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This is an interesting way to consider the problem of arguing to normies why socialism/communism is bad. While I agree that whipping out a supply-demand curve probably isn't the best way of doing it, I'm not sure that offering an alternative to capitalism is right either. I think it's more about knocking out a few load-bearing beliefs about how the capitalist world actually works and what it would looks like with the ultra wealthy gone, starting with the the basic premise of your statement:
The rich, not even the uber wealthy, "horde wealth" in any way that actually matters. If Jeff Bezos has $100 billion in calculated net worth, that does not mean that he's sitting on a hundred billion-dollar vaults full of gold, cars, cures for cancer, and unobtanium. If you ate the rich, you wouldn't get any of these things—you'd get a millionth owning stake in a yacht. How does this change your life? If you got rid of all those private jets, the commercial ones, the one that proletarians like you or I fly on, will still be producing a lion's share of transport emissions.
Those CEOs don't really make all that much money. If you ate them all, the workers under them might see their wages increase by a few cents per hour. Who is going to make the choices now? Imagine just how dumb the people you've worked alongside have been, and those are (ostensibly) the people some would like to see in charge. For every boneheaded decision some suit makes, how much worse do you think it could get with that moron Joey lead cashier in charge? Susan from the Department of Agriculture?
Capitalism doesn't actually say anything about who gets to consume how much. You can do all kinds of wonderful and terrible consumptive redistribution schemes and as long as the capital remains privately owned, it's still capitalism. You don't have to have factories and farms ran by state bureaucrats or line workers to do MMT and give everyone free money. These approaches have the same costs and problems regardless if who is ultimately in charge of organizing production. During COVID we gave a bunch of money to everyone in perhaps the most direct way possible and it made you poorer. How would this change if the state were in charge of the factories?
Capitalism isn't when the government doesn't do things, and the less things it does, the more capitalister it is. The government can still do stuff under capitalism, but because capital is almost always being used near to its maximum extent at any given time (this isn't a feature unique to capitalism, but history suggest that it does it better), the way the government does stuff almost always takes the form of redirecting consumption into production. It can do this through taxes, and it can also do this by printing money. Since the wealthy actually have a pretty tiny overall consumptive footprint, there's actually very little consumption that can be redirected away from them. So it actually winds up getting largely redirected away from you, because you outnumber the wealthy. Getting you to use paper instead of plastic actually does help the environment more than stopping a short-haul private flight because it's compounded by ten million.
Capitalism isn't when private companies get to do whatever they want, and the more people they kill, the more capitalism it is. In fact, some famous capitalists have even argued that capitalism simply cannot be done without a state setting the stage for a market to operate such as setting basic rules and enforcing contracts. It may be possible to run a small scale food market when your brother could avenge your death if you were sold tainted bread, but could be difficult to imagine a global food market without quality controls. Capitalism doesn't say you can't regulate negative externalities, and some would even say you can't really do capitalism without it.
Your job doesn't suck to make fat cats rich. The reason your job sucks is because it was optimized to suck the life out of you in order to deliver maximum value to the customer, who does not care how much your job sucks. When you go to the grocery store, which scrapes about 2% off the total cost of the prices you complain about, you do not care how badly those jobs suck to keep the prices low enough to keep you coming back. You do not care how much the farmer's job sucks, or the truck driver's job sucks, or the grocer's job sucks, and they don't care how much yours sucks. Rich suits get rewarded only for coming up with new and innovative ways for you to not care how much other people's jobs suck, and you always reward their ingenuity.
You'd probably have to adjust the verbiage to your audience, but I think the basic arguments above attack some of the basic perceptions about how the world works that underpin normie anti-capitalist sentiment. Advanced anti-capitalist sentiment is almost always a very different creature and would need to be contended with very differently.
I don't think those arguments work because the objection is that "those people are fucking up too much and do too little Tangible Work for the compensation they get, it's just Viscerally Unfair". Naked apes are wired for perceiving relative status, not absolute status. They don't want the CEO eaten because the other workers would get more. They want the CEO eaten so that there's no more CEO (and maybe some few sympathetic cancer patients can get treatment).
I don't think that's even true. What about raising the value of shares? Certainly, all of us as customers of various companies have observed the phenomenon of enshittification. If companies exist to deliver maximum value to the customer, they've really been fucking up.
I like the post you're responding to, but this is a key point you raise. You could tell a lot of people that banning billionaires wouldn't measurably improve the lives of the poorest people, and many of them would respond with "I don't care, we shouldn't have billionaires while there are people starving or without proper healthcare".
Jim/Stephanie Sterling (if anyone here knows who that is) was prolific with statements of this kind. "No one needs a billion dollars" or "You don't make a billion dollars, you take a billion dollars" are two ones I recall them frequently making.
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To me a certain form of this idea seems so obviously true that I am sometimes surprised when people even act like it has to be argued for. A form of capitalism without a state can work in situations where conquering others is simply so expensive that it is much easier to just trade and forget about conquest. Imagine some old-school type of trading where you send gold to China and they send you back silk on the Silk Road, back in the day, for example. But in modern, dense technological civilization, with large population densities and powerful military technologies that can strike half-way across the world within minutes, what would happen if we attempted capitalism without a state is simply that warlord gangs would form, they would seize control of the capitalist structures, and then eventually one of them would defeat the others and become a new state.
On a side note, I think one nice argument against communism is that communist systems generally forbid people from practicing capitalism, but capitalism does not forbid people from practicing communism, except in the sense that capitalist systems tax people and thus pull some of their resources away from attempts to build communism. If you live in a capitalist society but you think that communism is a workable economic system, you are welcome to create a communist or communism-esque organization like a worker's co-op or whatever.
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