this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Explain Like I'm Five
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I think the general idea of those against it is that they assume it is zero sum. Meaning, for everyone to be taken care of, the person must lose or have less.
That still doesn't make sense for people who aren't billionaires, though ... if it's zero sum, billionaires are even more problematic than they already are.
It makes sense if you don't think the billionaires can ever lose, so anyone else getting more means some other poor person has to get less.
As Ronald Wright said , A Short History of Progress (2004): "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." (note, John Steinbeck never said that)
Capitalism is the ideology that puts increase of the capital as the number one goal. It's usually is the meta strategy to make more and more goods.
To rephrase, if you do something else, it's gonna be less effective at multiplying the total wealth of society. And it might not always be a wrong thing to do, but the benefits need to outweigh the costs of scaling slower.
So, it's not wrong. Socialists often think about having a fair share of the cake instead of thinking how to make the cake bigger.