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The problem with this argument is that it relies on a No True Scotsman fallacy. Every time capitalism’s outcomes are criticized, the response is that we do not live under true capitalism. The system that actually exists is always treated as an aberration rather than the logical result of capitalist incentives operating over time.

The bureaucratic monopolistic society you describe is not a corruption external to capitalism. It is capitalism doing exactly what it is structurally incentivized to do. Capitalism’s defining objective is not serving people. It is profit maximization. Selling something for more than it costs to produce. That incentive does not stop at the market boundary. Firms rationally seek to reduce competition, shape rules in their favor, raise barriers to entry, and externalize costs such as healthcare, labor, education and environmental damage.

When capital accumulates, the most efficient way to protect profit is no longer innovation. It is political influence.This is not socialism. It is regulatory capture, a phenomenon extensively documented in mainstream economics. Industries systematically capture regulators to serve profit and shareholder interests rather than the public. Public Choice Theory explains how private actors use the state to entrench economic advantage. Peer reviewed research has repeatedly linked market concentration to lobbying power and weakened competition and demonstrates that capital concentration naturally converts into political power unless it is actively countered.

The regulations you are pointing to are not anti capitalist constraints imposed from outside the system. They are capitalist behaviors expressed through the state. Capital does not invade government accidentally. It does so because it is profitable.

This is why food insecurity and healthcare failures exist inside wealthy capitalist nations. Healthcare markets optimize for revenue rather than outcomes as documented by the World Health Organization and the Commonwealth Fund. Food systems prioritize shareholder value resulting in both massive waste and widespread hunger. Market choice disappears when industries consolidate, something the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice openly acknowledge has accelerated.

Saying real capitalism would wipe out big business ignores history. Unregulated capitalism has never remained competitive for long. It tends toward monopoly because scale, capital accumulation, and political leverage are competitive advantages. If capitalism were self correcting, it would not require perpetual bailouts, repeated antitrust interventions, or constant state support to prevent collapse. The fact that it does is evidence that the outcomes being criticized are not a deviation from capitalism but its mature form. Capitalism concentrated wealth beyond our imaginations. We live in a post scarcity environment where victims of capitalism and socio economic factors alike keep hundreds of millions unhoused, hungry and sick while the capitalist owners, that by nature produce nothing (proof of work) and only extract value through rent seeking behaviors, enjoy socialist benefits provided by and extracted from the workers that produce all of the things of value that we use. It’s become very common for the capitalist to rage against socialism while they enjoy all of our socialist benefits and initiatives while insisting that the rest of society must stick to raw unfettered capitalism. It’s also very common now for uneducated and ill informed workers to defend capitalism and vote against their own self interest as well. Capitalism only favors those who have breached a certain threshold of accumulation which is only achieved and made possible through extortion of the worker.

Zsubmariner 1w ago

If we drop the labels and the isms, I think what Jeff is saying is that what we have been calling a free market isn't one.

You are right to point out that the government and regulations on one side and corporations and bankers on the other is a false choice. Heads they win, tails we lose. It's all the same machine.

So what's actually wrong and how can we get free of it?

The usual Bitcoiner perspective is that the problem is fiat. Inflationary money perverts both business and government.. and individual behavior too.

I'd strongly agree with that, but it's also a deep rabbit hole and I have come to down it in gradually myself.

At first you just see, yeah they are stealing from us. That sucks. But then all the ways that creates evil incentives all over the place, and it starts to become clear that a lot of things are really deeply twisted by that. It twists politics, food, medicine, education, relationships...

Look back at weimar to see it on fast forward. Gambling, addiction, exploitation, crime... Just every kind of corruption goes crazy as inflation heats up.

Money affects people very deeply. It turns the knob on our incentives and our motivation and it changes us psychologically, even morally.

But if it's so deep, is it really just a government running a money printer? That seems wrong, but also kind of shallow. It must be something deeper, right? I think maybe I am detecting that question between the lines of what you are saying. Either way, it was a question I had.

It made me ask: what really is "fiat"? Is it something older, more universal, deeper in human nature and life?

The old word is "usury". The great wisdom traditions and the builders of the greatest civilization knew all about this.

Fiat means "declaration". It's not just "the state" decreeing money. It's claiming the value of something that doesn't exist, no matter who does it.

When I looked harder, I realized that "the state" did not create fiat. Fiat created the state. Usury created the state to enforce and collect on debt.

