"yes or no"

I took it like this:

It makes no sense to ask yes or no to two different positions at the same time. They need to be asked separately to make any sense.

Are you a capitalist, yes or no?
Are you a socialist, yes or no?

But not together. That’s like asking are you left or right handed, yes or no.

The second level of dumb is asking people if they’re a capitalist or not. So few Americans are, it’s always going to be misleading and erroneous when a majority answers yes. What they really mean to say is that they support the capitalist system, not that they qualify as being a capitalist.

You aren’t a capitalist if you don’t have capital, and very few people have it. You then have to invest that capital in a business venture, purchasing labor power to produce commodities for sale, the surplus value of which you appropriate for yourself, as if you did all the work.

Roughly speaking, less than 3% of the country can accurately claim to be “capitalists.”

Our economic system is obscenely elitist and exclusionary for that reason alone. It’s a club whose membership is limited in the extreme, but gets to call all the shots for everyone else.

The vast majority of the citizenry will never, ever be members. But the citizenry have to obey the folks in the club, regardless. We’re not allowed inside, but we have to obey the dictates of those merry few who are.

Which reminds me of that Dutch guy who made headlines at Davos for saying no one was talking about the most important thing, taxes.

Yeah, higher taxes on the rich are definitely needed. But that is in no way the most important thing. We shouldn’t allow billionaires to exist in the first place. If we were sane, we’d have an economy that functioned fairly, justly, upfront, with as close to equal compensation as possible . . . so “the state” wouldn’t have to come in afterwards and offset massive inequalities on the back-end. A just economy wouldn’t need that kind of redress in the first place.