly widely reported trends towards world-wide political polarisation, and various different groups/parties/companies trying to appear as if they don't harbour corruption in a black-and-white way (how ridiculous!?) these things affect all systems to varying (nonzero) degrees.

I think there are actually still plenty of other dimensions/axes/structures one can think and argue/discuss about even if not many people (or politicians) actually do!

Authoritarianism surely sucks on so many levels though, I will echo that for sure!

This headline indicates we should feel surprise that Republicans are losing faith in capitalism.

That's a little odd, given the abrupt reversals of policy preferences we've all seen since 2017. "Law and order", free trade, free markets, low tariffs, personal responsibility, judicial restraint, checks and balances, the importance of character, all at least tacitly abandoned.

People seem stuck in thinking that the Republican party is still conservative. It's not. It's become extremist and radical -- the opposite of conservative.

They still call themselves "conservative". The giant bulk of the people who used to call themselves "conservative" still do so, and are MAGA. An outside observer is forced to note that almost all the doctrines have changed.

This is a fundamental misreading of self described “conservatives”. They only pay lip service to economic liberalism because it gives them something to rally around. It’s always been more about prejudice and punishment. If you want proof, look at the shift of the religious aligned conservatives starting in the 1960s who once leaned economically toward social democracy but quickly shifted right when the right started pandering to prejudice.

It’s a worldwide shift, happened across western nations as the left (once a bastion of prejudice) moved toward more progressive ideals.

Self identifying conservatives have never been terribly interested in economics and never will be.

Why should we be surprised? The “Conservatives” never actually conserved a thing.

I think MAGA represents mask off conservatism. Largely they support the same things. They have the same "enemies" and targets. I think for too long Americans have bought into the myth that conservatism is just about a slow and measured rate of change. That's what conservatives want you to believe because they know they can't say the real things out loud. So they speak in euphemisms. Trump let's them dispense with the euphemisms and just say what's really in their heart out loud. If MAGA isn't conservative, then conservatives simply do not exist in enough numbers in the US to be relevant. I find that conservatives are showing you who they have always been to be a far better explanation than MAGA isn't conservative.

In addition. It's perfectly historically accurate. When have conservatives fought the hardest? It's always at the distribution of rights which were always supposed to be "equal". Conservatives started a civil war to maintain slavery. They fought against women's suffrage. They fought against civil rights. They fought against gay rights. They are fighting now against trans rights. Conservative's most defended positions are about hierarchy and how they can maintain it. It's literally just bigotry. Always has been from Edmund Burke through Jordan Peterson. Conservatives will always fight at any minority group approaching peer status with them. They are afraid the minority will treat them the way that they always have treated the minority. Fortunately the world isn't made up of conservatives.

I didn't leave the Republican party, the party left me. Then again I'm some kind of crazy nut for believing that principles matter even if you lose the election and that cruelty isn't something to be praised so what do I know.

>Then again I'm some kind of crazy nut for believing that principles matter

People all across the political spectrum are saying things like this.

I think the next 30yr will be unkind to the idiots who were perpetually all in on the "new hotness" because they did all sorts of mental gymnastics to do so and record of their lack of principals is recorded all over the internet for all to see. And there's AI to dredge it up for us.

But on the other hand my magic crystal ball called history says that none of that shit matters and the worst people are always rewarded

I think I'm losing my faith in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the general rule of law more than I'm losing faith in capitalism.

Capitalism is working as designed, all the money flows up.

The rule of law is not working as designed. The rich have clearly different rules than everyone else.

And when it doesn't work, we bail them out and socialize the losses because its not actually a pure free market system.

Some faiths can survive only putting apart real facts, so treating capitalism or socialism like 'faiths' can bring to disasters, history docet, these things are only ideas, tools, models, not matter of faiths, and when real facts will begin to show up, the faiths will crumble, but ideas stands..

If surviving is adapting, changing as needed, actually the very few winning the greatest lottery in the world and history are very reluctant to agree to help change the rules, even minimal reasonable changes, because they have no needs actually.

But when needs will rise, maybe; but there is enough time? This is the bigger doubt for me.

We have socialism for the rich, so why not for the poor?