When you give a loan at interest, you are "pulling forward" the value of work that has not been done yet (or claiming to). To try to make that real, you need enforcement. Then you can but and sell that "bond" (bondage) today, backed up by the enforced ability to control what others will do in the future. You can claim the value today of the work that someone else will have to do in the future.

So now you are ammassing "wealth" (power over others, actually, the claimed value of the bonds of others) and it's a feedback loop and a game that gets bigger and more elaborate as it goes.

Pretty soon you are making loans to princes, and they had better take it too, because you will be making a loan to his neighbor, to raise an army, because he needs to do some pillaging, because he already owes you money. And if he doesnt pay, you will loan even more to some other prince to conquer him and collect the debt.

And now you have the state, controlling and extracting it's people, making wars, enforcing and collecting on all the debts. "Regulations", bailouts, money printing, crazy taxes, snake oil drugs, propaganda, social breakdown... Etc etc

The whole thing keeps growing and enslaving and conquering and extracting, faster and faster. Because it can't stop. Because the weakness is, power over all the real value is moved by the sucking force of the lie.

There is no value from future work. The fruit of future work does not exist yet. You can't eat next year's grain. So you always need new bag holder, trading his something for your nothing. And the hole just grows and grows. If the music ever stops, the whole thing comes crashing down. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

Bitcoin doesnt just fix money in the superficial sense of stopping the money printer. It breaks the whole model of the debt-based world. The whole thing breaks. Which is scary. But so is letting this continue.

Bitcoin anchors value in time. Deflation makes borrowing and lending impractical. It breaks the incentive of the state to act as guarantor and enforcer of debt. Value accrues to the one who works and provides real value now and drains away from rent seekers and bond holders.

A free market under those conditions will be a totally different animal. I don't think we can know what that will be like, but it sort of destroys our ideas about "capitalism" and "socialism" as we mean those things today.

Anyway, I think that's what it means. I hope that helps.

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Discussion

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

You’re much closer than most. I can see you working to escape the linguistic spiral and get beneath the labels to what actually drives the system. That instinct is right. We’re going to have to question even our most basic economic words before we reach bedrock.

Zsubmariner 1w ago

It's a clumsy business to unravel the stories that are sewn into the very words we use and see what's underneath, but I keep trying. Thanks for noticing.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

Yes, many questions left to be asked and need to be asked. Which is frustrating in the #bitcoin world to see capitalism protected by its few religious followers.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

Bitcoin made me start to question everything, and I literally mean everything. We have to go back to first principles to really understand the structure.

“Capitalism” and “socialism” are not analytical terms anymore.

They are rhetorical weapons. They are used mostly to identify what tribe someone is in, and who the enemies of that tribe are. They no longer describe systems, which is how they started. They signal allegiance, not alignment.

An -ism does three things at once:

1. Collapses multiple variables into one label

2. Smuggles moral valence into description

3. Freezes inquiry by pretending the system is already defined

We've been given a gift, an exit from the cage that we've been locked in. But the only way to see the path is through inquiry and critical thinking, questioning everything.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

I agree with that. I’m okay with throwing out all preconceptions of any -ism. It’s a little odd that this happens when we are literally at the end stages of capitalism as we know it from previous understandings, but hey let’s move forward.

So why don’t we throw the term capitalism away because capitalism and free markets have never existed together and never will.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

Capitalism should mean any system that uses capital (stock x velocity) to do work. And that's every single system process ever, going back through 4 billion years of evolution. It's functionally meaningless. I don't think we are at the end stage of capitalism. I think we haven't defined it properly yet. Ownership and who owes what to whom is debt based thinking. That's what I want to throw into the trash.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

So you are saying capitalism has nothing to do with property rights, self interest incentives, or profits?

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

I'm not saying what it means, I'm just presenting the question. What SHOULD it mean?

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

Oh, lol, honestly I don’t typically use the word “should”. I can only assume we would use Adam Smiths defining tenets of Capitalism.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

He wrote Wealth of Nations in 1776. We have learned a lot since then.

He defined capital as "that part of a man's stock which he expects to afford him revenue."

Notice the framing: capital as a subset of **stock**.

Smith wasn't wrong—he was emphasizing one component. He divided capital into "fixed capital" (durable goods like machines) and "circulating capital" (consumable goods like raw materials and wages). Throughout his analysis, he understood capital as active—stock being deployed toward production, not sitting idle.

But by anchoring the definition to stock—to accumulated things rather than transformation rate—Smith inadvertently set economic thinking on a path toward emphasizing accumulation over velocity.

