Capitalism is nothing but a giant pyramid scheme.

I'd say it's more like disguised feudalism. We're all peasants for the few kings and queens that have all the money at the top.

Yes Marx formalized this opinion.

It's the owners of the land and the means of production that control all of the wealth.

Trickle up economics

Honestly one of the reasons I fell for a pyramid scheme coming out of high school.

A friend invited me and I went to shit on it and get him out, but the main guy's whole thing was "everything is a pyramid scheme, at least here you have the chance to build a pyramid beneath you."

Obviously there were other reasons as old as time, but the argument of "so what, your 'regular job' is already a pyramid scheme you can't win" was pretty rattling to a teenager in 2011.

If anything this understates the problem.

It fundamentally is NOT a pyramid scheme. In a pyramid scheme there is no actual product or service of value and simply extracts wealth from the people in lower tiers. Value, or wealth, is simply the byproduct of an equitable transaction between two or more parties.

To be more specific, fractional-reserve banking system creates this giant pyramid scheme, not capitalism per se.

No, it is not. It is brutal in many ways. But that it is not. Neither is socialomswor communism.

Pyramid schemes are zero-sum. I steal and gain, you lose. Capitalism and even communism are not zero-sum games. They are net-positive. They involve people making goods and services for others.

and with a disappointing lack of giant pyramids, no less!

I would say this about the stock market

DAE Capitalism bad?

would you sign up to my pyramid scheme if I was a cat?? 🥺

To all the people here ranting about monetary debt: its not an issue. Money isn't designed to hold value in the long term. It's a feature, not a bug.

It's just really unfortunate for those who play the game as if money were an asset. It's meant for transactions, not for storage.

so brave

How so though? This sounds like a statement that's meant to be flashy but doesn't actually hold up. Pyramid schemes are characterized by a) an eventual lack of ability to recruit more people, b) recruitment rather than a product or a service being the driver, and c) a person at the bottom left with nothing, including recourse. Capitalism, even completely free capitalism, doesn't work like that unless you specifically rig it to do so. That's called "corruption".

Capitalism is anarchism for shitty people.

Some retirement saving schemes may be a pyramid scheme. When the population growth stagnates, there will not be enough young people to produce for everyone.

Reminds me of that famous Churchill quote about democracy

Yes, but you're going to find the same thing with Communism.

Too many shitty greedy people at the top, too many plebs with fuck all at the bottom.

And while you may be thinking "I could live on a commune, spend an hour a day growing our own food and have all that time left for whatever else I want", you'll quickly find you can't grow your own 65" OLED television or whatever other comforts you've become accustomed to.

The billionaires need reining in, and better distribution of wealth all around the bottom, but capitalism ain't going anywhere.

This is the ideal shower thought imo. Concise, absolutely true, and something you wouldn't realize on a daily basis (at least not in these terms)

in that there are hierarchical meritocratic levels of achievement?

or that there are extractive processes which benefit the top at the expense of those lower?

Capitalism is a scheme where finite raw materials are being extracted and where finite nature is being destroyed - both on the planetary scale; once we reach the end, it will be the end.

Maybe we have different ideas of "works"

That's crony capitalism.

actually all economies are zero sum game. down the drain everything is about ressources rather than labour or energy. the later are the means to transforming the resources. what counts at the end is how much you have to survive and thrive.

Capitalism is nothing but allowing freedom and allowing property (in contrast to posession)

It is and it isn't. I think societies should be built on multiple different systems, anyone praising any particular one is just spreading gospel to a cult.

At this point, "Capitalism" feels as undefined to the left as "Woke" is to the right. It may be bad, but people just put whatever they don't like into a box and call it "Capitalism".

Atleast it works unlike covert fascist ideas like Marxism/Communism