Edit: wanted to make this a little less low-effort so here's how I see us having socialism for the rich:

Taxpayer-funded research being transferred directly to private companies, often with little to no compensation back to the government or taxpayer, and with all profits from this R&D being privatized. The entire Internet is an example of this. SpaceX getting decades of NASA research almost for free (plus contracts) is an example. Pharma companies privatizing taxpayer-funded university research. Endless examples. This one is a huge transfer of wealth, usually to people who don't need it. The old system (until the 1980s) was that those people pay it back through taxes, but they've successfully removed that part, so now we pay for the R&D and they keep the profits.

The whole "too big to fail" phenomenon and bailouts. 2008 really showed this clearly, and it hasn't gone away. Meanwhile ordinary people are not too big to fail and will not be bailed out.

Open regulatory capture, now institutionalized through a system that looks very pay to play.

Direct government subsidies to companies that absolutely do not need it, such as state and local government offering huge "incentives" to get data centers that don't generate much local employment. These are basically handouts to the already rich.

Tax cuts on things like real estate and capital gains and increases in consumption taxes like sales taxes and tariffs. All consumption taxes are regressive, meaning the poor pay a higher percentage of their income to them (because a higher percentage is consumption) than the rich. Tax cuts on property taxes and investments benefit the wealthy more than the poor.

... and so on.

At this point simply flattening the system and making it neither progressive nor regressive would be a net move in the progressive direction. The current system is regressive. It's socialism for the wealthy paid for by everyone with privatized gains and socialized losses.

Agree. Is the (very) old trick: private gains, and public losses. Like investing in the last 20+ years thousand of billions in speculative finance and not in real concrete economy, inflating finance to over 10 times or more than the real economy, and linking all to the rule (or fable) of eternal growt.

Ah yes, CNN, the trusted and unbiased source on capitalism, and especially republicans.

Yes, better to listen to Fox News / OAN/ Newsmax/ The National Review. Now THOSE are unbiased news sources!

Yea CNN is trash, but if you’re worried about liberal bias, the article is referencing a Fox News poll.

i lost faith in CNN way before.

Why is politics/ communism being pushed on hacker news?

You have to know, government is incredibly inefficient, so indifferent it can barely do its basic work. When you put it in charge of the details of the economy, everything breaks down, basics disappear, people starve.

And then they start arresting people complaining about it, and they build walls so you can't escape.

It has all the benefits of being in prison.

So then who should be "in charge of the details of the economy"? Multi-national corporations? The Trump Family? How's that working out for everyone else?

A distributed adaptive system with local knowledge and fast adaptation, efficient resource allocation. It's called capitalism or freedom. Stop asking for everyone's freedom to be taken away. Our family escaped communism the hard way. Communism is like a guy in a club who says he's selling ecstasy but it's giving out cyanide.

and your thoughts on socialism?

There has been a sustained anti-capitalist propaganda campaign in the last few years, so this isn't surprising. Most people are sheep.

A “propaganda campaign” implies intent. I’ve seen a lot of dissatisfaction about capitalism, too, particularly among Gen Z, but to me it looks like an expression of the loss of faith the headline is talking about. What makes you think this is a propaganda campaign and not a zeitgeist?

"Propaganda campaign" is the wrong term, but there is still an interesting effect - in the 20th century we tried a bunch of things and liberal capitalism underpinned by democracy won the battle of ideas so badly that the alternatives were basically discredited.

But that didn't convince many people to actually change their ideologies. Instead, the authoritarians rebranded themselves as a type of liberalism and the communists rebranded themselves as a type of capitalism. The net result is there is a lot of intent that tarnishes liberal capitalism, but it is mainly people who aren't remotely liberal capitalists trying to rebrand their bad ideas as compatible with liberal capitalism.

In effect it looks a bit like a coordinated effort because there are a bunch of people working hard to associated prosperous ideologies with bad outcomes.

"sustained anti-capitalist propaganda campaign"... LOL

there has been a sustained pro capitalism propaganda campaign over the last hundred years or so. no wonder people are sheep

People losing track of history. No system will be perfectly for everyone, ever. One system has helped the most people ever in history.

Fix what's broken, don't switch to something already proven worse.

I never even experienced the shitty systems, but sometimes I feel some sort of immersion or shock therapy is needed to remind people. We have evidence. People have suffered and died to generate that evidence.

>some sort of immersion or shock therapy is needed

A quarter of the country lives on less than $34k a year. I bet that would shock some people into changing their definition of what is 'shitty'.

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