**The focus began shifting from "how fast can you convert resources into value" to "how much do you possess."**

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

Yes, but I believe the focus of Smiths tenets was really the self interest and profit incentive…those being the main driving force. Do you agree?

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

Are we dependent on his motivations in 1776 to decide our actions in 2026?

I know I'm not.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

No, not at all but we need a baseline and not a moving target.

To you, is profit and self interest incentives key tenets of capitalism?

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

No. I find them to be distractions. But then I reject the debt based framing of capitalism that you are using, entirely, so that shouldn't be a surprise.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

That is very interesting. So capitalism to you is just the transaction between two or more people?

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

The current definition of capitalism—profit motive plus self-interest—describes participant behavior, not system architecture. It's like defining a bridge by how drivers behave on it rather than by the load paths that keep it standing.

What we call 'capitalism' today is actually debt-based extraction wearing capitalism's name. It optimizes for profit by borrowing from future capacity—inflating stock through credit creation, degrading velocity infrastructure through deferred maintenance, and preventing exit to hide insolvency. The accounting equation 'revenue minus costs equals profit' measures extraction efficiency, not capital function.

Wealth-based capitalism means systems where capital actually works: Stock × Velocity → Work. Capital isn't money to be extracted. Capital is the multiplicative relationship between accumulated capacity and conversion rate that produces sustained output. Profit isn't the goal—it's a signal that work is being produced efficiently. Self-interest isn't the engine—it's what exit rights harness to discipline conversion systems.

The difference is geometric, not moral. Debt-based systems can generate massive profits while destroying capital. Wealth-based systems generate sustainable returns because they maintain capital. One optimizes the accounting equation. The other maintains the multiplication that makes the accounting possible.

Economics is the study of transactions. Politics is the study of human interactions. Civilization walks on two feet, one is economics and the other is politics. If we study what these things actually are, the picture becomes clear. If we distract ourselves with the hype of 300 years of extraction memes, we trip on the language and get nowhere.

Rand got the incentives right but missed the architecture entirely. Self-interest doesn't automatically produce good outcomes. Self-interest plus exit rights produces selection pressure that forces systems to serve rather than extract. Remove exit and self-interest becomes extraction. Maintain exit and self-interest becomes optimization.

We're not arguing about whether self-interest should drive economic activity. We're arguing about what system architecture channels self-interest toward building rather than consuming.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring this comment. Will respond when time allows.

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

I don't know what he wanted, I only know what he wrote. He was trying to describe what he saw from his investigations. He did a pretty good job. Now the world is in our hands to shape.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

I also greatly appreciate the dialogue and conversation so far. Thank you for your time.

Zsubmariner 1w ago

Yeah, people are at different points down the rabbithole. As nostr:nprofile1qqsd7pkjrm98cxwgn5z5je9jm83stfp9a00rgspukrnev6589v3strcpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqprdmhxue69uhkummnw3ez6vfwde3x7tnpdenkzmnf9e3k7mg4yqp is saying, part of what nostr:nprofile1qqsg86qcm7lve6jkkr64z4mt8lfe57jsu8vpty6r2qpk37sgtnxevjcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqzrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqaktkhj was saying in the video too, people end up meaning very different things.

I don't really use the isms much anymore because they're just trigger words. Ideologies are just programs that keeps us fighting and puts a frame around our minds so we don't see the system for what it is.

Fiat is word magic, at its core. And words have become increasingly shallow and meaningless during the fiat age.

I've found that going back to old sources and clear thinking from before these spells were cast has helped me see things from the outside more. Words are thinking tools, and they have effectively been nerfed--they used to have much clearer, deeper meanings.

I think the schools have had big role in taking away the deeper meanings of words. Even civil war letters from regular farm boys in the 1800s are humbling to read now.

Take the word "literacy" itself. (Kind of an interesting example.)

It used to mean deeply knowing history and the source texts of our culture. The Bible, Aristotle, Homer, Seneca... Now it means just the basic ability to read and write.

Now everyone is "literate" but nobody knows what anything really means. That makes us useful but not dangerous to the system and more programmable.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

I do the same thing, but then I dig down to the etymological roots of the word and question whether even they had the right conceptual framework for what we need. Frequently the answer is no. Clearest example in this case is Capital.

Capital did not begin as an economic term. Its roots lie in the Latin _caput_—head, source, origin. The word shares ancestry with "cattle," and this etymology is revealing.

