Comment by PowerElectronix
20 hours ago
I don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff.
People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
I think you're mixing up capitalism with commerce. Commerce is where people buy and sell stuff. This is good. Capitalism is where capital is hoarded by an increasing smaller group of people. This is bad.
(Many) people love gambling. Capitalism is great at giving people what they want.
Look around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy.
The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction.
This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.
Those are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions.
Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.
You and I probably have very different ideas about what is moral and what is not. For me, the highest moral crime is greed. A lot of people seem fine with it today. So for you to claim that the fire happened because of the poor moral character of the person who lit the fire, I can just as easily say this happened because of the poor moral character of the people who didn't pay him a fair wage, which leaves us nowhere.
That's why I focus on purely systemic arguments. The humans in the system are abstract. It doesn't matter if they are moral or not, they respond to systemic incentives. So if they're acting immorally according to you, why is the system incentivizing degenerate behavior instead of moral behavior?
there a lot of things that may be immoral but it is the system that promotes it or prevents it. our system promotes it (there are ads for kashi and fanduel on nickelodeon) so it is the capitalism