How to fix capitalism in the USA

The least worst economic system, still pretty bad. Here are some simple solutions which with adaptations could probably work in other countries as well as the US:

This yes this. Exactly ^^^ this.

A quick list of all the things that I think need to be communally shared and taken care of with many regulations and agreements to avoid the tragedy of the commons: air, clean water, rain (see: ridiculous water rights), the environment, wilderness areas (70 to 90% of the area of the planet's surface, actually). Things that - common sense-wise- shouldn't be bottled up and sold for profit to the highest bidder, shouldn't be. Capitalism that is thinly veiled greed should never be encouraged under the umbrella of "but it's Capitalist, Capitalism good!" No it's not always, shut up, robber baron. You regulate the shit out of things that are just greedy, such as cutting your bread company's flour with sawdust, or trying to sell bottled air. And seriously, too much is monetized on the internet these days, wayyyy too much. Every minute is taxed, tracked, you're advertised to, like, leave us alone. I think in the future the internet is going to help us figure out what works best. Some sites are free speech at its worst. Others are censorship at its worst. Monetization will be a problem, someone's got to pay for it. Adminning will be a problem, someone has to do it. How these things and particularly social media get structured can help us figure out how governments should be structured. Because clearly, something's got to change, but neither full capitalism nor socialism nor communism really work. Something new has got to be made.

Also, information that will not reasonably cause harm should never be censored, and should be shared, even to the point of possibly making you look a little like Robin Hood or Prometheus. Or else we have well, a repeat of 2020. So things such as books, recipes, and other written information? I'm not so sure it's the wisest idea to focus overmuch on cracking down on piracy with all that. Where does the piracy crackdown end and the censorship/violation of free speech start? Yes, it's bad to steal a person's livelihood and writers work damn hard and should be fairly compensated, but information must be shared or we're all screwed. It's not a cut-and-dried issue. Picture this: I could've put this entire website into book format and earned a living from it. 7/19/22 I have (memory failed me for a minute but heyyy) gotten two donations on this site, woohoo! but it certainly doesn't provide me with a living, because this site is free to the public. My reasoning is that I wanted this information out there. Maybe it should be up to the writers of things to determine if they want to provide free information along with the bought and protected by copyright/trademark. Probably a good idea to promote this kind of thing; each one teach one.

Simplified tl;dr - lots of regulation, improved access to education and information everywhere, improved infrastructure everywhere, some basic restructuring of the system itself, consistent hard work and effort from people in the system (to unfuck it and to then prevent it from getting fucked up) that NEVER STOPS OR WE ARE IN TROUBLE, see the slow downward spiral of the US from 1960 til 2020 that happened due to Boomers and Gen X giving up on doing whatever it took for educated, well-considered, smart political action and change; printing t-shirts and protesting isn't going to do nearly enough. Usual caveat, not all Gen X'ers, not all Boomers, yada yada you get it. EDIT 5/8/22: I think that's not entirely fair to Gen X. On further consideration it seems that Gen X for the most part didn't even have a chance to change things, and what they could do most of them did their best at and still do. I guess I'm being biased because of the crushingly huge workload Millenials and generations after inherited.
8/12/22 An insight. Worldwide, there's a bit of a fractal power structure. It goes matchy matchy from the top to the bottom, monkey see monkey do, blind following of whatever will give humans the most pleasure without real consideration into ethics or independent thought. The top? Whatever the government structure is and whatever the power structures are on a large scale. Dictatorship, democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, whatever. But no one has noticed that there's a continuum from top to bottom, and most of us at the bottom of the power structure can't see that we make our own power structures in whatever social structure we exist in. Wherever we circulate, there's a power structure of some kind. The question is, how healthy is this power structure? To be more specific, your family, your workplace, your friend circle, your community. What kind of power structure are you fostering here? Because let's say someone is a boss of their own business. Are they a dictator? Were they elected democratically? Let's say someone is a spouse. Do they treat their family well, or rule with an iron fist? That's the kind of "voting" that people have no idea they're doing. Your behavior is a vote. The way you treat others is a vote. In fact even the way you treat yourself is a vote. And frankly most people are dictators, and they will gladly buy their own freedom with the coin of other people's hard work and effort aka slavery. There is no point in blaming the higher-ups in government or corporations if you too are just as bad.
