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Polymarket paid influencers to fake winning bets, built dummy websites to pull it off
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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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That's capitalism. The greatest irony is that free market has been associated with capitalism. I'm personally not a huge free market fan anyways, as I think it carries it's own problems, but I find it funny that libs and cons think of free market as a capitalist society.
We have had 500 years of capitalism now and despite every single "please bro, just one more free market expefiment bro, it'll work this time", it always consolidates, cheats, corrupts and blackmails. Capitalism innately favors monopolies and manipulation over honest competition and equal ground for ideas.
In my, admittedly imperfect, view I feel like if some society really wanted an actual free market it would a socialist one. Where everyone is actually on equal footing, people have their basic needs met so they aren't focused on surviving, and people aren't born with more than others. From there, ideas and items could actually compete. If this hypothetical society kept money and markets, as described so far, and people's needs were met, then luxuries and unnecessary but enjoyable products could be sold in this situation.
The current system is kind of just the default system that nobody really planned out or thought about carefully. Unemployment, suffering, homelessness, inequality, billionaires, etc, are all baked into how it works. But it kind of mostly sorta works good enough that nobody is motivated enough to do anything about it, plus it directly benefits anyone who could do anything about it.
It's rapidly reaching it's limit, though, especially with A.I. and most people's jobs being bullshit. I'm curious what the replacement will be, and I'm hoping the transition isn't too... painful.
Except it's not, it's intentionally maintained around a set of rules. Those rules resulted in it growing into this shape
I didn't meant that there are no rules. I meant that if you dumped a group of people on another planet, in 1000 years they'd probably have capitalism again. It's just one of the the path of least resistance systems that seems obvious at scale. Nobody sat down and designed capitalism. It just kind of happened.
Native Americans lived in greater numbers for many thousands of years without developing capitalism. I think this speaks more to your worldview than reality.
Wealthy people most certainly sat down and designed the systems that allow capitalism to exist. It was not a unconscious effort. Did some things just fall into place? Perhaps but the hyper capitalism we experience now has a ton of law and policy created to allow it to exist the way it does.
A great example of this is the concept of the corporation. It took hundreds of years of lobbying and legal wrangling to get it to the point where they are now. Not time limited, no financial responsibility for shareholders or executives, does not have to be for the public good, personhood, etc.
Yeah maybe. But I'm not really talking about nomadic ancestral living though. Plenty of villages in the country today are functionally communist, I've lived in one.
What I mean is it seems hard to have a system that has all the stuff we have today, without capitalism appearing at some point. Electricity, computers, trains, huge populations, cities, etc.
I'm trying to say that it's easy to implement, it seems obvious, and it benifits those in power. But it's inefficient and horrible long term and leads to problems. I think all the current laws and policy protecting capitalism were put in place to prop up a dying system. So rather than it being deliberate, I believe it's just a series of reactionary patch jobs that "fix" problems as they come up rather than anyone actually sitting down and designing a good system.