Originally Posted by sopas ej
It's not a made-up definition. I guess I just have to rephrase it so that you'll swallow it easier. The focus of a free market is the exchange of goods and services, and wealth.
The focus of capitalism is wealth creation and the ownership of that wealth, and making profit. But it doesn't stop at just making a profit; a capitalist seeks more capital, and will try and do anything to keep increasing profit, even if those profit goals are unrealistic. I'll use a friend's situation as an example. Back in the 90s, he worked for a store called Sur La Table, which used to be a family-owned small chain of stores out of Seattle. He worked at the Pasadena, CA store, which at the time was the only store in all of southern California. The Pasadena store was highly profitable, and there were regular customers who would drive within a hundred-mile radius just to shop at the Pasadena store. Then the company was sold and it became more of a corporate entity. They started expanding and opening more stores across the country, and more stores in southern California. It started eating the profits at the Pasadena store, and the customers who used to go there from far away started shopping at stores closer to them... BUT, corporate kept telling the Pasadena store that they weren't meeting their profit goals, but DUH, the other stores took that profit away. The Pasadena store was still very profitable, but not profitable enough, according to corporate. So of course, like in other big companies, they use that as an excuse to start reducing employees' hours/cutting their benefits, and laying them off, and then hiring new people at a lower wage, to meet their profit goals. That's capitalism. Nothing benevolent about it.
Capitalists are basically profit-hoarders. They constantly seek more and more capital. And they're not patriotic, either; they will go offshore for labor and materials to make even more profit. Japanese auto companies are capitalists too; they did exactly what American companies do. When Toyota and Nissan opened up auto plants in the US, our media was like "They're providing jobs for Americans!" Well yeah, that's one way of looking at it, but in reality, they were using cheap American labor (in comparison with the price of labor in Japan) to build the cars that Americans buy, and selling them directly to Americans without the tariffs and import taxes. Isn't that obvious?
Again, nothing benevolent about capitalism and capitalists. Amazon is the perfect example. Jeff Bezos is basically the richest man on earth, but wealth isn't created in a vacuum. He basically exploits his workers; Amazon workers aren't treated well nor are they paid well. In capitalism, there are the wealth creators (the workers/people who do the actual work), and the wealth takers (people like Bezos).
And so what if Bezos is a "philanthropist." The giving of wealth is funded by the stealing of wealth. Again, wealth isn't created in a vacuum. We wouldn't need philanthropy and charity if wealth were evenly distributed among the people.
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