Here's what I think. I think that growing up in this country too many people were snookered into thinking "this is a free country" and then shoved into over-glorified indentured servitude and told to enjoy their so-called freedom. I also think that this could have been prevented by Boomers and other older generations fighting a heck of a lot harder for labor rights. The worst of it was the general attitude that having a job was some sort of favor to you so you were encouraged to do everything short of sleeping with the boss to get in their good graces and view the Boss and the Business as God. As opposed to having any kind of self-respect or awareness of your own worth as a human being and not just a cog in the rat race machine. What's messed up about the current situation is that it only took one or two spoiled-rotten generations to ruin not only this country but possibly the whole world; not only did they sell out but they did everything in their power to sell out big. So younger generations look to philosophies like Communism and blanket-coverage Socialism in desperation. The trouble is that it's quite like Totalitarianism in that it's like trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. It is not that fucking simple.
Until the policies of a Capitalist system completely and utterly get rid of indentured servitude, which is no more than legalized slavery, then Capitalism will get canceled. As it should. Indentured servitude, complete dependence on one's boss's whims for survival, in other words a minimum wage that does not allow for living a halfway decent life, zero legal recourse for mistreatment at work, lack of choice in where you can work and live, lack of ability to start your own business, captive consumerism, and no labor rights for fair schedules and work safety and so on, IS SLAVERY. The emperor has no clothes. Every justification for this is mealymouthed newspeak.
One major oversight of our educational system is the reality that in a Capitalist democracy, just keeping the place afloat and running well with minimal fuckery requires every single citizen to do their part. To participate. And for them to do that, the educational system has to adequately prepare them for this role as they are essentially the real "President," the real "Governor," the real congressperson, senator, judge, mayor. Not only that, but they have to have adequate time off from work to enable them to properly look into how things are going, regularly; to attend town hall meetings, to research political candidates, to watch political broadcasts, to vote. And for that they need labor rights. We have had neither for many years and this is the result. That over-reliance on STEM in public education in this country and the USSR? Yeah, that was to avoid teaching people the necessary skills - history, sociology, psychology, law, politics - to stop corruption in government.
One of the most amazing privileges in this country and other democracies is the privilege of being able to do what you love, or at least don't utterly hate, to earn a living. But if older generations grind the younger ones into the dust and crush their dreams just to make a point (respect your elders, fuck you I got mine, the old ways must never be overturned, etc.) then you don't see that. And if people don't help one another as much as possible to pay it forward privilege-wise, as very few in this world are born lucky, you also don't see that. Imagine if some of the most iconoclastic people in history - Isaac Newton, Mozart, Sojourner Truth, Gandhi - never got their lucky breaks, never had any privileges, were condemned to some workhouse or farm somewhere for their whole lives. You can't fully say they made their own luck, even though they were so extraordinary. Now picture this, lots of the world is that way, and a lot of really talented people are grinding away at some bullshit punch-a-card job to make someone far away rich. And for WHAT?! So what I'm saying is that capitalism only works when humans have basic empathy for one another and help one another. How do you make that happen? Start with yourself. See what sort of a difference you can do. Enough of us doing this will cause a sea change. Forcing people to be nice to one another with a doctrine like Communism will just be making A Clockwork Orange, which please read. However, forcing people to not be evil to one another, especially through slavery and indentured servitude and acts of war, is equally important. And that is a little more complicated. Try to do what you can on that front. I'll also say that the fastest way to kill quality of life in a Capitalist place is to encourage evil and amoral behavior in its population. Encourage the opposite.
