Capitalism is nothing but a giant pyramid scheme.

Capitalism is now playing 3D chess

Shit, even at a trickle pace...

If I somehow got one single penny from every person on the planet, I'd have about $80,000,000...

Do you have a penny to spare for the cause?.. 😂

A firehose in the sky that sucks the rain back in.

What about the stock market? They seem to be pricing companies way higher than they are worth.

Is there a difference between a pyramid and a ponzi scheme?

Like social security?

You're not forced to take on that debt though, nor is the debt unpayable unless you take on more debt. Some people put themselves into a ponzi-like situation either through poor financial decision making or circumstances so shit that they can't do any better, but the average person doesn't need to take out a loan on a freaking pair of nikes or even a car or house. It's a cultural norm to get a mortgage, but if you do the math it often doesn't make sense to and isn't anywhere close to mandatory. At most you could argue that the US government debt works that way, but even that's iffy and depends on your geopolitical outlook.

Further, products and services are never exchanged in an equitable transaction between two parties, because capitalism necessitates a third party, the capitalist.

Hang out with small business owners and you'll find lots of examples of two party exchanges. The closest thing to a third party is when there's a contract dispute that involves arbitration or a lawsuit.

The capitalist must acquire products and services from employees for less than their true value, and then sell them to consumers for more than their true value.

This isn't capitalism, this is employment. Employment has been a feature of most economic systems over the past few thousand years. It's important to ignore Marxist theory on employment and alienation because is relies on cherry picking facts to create bizarre and blatantly false narratives.

This sentence also packs in a misunderstanding of how value is generated in all economic systems, not just capitalism. The migrant worker is an economic staple in most (if not all) societies that engaged in agriculture. Take the Roman economy for example, migrant workers lack any property ownership themselves and so must sell labor for money. In the absence of tools, property and seeds, they are not able to generate anything of value for anyone else. A wealthy Roman farm owner has more land than they can work themselves. Without workers, their land has some value, but much less. When the farmer purchases labor for money, more food is produced than was consumed by both parties over that time period. If an excess of food is not generated, then somebody starves. The same thing holds for McDonalds. McDonalds owns a trademark, a marketing organization and a supply chain; all of which are useless without a restaurant. A franchise owner purchases access to the systems that McDonalds owns in order to create a restaurant. The restaurant is useless without a fry cook. The fry cook operates the kitchen gear in the restaurant in order to produce food for consumers. It's important to note that without the restaurant, the marketing and the supply chain, the labor of the fry cook is work very little.

And because capitalism demands growth

The demand for growth is not specific to capitalism. Economic systems that don't exhibit growth either can't physically support a growing population (with things like food or shelter), or the average standard of living decreases. Both of these situations are difficult to sustain for any political system.

No, fractional reserve banking demands endless growth because debts can't be paid off with interest since the extra money to pay the interest didn't initially exist. Therefore, banks have to lend out more money they don't have so the prior debts can be paid off but in the process they create more debt. But those following loans come with more interest which leads to the insatiable need for more growth in the economy by loaning more money.

Markets are not always fair or efficient but that doesn't mean capitalism is a pyramid scheme. It is still very much the opposite.

Because it allows banks to lend out money they don't have and when the banks lobby hard enough to completely remove whats left of the gold standard, the sky's the limit for lending out money. Creating money out of thin air increases inflation. However, in a weird way it impoverishes the lower classes while inriching the elite class because the latter tends to better connected and therefor closer to the "monetary spigot". This allows the elite class to buy up everything(land, companies, lobby/bribe governments)from the top down like a game of pacman.

That's a valid point, though I still wouldn't call it a pyramid scheme.

A hexagon!

They're zero sum because money is being exchanged, but the person losing money isn't getting anything in return for the exchange. Someone is just stealing from someone else (one person loses, anotber gains). No matter how many people are added to the scheme the mechanics remain the same.

An economy, be it a capitalist or communist one, involves the exchange of money but in exchange for goods and services. Both parties of the transaction gain from it.

Now, it could be argued that the wrong people gain the most from capitalism. That's another argument. But the system isn't zero sum, the way a ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme is.

Generally the idea is that both parties need to benefit from any transaction if it is voluntary.

They draw the box around the part that is a net positive.

The destruction of the Commons is not accounted for.

The impacts outside their box are not accounted for.

That’s the tragedy of the commons, and you’ll find it’s true for basically every possible societal organization.

Before Capitalism Humanity drove mammoths into exctintion, and that was a hunter-gatherer society.

https://www.earth.com/news/humans-drove-woolly-mammoths-to-extinction/

What I mean with this is that the effect of humanity in the environment is an human issue independent to the economic system issue the humans use.

Incredible that you can say that seriously. Human development and civilization causes ecosystem destruction. The particular economic system may affect the specifics of how this happens not whether or not it does.

care to expand on that at least a little? i dont follow.

Sounds like interesting reading, could you please add a link or reference?

It can call itself whatever it likes, doesn't mean it actually is that thing.

So are PCs and smartphones, yet here you are.

I was also thinking that but now i see his comment as a reply to aome other comment so he probably have sent this by accident

The Pie is of static shape, and that shape is all the resource planet is holding, and any part party who has more of those ressources means others will have less, the economy 'wealth" of the british empire didn't grow because it has engaged in equitable transaction with the colonised world (you can never have equitable __ insert something here __ ), they needed more ressources to grow and those ressources were extracted elsewhere

Just the same how the rich countries today aren't rich because they engage in equitable transactions with the poor world, but because the mecanisme that are put in place makes so those "equitable transactions" favours the hoarding of wealth on one side more than the other.

So when 2 people engage in a transaction and walk with different feelings? Kind of like the theft of my surplus value funding bezos latest yacht? I will take thank you very much . Or will I ? Perhaps there is no such thing as equality in transactions under an opressing system with the sole purpose of hoarding wealth? It's very much a zero sum game , you should perhaps read a book ? Since we are on that kind of level at the moment...

Yea, I even agree on the analysis that it is bad. The trick is defining WHAT it is.

Fanatics often hate those that are only slightly different from themselves the most. See Catholics vs protestants.

It's ok, communists only rounded up and killed millions...and caused millions more to die of starvation....but it's ok because fascist killed them in WW II..

It's like two communists Stalin and Trotskey, fighting against each other for power. Trotskey was defeated, exiled and later assassinated

Communism is fascism under a different name. Every communist country in the past or present has been a fascist totalitarian state

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Capitalism slowly degrades into fascism, agreed. Communism is fascist from the very beginning

And there are no outside forces that have influenced North Korea either.

It's hilarious how these tankies are agreeing with your comment not knowing it's sarcasm lol

Opposite likes north and south are opposites? Or opposites like apples and oranges are opposites.

Fascism and communism are both:

• authoritarian attempts
• to improve socieity
• by radically changing economic relations
• from consensual trade to slavery
• to support a massive war effort
• designed to get the rest of the world under the same authoritarian regime
• resulting in millions of battlefield deaths
• and the deaths of millions of enslaved citizens
• by overwork, disease, starvation
• and outright systematic execution

But one’s “left wing” and the other is “right wing” so they could be described as “opposites”.