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Comment by Webstir | Hacker News Reader

It’s the capitalism, stupid. Here’s a little blog post I penned a while back on the topic: https://www.ianwelsh.net/capitalism-as-mental-illness/

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The irony hopping into a popular post to promote your own tangentially related blog post where you rail against "advertising" is papable.

Self promotion is allowed on HN.

Cue https://www.persuasion.community/p/ugh-capitalism in response

A far less compelling narrative is to handwave it away as "it's not really the system." The hyper-competition that capitalism breeds (for relatively little benefit) is the moral bane. More specifically, the recent history of touting capitalism while demonizing socialism has caused this shift, as opposed to the era of the New Deal, when social safety nets and public works were promoted as a net good. While there is a bill to pay for some programs (such as Social Security), the broader approach has largely been vindicated. Capitalism has produced severe wealth inequality, benefiting only a select few and breeding blatant corruption.

Calling everyone stupid is a surefire way to get them to read your post.

I imagine the parent comment was just paraphrasing on the "Is the economy stupid" phrase from the Clinton campaign,

It's a famous way to phrase rebuttals , famously political ones, and it's been used about a trillion times.

Flag fiends: Have some appreciation for nuance. This is not a hostile comment -- it's a concurrence, and on-topic.

Not to defend the down votes, but it's not just one thing. The article praises the attitudes of Mexicans and French folk, both of which are also capitalist countries.

It's capitalism to an extent, sure, but it's also the culture of a country.

There are few, if any, countries which have taken capitalism to the same extremes the US has. The concept of a country which is so at the mercy of capitalists that people will beg you not to call an ambulance for them when they’re injured is incredibly foreign to me despite living in the UK, a country renowned for its financial sector.

Which I guess is to say yes, it is the culture of a country, and the culture of the US strikes me as money above all else.

I have no idea why people blame capitalism for things like a lack of socialized medicine (which I support for the record).

It's the American emphasis on individual freedom that results in a lack of government mandates for healthcare. Nearly everyone has healthcare, adding the small percentage who don't to the existing government-run system would not be a major financial burden, and cases like the one you cited are effectively (but not literally) zero.

Historically, there's been a tug of war between people who feel like you should be able to take the chance of financial ruin over an unlikely event and those who think the state should be protecting those people from themselves, leading to the disaster of a system we have currently. That's pretty much the explanation.

The first sentence is insulting (even if indirect), for no reason other than attention seeking to click the link. The content is was an ok read.

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