In a Capitalist democracy, people are too often not aware that they have more than one way to vote, and that they don't have to settle for crap; indeed they should demand the highest of quality for everything they vote for. This has to be a message more or less painted across the sky so everyone knows it! Here are just a few of the ways voting happens: the usuals - voting for national, state, and local politicians, ballot measures, judges, and everything else on a ballot. That's the most obvious. Voting with dollars is another - you hate a business, boycott it. You don't really like a business all that much, boycott it. It supposedly is in "your own best interest" to buy it because of captive consumerism but you don't strictly speaking actually need it? (a long commute, exorbitant college, car insurance, cell phones, planned-obsolescence products that break after a year and can't be fixed, etc.) Fight it tooth and nail; find alternatives. In some cases (paywalls for scientific papers, finding information, library works etc.) you might want to read the legend of Robin Hood and make your own decisions; I can't condone breaking the law. It doesn't totally please you? Boycott it. Buy only the best, if you can at all; if there isn't enough choice on the market, it's not going to just solve itself; do your best to buy the best. Voting with your presence at a place to work is another way, which is why self-employment, start-ups, and new businesses have to be promoted as much as possible. If all the work sucks, it must be a viable thing to start your own place to work. Voting with your presence at a place to live? Well, that kind of voting is being done by a lot of Ukrainians right now and more power to them. Same deal with people deciding to stay in Texas. Voting with your presence in a relationship, be it a friendship or a casual acquaintance or even a marriage? Yep, more voting. Did you know that shareholders of stock also have a say in yearly (at least) votes to help determine who gets a say in how the thing is run? Oh yeah. Unions also often have votes; if they don't you need to be suspicious. In fact, in good businesses, you might just wind up in a place of work where it's not structured as a monarchy or a dictatorship but as a democracy so you can vote who your boss or upper management is, and so you can have roundtable discussions with everyone from the boss to the janitor. Start a business, and you can try this for yourself. And you know the old saying, "caveat emptor" aka let the buyer beware? I bet you didn't know "beware of the customer" was the flip side of that. Who's holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy things? If they're not actually forcing you to buy the thing and it's crap, you don't have to take it. Moreover, you can help make it so that the most successful businesses have to listen to you and your big mouth; bug the corporation, bug the business, bug the people in charge and give them a piece of your mind and if they change their ways, bueno, they have you (and lots of other disgruntled people probably) as a customer; if not, you say goodbye forever, possibly write seriously insulting reviews everywhere you can, warn friends and family away, and even contact lawyers and the press if needed, and often have the satisfaction of watching them go down in flames. Often the biggest reason people "vote" for crap is lack of time and effort invested into research to find the best things to vote for, plus lack of education to understand the issues at stake, and this is not impossible to combat. You have more power than you've been told. Now that you know, use it.
Another way of "voting" in a Capitalist system is to vote for yourself by starting and running your own business, or collaborating with those that are starting one and running one. I've heard a lot of bitching and moaning about franchises and big business over the past fifteen years. And a lot of that is warranted, to be fair, monopolies are really out of hand. Captive consumerism is indeed out of hand and regulatory agencies and politicians need to be busting up monopolies right and left. But no one is talking about the ease with which the big businesses are taking over in small towns. You ever stop to think that maybe it's not just because the little guy is fighting against the big guy, but maybe the little guy tends to suck? A lot of these huge franchises started as puny businesses, and during the Great Depression at that. No, a lot of the bitching and moaning is coming from people selling goods and services that not only have a lot of competition from better businesses, they also don't have a lot of demand. Case in point, quite a few small town businesses that pay peanuts, think racism is great, think sexism is great, and sell "value added" garbage like dusty candles and country-living dyed leather, goods no one actually wants or needs, and so on, usually started with funding from family members. The energy spent on the bitching about franchises could be better spent learning how to be better at starting and running a viable business. No, the truth is that a lot of small business owners aren't willing to do what it takes to become successful, namely working hard, so they're more than willing to blame the system instead of improve, and also pay rock bottom wages and overwork their workers then wonder why turnover is so high. So essentially if you want to vote yourself into success as a small business owner you have to put in a lot of effort to learning how to do it right. Learn from the people who didn't. I worked for some of them; I credit that for learning how to invest well.
Another way of "voting" is to participate in the judicial system regularly. Say, by giving yourself an hour a month to look at the FBI's Most Wanteds, local sex offenders, and the January 6 terrorist pictures. That way when you see someone on the street, call it in to Crime Stoppers, warn a fellow parent away from a registered sex offender; you have voted. One less person destroying the country out on the streets. Also jury duty is quite important. But since legal education is not a part of public education, you don't really know what you're doing there, which means it is important for the average joe to learn this stuff. I'll be adding it to Big Brain Time ASAP.
