Late Stage Capitalism

This is what's frustrating about trying to talk to people about socialism. It's everything that liberal capitalist democracy claims to be but isn't. They've just been brainwashed into thinking it just means authoritarianism.

• Democracy: You want a government by the people, of the people, for the people? Well a system that lets the rich and powerful pour their vast resources into corrupting it doesn't allow for that. And that's before we even get into the explicit ways in which US "democracy" was set up to be resistant to popular influences. Also, in a less direct way, the more of society that is privatized, the less in under the preview of whatever semblance of democratic control we do have.

• Freedom: Under capitalism, your freedom is directly proportional to your wealth. Rich people and corporations can do whatever the hell they want and can often do things that infringe on the freedoms of others, but if you're poor, or even just not super rich, your ability to make choices in life is heavily constrained by what the market offers and what you can afford. If you can't afford to lose your job, you have to follow what your boss tells you. But hey, that's not a government, so it doesn't count right?

• Meritocracy: People want to be rewarded for their hard work and keep that reward? Well capitalism doesn't reward hard work. It rewards having enough money and power to siphon the value of other people's hard work. It doesn't matter what people did to get to the top, they could have inherited it, they could have done crimes, etc. They could be completely undeserving of it and still be put in charge and still take your money.

• Innovation: Capitalism doesn't promote innovation as anything more than a byproduct of a different force. ANYTHING that makes profit is incentivized, regardless of how productive it is for society. Sometimes that's new tech, but things that are equally valid under capitalism include: Weapons, cheap plastic crap, getting people addicted to things, finding ways to offer less and charge more, suing others to try to stop them from using anything vaguely similar to what you own IP for (regardless of if you were even the ones to originally make the thing instead of just acquiring the IP) etc. Under this framework, you can even consider lobbying the government as profit generating activity. You spend some money to get the government to do things that will allow you to make more money in the future.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It's just really hard to make the jump from having people agree with these things to realizing that the system itself is to blame and that in order to do better we need to change it.