Americans – including many Republicans – are losing faith in capitalism

Nothing quite dampens your belief in hard work paying off when you see an openly corrupt government self-dealing billions of dollars.

i lost faith in CNN way before.

Why is politics/ communism being pushed on hacker news?

You have to know, government is incredibly inefficient, so indifferent it can barely do its basic work. When you put it in charge of the details of the economy, everything breaks down, basics disappear, people starve.

And then they start arresting people complaining about it, and they build walls so you can't escape.

It has all the benefits of being in prison.

People losing track of history. No system will be perfectly for everyone, ever. One system has helped the most people ever in history.

Fix what's broken, don't switch to something already proven worse.

I never even experienced the shitty systems, but sometimes I feel some sort of immersion or shock therapy is needed to remind people. We have evidence. People have suffered and died to generate that evidence.

This headline indicates we should feel surprise that Republicans are losing faith in capitalism.

That's a little odd, given the abrupt reversals of policy preferences we've all seen since 2017. "Law and order", free trade, free markets, low tariffs, personal responsibility, judicial restraint, checks and balances, the importance of character, all at least tacitly abandoned.

We have socialism for the rich, so why not for the poor?

Edit: wanted to make this a little less low-effort so here's how I see us having socialism for the rich:

Taxpayer-funded research being transferred directly to private companies, often with little to no compensation back to the government or taxpayer, and with all profits from this R&D being privatized. The entire Internet is an example of this. SpaceX getting decades of NASA research almost for free (plus contracts) is an example. Pharma companies privatizing taxpayer-funded university research. Endless examples.

The whole "too big to fail" phenomenon and bailouts. 2008 really showed this clearly, and it hasn't gone away. Meanwhile ordinary people are not too big to fail and will not be bailed out.

Open regulatory capture, now institutionalized through a system that looks very pay to play.

Direct government subsidies to companies that absolutely do not need it, such as state and local government offering huge "incentives" to get data centers that don't generate much local employment. These are basically handouts to the already rich.

Tax cuts on things like real estate and capital gains and increases in consumption taxes like sales taxes and tariffs. All consumption taxes are regressive, meaning the poor pay a higher percentage than the rich. Tax cuts on property taxes and investments benefit the wealthy more than the poor.

... and so on.