Yet another way of "voting" is to check your privilege, because in some ways the more privilege you have, the more power you have. This is power that can be used for good. So if you can imagine someone yelling at you to "cHecK YoR PrIVILegE!!!!!" about any given privilege you have, such as running water, heat, electricity, a job, or whatever other asset you've got, see what else you can do with that asset, or how you can use the asset in the best possible manner to achieve the most positive possible outcome with it. A good way of figuring out how, in each case, is to contemplate how someone could be green with envy over your asset. Maybe make an exhaustive list of these because it's not actually intuitive to count up your blessings and some of them are quite unexpected, such as living in a climate that's moderate. If you are honest with yourself you can actually come up with thousands of these. Why would they envy you that? Look closely, and then use that knowledge. (I will warn you that any kind of putting yourself in other people's shoes, however, can have you make stupid snap judgments about their actual situation, which is a glitch in the human brain, so watch it.) Your blessings and privileges are assets, and they can be put to good use. In other words, take a close look at how you can use the great power and privilege that you have (and if you're reading this, then you have it, because electricity and internet are not, statistically speaking, that easy to have in the world today) and how you can use that for good purposes in the most wise, responsible manner you can.
Since under a Capitalist system in a democracy, things get so much better so fast, people (and I have been guilty of this) quickly forget just how bad "bad" can get. Then people get ticked off because things are bad but folks don't get that it's still the least worst place around. Case in point, people in the USA right now bemoaning our lack of freedoms. Yes, we have a lack of freedoms. But compare that to Russia! Compare that to China and the levels of racism and xenophobia in most countries in Europe, and pretty much everywhere else. Compare that to the seriously f'd conditions in places that are really far off the map and off the grid, far from the ability to call 911 or the police. US citizens don't know how good we have it and that is not something that can easily be fixed through learning things the easy way, i.e. through books. Unfortunately the only true way to fix this problem is to A. Mandate choosing one of the following upon completion of high school: 1. join the military, 2. join the Peace Corps, 3. work for some sort of U.S. interests abroad such as helping build infrastructure for our allies, 4. do community service in the poorest areas of the USA. There's no other way. You can't teach this stuff from books. And what's worse is that if you never learn how things really are, you wind up voting in other people who have no idea, and you can't defend the place from exterior threats that DO know what it's like to have it bad and are convinced they can solve their problems by taking the US down with them. B. Reduce taxes substantially for for US citizens who spend at least 4 months abroad once every five years. And C. Increase merit-based immigration from everywhere as much as is reasonable so we wind up having a bunch of people who are really good at what they do and willing to pull their weight to make the country succeed, and asylum-based immigration as much as is reasonable. We can't admit everyone who wants to immigrate (that would be insane), but we need to move as far away from the stance of "fuck off, we're full" as possible. Since none of these options seem to be close to happening I suggest to you, readers, that you travel outside the country more, wherever your home country happens to be. I also suggest talking to as many recent immigrants as you can as that way you can gain some serious perspective. Listen well, these guys know what they are talking about.