In agrarian societies, a "head" of cattle represented something more sophisticated than modern accounting captures. The animal was simultaneously:

**Stock**: Physical asset, tangible wealth, something owned

**Velocity**: Transformation engine converting grass into milk, meat, muscle, and more cattle over time

The language carried both components naturally. When someone spoke of their "capital" in cattle, they meant the productive system—both the accumulated animals AND the rate at which those animals generated value through reproduction and yield.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

Current uses of the word either focus on either stock OR velocity, infrequently both at the same time, and our entire use of the word in language flows back and forth between them. Makes it really difficult to nail down exactly what someone is talking about.

The way I use the word, capital is both stock and velocity.

Stock x Velocity -> Work

Zsubmariner 1w ago

Good example of exactly what I mean. (And that is the Austrian sense of capital or capital structure.)

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

I truly believe that capitalism has run its coarse and it is unsustainable mainly do to its profit incentive and its centralization. Now, Bitcoin put the final arrow through capitalisms heart.

The solution will be property rights that are compatible with life essentials being freed from profits. Everything else will fall into place.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

Sure, I get that but we can agree with what profit means.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

Profit is the difference between what something costs and what it returns. But today's profits generate tomorrow's costs if the transaction doesn't serve the long term.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

Correct. You can run a successful company where all bills are paid, and labor is paid with little to no profits.

Zsubmariner 1w ago

I think you may be using the word profit where many of us would use the term "rent seeking". The old term is "usury". All human beings seek benefit. The question is donlmination and exploitation.

Entrepreneurs and competition are not evil, and are timeless and fundamental to human nature too. Entrepreneurs seeking margin bring tremendous good to the world. Deflationary money causes prices to fall to the cost of production and forces them to constantly innovate. The wealth created is naturally distributed to everyone by deflation.

When someone uses property as leverage to exploit others, that's wrong. We agree on that. But banning all profit or collective ownership would impoverish us in a tragedy of the commons. Property is natural and good.

You would ban all sex because some people misues it to hurt others, right? It is procreative and good, even though it can be misued.

I noticed that you are still pretty focused on capitalism ending, etc.

Ideologies don't exist. They are just figments of propaganda. They don't run the world and we don't fix the world by having the right one run it. That's all a psyop we've been sold. Usury, as a runaway process, is running the world. Or running away with it, you might say.

Bitcoin kills that process and we can just go back to being healthy.

Ideologies are just a distraction.

Chad Lupkes 1w ago

We can't let our anger and frustration distract us from coordination. Focus on signal, not noise.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

I would need a breakdown in definition between profit and rent seeking.

Zsubmariner 6d ago

Profit is just margin. The difference between what you pay for something and what you sell it for. If I travel to a far off land to buy spices, bring them back and sell them to you for a price that is worth more to you than the money you trade, both of us win. The margin is what you were willing to pay for someone to go get those spices for you.

If my neighbor can find a way to make the trip more efficient, he can give you a better price.

We compete and prices fall to the marginal cost of production. The world gets more efficient and thus we are all better off. Everyone's money is a little more useful and so we all get richer.

Rent seeking is I have a thing you need, or I can get the government to force you somehow, so I use my leverage over you to extract the maximum I can take from you. Often that will be more than you have, by a bond ("loan") so I take your freedom and then I can sell my claim on you future work and set up enforcement, regulation, etc.

One is a freely negotiated exchange of value, the other one is extortion.

We live in a world where these waters have been intentionally muddied. They have pretended that rent-seeking is fair play, called it "profit". Some people have reacted, understandably, by saying "well profit is evil then." But it's not. Profit is good. Usury is evil. There is a reason why that word is old and strange to us.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

Profit is not margin. Profit is what’s above cost and labor.

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

Why do you consider labor to be separate from cost

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

Labor is a part of cost, all labor included. Most people complain if I don’t include labor because they believe with no profit the “owners” make zero money. Which is educated and self employed people like ourselves know these things but not everyone does.

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

Then why use them separately when you attempt to define Profit above? You said that Profit is what's above cost and labor. If cost includes labor, why mention it separately?

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

Like I stated, most people don’t understand that cost includes all labor.

Zsubmariner 6d ago

If your goal is to reify something called capitalism and blame it. Go ahead, but it doesn't mean anything. That's just ideological programming. If you want to engage in real terms, but ideological checkers is boring and will never solve anything or get you closer to the truth.

Arguing over maps while ignoring the territory is pointless.

Is there a point you'd like to address that you can express in non-ideological terms?

