This community is diverse. It's just really in fashion today to be against capitalism and the rich. Marxism is the answer apparently.

The interesting thing to me isn't this community specifically, it's that all the prosperity that we (here anyways, for the most part) are enjoying, all the technological achievements, the lifting of billions of people from poverty ( https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief ), elimination of many diseases, increased lifespan, were mostly achieved under some version of capitalism.

It's not that there aren't problems (lots) and it's not that the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else isn't a concern but the simple narratives are also wrong.

Capitalism speeds things up but its not the cause of innovation. Plenty of invention happens under other types of economic structures

Capitalism, really, when it comes down it is just individuals being able to profit off of the things they create. GDP per person throughout almost all of history (thousands of years at least) was less than $2 per day. Capitalism came along where people could actually profit off what they create and now on average it's about 40/day.

If people can't profit off of things they won't innovate, and even if they did there is no market if people can't profit off it.

> If people can't profit off of things they won't innovate, and even if they did there is no market if people can't profit off it.

patently absurd. no inventions before capitalism?

Very, very few by comparison. We have thousands of innovations every single day now. How many innovations can you name pre capitalism that had a major impact on society?

Shareholders do not provide value, workers do. After he retired, Steve Ballmer did not provide $110B of value to Microsoft customers, but he received that wealth anyway.

There is absolutely value in providing risk capital. That's literally the lifeblood of commercial innovation.

But this only happens when stock is initially offered. Not when it’s traded afterwards.

That is completely untrue. Companies frequently own their own stock, and issue more when the price is high it continues to be quite valuable to the company

They can buy back shares and keep them in treasury, that's correct. But they need cash to buy them back first and it only actually results in a positive flow of money if they are able to sell it at a profit later.

And when they issue more, then this initial offering again (of new stock).

We are responding to somebody who said the shareholders do not provide value. Which is just obviously incorrect