***3/27/22 I was recently alerted that the following idea is straight-up Socialist and can cause problems because people find ways around the lack of power due to excessive money, and sufficient taxation should be enough; I am not sure I agree but I think this idea is worth thinking about and discussing*** Because over a certain amount of money in your bank account, you have been "voted for" without being voted for and now have lots of power you did not earn via merit, thus can destroy everything for everyone else, there has to be a net worth limit for every human. ~~Ten million dollars~~ actually let's go with 30 million (cause watching rich people cavort is an unofficial and very important national entertainment in the United States), and everything over that goes to the government for the sake of public projects only, such as maintenance of state parks, of roads, for schools, etc. I can practically hear them screaming "Communism!" now. No, it's not you fucking idiots, according to my calculations you can live off one million dollars comfortably in retirement and another one million throughout the course of your life. Then you still have ~~eight~~ 28 million dollars with which to do whatever the heck you want, and you can do a lot with that much. Plus considering most of the country earns less than $60,000 a year and most of that goes toward expenses, especially taxes, that's a huge cap. We currently have monarchies masquerading as democracies and this would solve that problem. This is actually the single largest step we can take towards creating a meritocracy that we can do. If you have any other, better, brilliant ideas, then please feel free to critique it but if you don't kindly shut the fuck up because obviously the system as it is, is not working for anyone but the richest. This will not hold forever but it should be a good stopgap measure until we figure out how to survive without money, which is partially what this website is for. Notice how Ayn Rand did not depict her super-rich factory owners to be pampered party boys without a single shred of work ethic or merit, which is what we have going on right now. She depicted the factory owners to be self-made men who directed their factories themselves, made the processes themselves, even in the case of Atlas Shrugged rescued an employee from a deadly situation themselves. We have pretty much none of that now, just parasitic rich people with a lot of wage slaves relying entirely on their wage slaves to "give up, give up, give up" for the good of Others. This is not what Ayn Rand would have wanted. You know what else? The most ideal philosophy to convince people to adopt in order to make slaves out of them is Communism. If I was uber rich and super evil, that is certainly what I would try to promote. (looks intently at China)
Tax the ever-loving shit out of the uber rich. They do not need THAT MUCH. And no human being ever needed to be a billionaire in order to survive. Nope, take most of it away, put it into public projects like crumbling infrastructure. I'm not into glorified monarchies, no matter what they call themselves, and if you think of yourself as an American, you shouldn't be into them either. Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called the Revolutionary War?
If we ever managed to make it so that the amount in your bank account actually was directly correlated with your merit as a human being, then yes, we could get rid of the income cap rule. But when has a person's net worth ever indicated their intellectual, moral, social, or spiritual merit? Heck, even their overall worth as a person?
Minimum wage that makes sense for all workers, including those below the age of 18 - no "tipped wage" or "minor pay" bullshit, and no $7.25/hr bullshit which is essentially just a way of making a wage slave. No no no, back in the day a minimum wage made it so one person could support a four-person family on their pay. That's what we need to bring back. Otherwise, you're just a sucker for going to work, and who does that benefit? Nobody.
The thing about Capitalism people fail to understand is upon looking at Communism versus Capitalism, it's a question of how long does it take before each system degrades into corruption and evil without people within the system exerting effort to prevent this from happening. In Communism the decay starts pretty much instantly regardless of how much the people in it fight it because it's baked into the philosophy to make it so the people gaming the system win; so that the most two-faced, selfish, and manipulative and evil win. "From each, according to their ability, to each according to their need" is music to bad guys' ears because they just need to pretend to believe in this, not work at all, convince other people to overwork, and reap the profit. In Capitalism, the decay starts after about twenty to thirty years of people sitting on their ass not writing regulations into law and fighting the corruption actively. Otherwise Capitalism quickly starts becoming oligarchies and monarchies of the uber rich; something we could have avoided. And we've had about sixty years because neither Gen X nor the Boomers did enough to stop the degradation. I'll say it now: Capitalism only works if it is very well regulated and the majority of people (not just those "whose jobs it is" to fight the bad) fight the evil and stagnation and corruption that can grow in such a system every single year, every single day, in every way they can. Otherwise you end up with something like the USA right now. The US was created to make a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but that also means that the majority of us effectively are the boss and when we slack the whole thing goes to shit! Also, you don't want an uneducated boss do you? Well.