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

We use profit as a component to calculate margin. But they are closely related accounting terms.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

Margin and profit are not needed to run a successful business. Profit or margin as a goal is unsustainable.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

If you have something I need to live, is it a negotiation on price? Who has leverage? Sounds like a paywall for something you know I need. Surely you can agree with that?

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

So if we have something that you need to live, we should give it to you without a price, ignoring the cost?

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

Absolutely not, it would operate just like co ops operate now. My power company is a co op.

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

I love cooperatives. But just because they don't focus on earning additional profits that they can provide to shareholders doesn't mean they don't try to lower their costs and manage their business operations in the exact same way as any other type of business entity.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

Unfortunately we disagree there and there is mountains of historical evidence to back up that “for profit” leads to exploitation.

Chad Lupkes 6d ago

I think we're just talking past each other now. I'm talking about cooperatives, you might be talking about for profit companies, I can't even tell anymore.

The best way to prevent any change is to keep using the old language of debt based systems.

Moving on.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

I agree with most of this but this is where my frustration begins. Adam Smith actually spells out what capitalism is and warns what it CAN and probably will become. Yet, it’s like he is forgotten and the excuses start.

BlueDuckBTC 1w ago

“When I looked harder, I realized that "the state" did not create fiat. Fiat created the state. Usury created the state to enforce and collect on debt.”

Could we look at this from an angle that profit created Fiat and profit now uses then State much like it uses the Banks? I think governing bodies is a natural manifestation of social animals, this has been observed over and over again. My default is to reject the notion of a State but let’s not inject that and let profit/capitalism be let off the hook so to speak.

“Bitcoin doesnt just fix money in the superficial sense of stopping the money printer. It breaks the whole model of the debt-based world. The whole thing breaks. Which is scary. But so is letting this continue.”

Everything leading up to this paragraph guides the reader into “Fiat is the problem” but I think it skips the vast majority of history. As Lyn Alden and many others have said, gold actually served as very good and hard money for a long period of human history, prior to technological advances rendering it useless. During these times there was still corruption, there were still those profiting off of someone else’s labor and centralizing wealth/power.

I have no doubt that #bitcoin will get us the vast majority of the way “there” but without changing ideology of profit of everything else…I’m reluctant to say Bitcoin will fix anything at all.

If Bitcoin succeeds, why is for profit capitalism the automatic winner IF it is still just a theory? Why couldn’t other systems like profit sharing, co-op, or even fully socialized industries survive perfectly fine and better than for profit capitalism?

Ricky Zhang 6d ago

“If Bitcoin succeeds, why is for profit capitalism the automatic winner IF it is still just a theory? Why couldn’t other systems like profit sharing, co-op, or even fully socialized industries survive perfectly fine and better than for profit capitalism?”

Because those models likely rely on a centralized authority, which definitionally suppresses the free market and is therefore likely to be outcompeted by the free market in the long run.

Sure, I could see a few small pockets of profit sharing, co-op, or full socialism on the bitcoin standard consisting of those who voluntarily choose those models.

But the desire to contribute and create value is a key component of the human condition. Most humans want to create a better future for their offspring than the present. So I’d expect the global free market to dominate, while other models survive as small boats lifted by the rising tide of the global free market on sound money.

Zsubmariner 6d ago

I think so. And either way, there's no need to wrestle over theories. If people want to have a coop or put tarrifs on their border or... Whatever. Go ahead. If you think you have a better model, just try it. In some contexts, it will probably work.

Bitcoin just means you can't force it on the rest of us so easily and we can find out what really works for us in our context.

Another old word I love is "subsidiarity". We will be able to make local decisions. Not because we get everybody to agree to that as an ideology, but because that is just how things naturally work.

In a lot of ways, Bitcoin is just letting us be ourselves again. Be natural again. Be healthy again.

Once we're all out from under the yoke of the debt system, the questions will answer themselves. Freedom allows the truth to emerge.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

I can buy into everything you just wrote. Which is why I contest the overwhelming sentiment that capitalism is THE answer.

Zsubmariner 6d ago

Isms don't exist, man. There is no THE answer. All this isms stuff is mind control.

The world we know is a tyranny of debt. Let's just solve for that. The best thing you can do is get your own mind and energy free from it. Stop using their fake money, stop using their fake words

Fiat is word magic. Break the spell.

BlueDuckBTC 6d ago

But capitalism relies on a central authority for property rights. I agree with human condition to create and produce but that happens naturally without profit, property rights, and does not need any market.