The consequences of letting a Capitalist democracy stagnate, corrupt, and rot are roughly something like this: 20 to 30 years, discontentment among minorities and the poor and the unlucky and oppressed. In other words, those falling through the cracks of the system. 40 to 50 years, suicide and crime rate goes up, economy collapses for everyone but the super rich, the super rich become the de facto monarchy or oligarchy. 60 to 70 years, you get assholes like me making an effort to bitch and a bunch of really disgruntled people causing enormous economic harms to the people who are abusing the system and hogging all the resources and exploiting millions of people. You also get protests, widespread anger, boycotts, and every legal recourse used to keep things from going further. And as you can see, you also get a lot of negativity and worthless b.s. to deal with on top of all that. 80 to 90 years, you get something akin to the French Revolution. We're at the turning point now and anyone with any sense does not want to see it go further. So how to fight it? One thing at a time, tackle each problem well, wrestle it down, move on to the next one. Rise and grind. Know what you have control over and do what you can there, and don't worry about what you can't change, but know you have more power than you think. There's no easy way out of this, but the road of hard work and effort is a hell of a lot better than the road of civil war or revolution. Thankfully a lot of folks US are actually tackling this problem in a sensible way and turning this place around, but I gotta say it: far-left rhetoric is not the way either and it'll just detour us away from where we want to eventually go. Don't drink the koolaid of the far-right or the far-left. Please. It'll go easier for all of us.
The amount of effort it takes yearly to keep Capitalism and democracy from becoming something else, like captive consumerism, oligarchies, Fascism, or Communism, or worse, is equivalent to a part time job. Individually this has to be done. However these days, on top of whatever super-intensive jobs you're already working, it can be a heck of a workload. So it makes sense to assign someone in your family or friend group to do the work, someone like me perhaps who has limited mobility or someone with free time, and have that person research the heck out of political candidates, ballot measures, issues at stake, voting, and current events, plus educate themselves well so they aren't trying to fuck with things they really don't fully understand, to help everyone vote well and do the activist thing effectively and be well informed. It has to be someone you actually know and not a news pundit or political blah blah talking head! This has to keep up every year. And if/when the country ever gets out of the shit, then each person has to do this part-time work themselves so they themselves are informed. It's no longer optional. I don't think it ever was.
Write JFK's Consumer Bill of Rights into law, because finding out the hard way that a product gives millions of people cancer is no way to run a society. For instance, Roundup source other source. And on that note, given that it causes leukemia and other blood cancers, I suggest that if you use it, you should stop.
Give Native American tribes as much of their sacred lands back as possible. Also as much land as possible in general. There are many ways of going about this, such as government intervention, crowdfunding campaigns online, or straight-up getting rich and buying land then giving it to the tribe or Native person who wants it. Why is this important? Well, we kind of need the planet healthy in order to live here let alone have any kind of wealth at all, and history has shown - including current events - that Native folks in general treat the land infinitely better than us new immigrants. It's literally the difference between someone treasuring the goose that lays golden eggs and the idiot that kills the goose in an attempt to get rich quick. That's how important the relationship with the planet and its lands is.
On that note, criminalize harming nature and the environment. It is way, way past time.
No longer make school mandatory for children or teens, just have one big test they need to pass in order to get their GED and convert the schools into study centers they can go to whenever they want
Rights for workers, so again, you're not just a sucker for going to work. Schedules given two weeks in advance and illegal to change past then. Mandated vacation time of one month per year at least, pregnancy leave for both parents that lasts til the kid turns one, no more than sixty hours a week legal in any industry, no shift longer than 10 hours legal in any industry, illegal to contact employees when they are off the clock. Every Socialist benefit given to those working in government industries such as the goddamn DMV, courthouses, libraries, and so on, given to every worker in the United States. They get Labor Day off, they get to enjoy their 9 to 5 Monday through Friday schedule, and no one else does, and no one sees that as problematic huh?
Make all trade with multinational corporations illegal in the United States. They can peddle their exploitative bullshit elsewhere. Our economy can boom instead. Plus we can trade with national corporations in other countries as well, bueno.
Massively strengthen the anti-monopoly laws so that we don't have the two-company versus fights anymore, but at least five different companies vying for supremacy. This will help end captive consumerism and increase originality, innovation, and merit in the corporate world.
End legal classification of corporations as "a person" and hold the entire corporation and all of its shareholders liable for any and all damages caused by it
Force the IRS to just tell people what they owe, when they owe it, and have explanations as to how they arrived at that figure included in the communiques. This will result in a small business boom, because starting and running your own business without the money to pay someone just to do the taxes gives you something like at least twice the workload. I am not exaggerating.
End any and all monetary influence in the legal and justice system and in government. If it is set up such that the rich can pay their way to better justice, or any position of public office, then there is no justice, plain and simple. Socialize the whole thing.
Make a large assortment of unethical financial practices illegal, such as compounded interest for loans and credit cards, billing someone for not having enough money in their bank account, and home equity loans of credit
Make planned obsolescence and single-use products that do not biodegrade illegal. This crap is sold on the false premise that we have unlimited resources on the planet and if we just keep making profits all of the junk resulting from these policies will be someone else's problem. Ok, boomer.
I am going to get hated for this, but end Affirmative Action. The emphasis must be placed strictly on merit, and if a workplace decides not to hire the candidate with the most merit based on some sort of -ism, then let them lose their dominancy in the market as a result, and they'll get their just desserts. Forcing such a workplace to hire candidates for greater diversity is just a recipe for constantly questioning "does this person really have the necessary skills to be here?" Affirmative Action had its place in the 60s through the 90s. Now it is time to let it go, let the -ist businesses flounder and fold, and let the businesses who hire those with the most skillz (and to hell with -isms) profit. One exception to the rule: college admissions. Those still need Affirmative Action to ensure no one gets their education denied them based on the shitlords who still rule academia.
Find the soldiers and listen to them. They understand what is going on better than civilians in the vast majority of cases.
An explosion of access to free education up to the highest levels of learning is definitely going to help. Improve accessibility to the best education possible, and you solve not just problems with capitalism but with just about everything else.
In any and every case where a human being can power trip and abuse their authority, regulate the shit out of it in a smart way to make it so they definitely get punished. Any system of government and law dependent on the honor system and on human beings to do the right thing is doomed to fail. It will also exhibit rampant injustice and people claiming that this is "freedom." Yes, it is freedom, but for a chosen few only, and if you look closer, that's not actually freedom since it makes the entire society start to collapse. Exhibit A, current events (February 2022).
Seriously tighten up regulation over cancer causing substances and other substances that cause severe disease or disability. They're so lax, holy crap. You don't want to know what's in our tap water. Or maybe you do, dunno.
Might be off on a tangent here, but aside from getting rid of all lead pipes and lead-based solder in said pipes, we need to get rid of our dependence on plastics (the stuff is worse than the industry portrays it healthwise and could very well be the next lead), on high fructose corn syrup, on hydrogenated vegetable oils and other trans fats, and on sugars as additives for food.
And on that note, it is probably better healthwise to use hydrogen peroxide to purify water than to use chlorine and chloramine. Since this can usually only be done at the end point of the pipe, it might be wise to promote collection of rainwater for neighborhoods and also regular boiling of city water in the water infrastructure as it goes through the grid, possibly via parabolic passive solar technology. Then the water can either be boiled or treated at each house. It's not impossible. It might seem like a colossal pain in the ass, but so is cancer and the other assorted stuff chlorine can do, and I have a nasty suspicion chlorine and bleach might have more to do with it than people generally realize.
Stop making governmental decisions on the "monetary value of a human life." I once heard in an economics course that the value of a human life is five million dollars, and that therefore government projects are done with that in mind and therefore any interventions to prevent things like loss of life, disability, etc. only go that far with the expenditure of money and no further. How about we shoot that stupid idea right back to hell where it belongs? The economic value of a human life is infinity. There we go, I fixed it.
There are two ways to keep a population at a manageable enough level for any system of government, capitalist or otherwise, to function at all in a reasonable and non-horrible fashion with enough resources to go around. 1. A series of wars in which many people die, or some kind of mass death event. 2. Population control measures. Since I am not a fan of late-term abortions (aka war or other unnecessary death), I think it wisest to go with the second option. Free birth control and a lot of sex ed for everyone, including those who need a refresher course since they never learned it in high school, subsidized by the state. Increases in taxes depending on how many kids you have; a tax increase after the first child, and further exponential increases with each subsequent child. No, religion is not an adequate reason to have as many kids as you want; that is how we wind up with the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (death, war, famine, and plague) plus a destroyed environment. Lots of research put into determining other methods of birth control, for all genders. And finally, ending the loopholes for deadbeat parents to avoid paying child support, such as by having it legal to allow bounty hunters to track them down and bring back their money, or bring them to prison. With a good enough reward provided by the state to make it worthwhile. Heh. Should be a pretty good dissuasion from creating a kid you don't intend to provide for.
Until the majority of people in a society and within a government all agree that treating human beings as inherently having all three: dignity, rights, and worth (no matter their outward appearance or social strata or strangeness to someone who does not know them or other kind of superficial bullshit) - unless they have been duly convicted of a heinous crime - is an ideal worth working towards, no one is going to exist in anytihng remotely resembling a civilization let alone a place worth being at.
The majority of the rhetoric and ideals of both Republican and Democrat party lines these days and the movements affiliated with these has been to dehumanize and demoralize the other guy, with a constant whataboutism and "no u" that has been a race to the bottom. But I'll be very blunt: deliberately spreading a plague or unintentionally spreading a plague is literally a war crime. Am I the only one seeing this?! No governmental system, no matter what it calls itself, can ever create a good living environment without its citizens seeing, accepting, and acting on the truth. So if we want to save our democracy we have to shackle ourselves to truth as an ideal no matter how much it hurts.
A lot of people are currently complaining about the way things are, particularly among people in power and among authorities. Things like the cops, the politicians, the businesspeople. Well there are three ways of fixing this. One is to instead of dismantling the system and "the man," become the system and change it from within. Another is to create your own system, saw off the limb of the system you want to replace, and replace it with the prosthetic you've made - and it had better work. The third way is to wage war aka "revolution," an extremely hellish business and nearly impossible to avoid civlian casualties while doing so. Thing is, all of these require effort. This is why you will see people complaining, or worse, trying to incite violence and revolution in order to get others to do their dirty work for them. Beware the narcissists trying to recruit other narcissists. Because if you decide to create some kind of vengeful, bloody "revolution" it is guaranteed going to hurt the innocent but everyone always says it's for the greater good. The quiet part out loud? The "greater good" is always THEMSELVES. Mounting body count is just incidental to achieving goals for these creeps. And they exist in both the far right and the far left.
With this in mind, probably best to change the system from within. Least messy. In other words, if you hate a system the most and complain about it the most and it's hurt you the most... make a plan, get in there, rewire it, tinker while you are there, but know how the power structure works first so you don't just wind up being dogsbody to the top dog. Wrestle your way to the top of the ranks without harming the innocent and in a way that is ethically correct only. And when you become the top of the heap, don't fucking forget where you came from and perpetuate the cycle. Most importantly, every step of the way maintain introspection and if possible a support network to keep you from becoming what you hate and to keep you from being a hypocritical asshole like so many on the far left these days - the exact mirror image of the Far Right. Oh, joy.
I'm pretty sure that my generation and younger, in fact including most of Generation X so a little before mine, are so over it with regards to being advertised and marketed to. Privacy is a human right. So if your ad campaign or marketing is in effect taking the tactics of a literal stalker, you need to chill the fuck out.
Also, write privacy rights into law, especially with regards to internet, the internet of things, surveillance, selling browsing habits and information about website users, targeted advertising, and so on. Literally no one wants Skynet, Big Brother, or the bunch of tech products that have recently come out to give us exactly those things. No. Fuck off.
The Oatmeal, How NOT To Sell Something To My Generation I don't think I can put it quite as succinctly as he did. Oh marketers and advertisers, learn from him.
A brief concession to the Communists out there: I think pretty much everyone who was around in the 90s had something going in the back of their minds "this isn't right, this isn't healthy, this isn't good" with regards to say, walking around in a mall, watching infomercials for yet more crap you didn't want or need, or otherwise engaging with the buy-spend-buy mass-consumerist nonsense. It is entirely possible to take Capitalism way too far. Rampant greed and the endless belief in "the bottom line" over everything else is tragic. My best guess to make it better as a stopgap measure is to regulate the shit out of it but the only long term solution I can see is to get people to slow down, think a little, and rein in their desires and their greed. How to make this happen? Frankly, we need universal mental health care and universal education (yep, broadband internet in every house will help provide) up til as far as it can go since you can transmute the base desire for "stuff" into a desire for learning, and no one can take that from you. Once we get that going I think things will be a lot better.

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