I am going to do my best to reenact my old self, and we can discuss my bad economics as if I still believe it. They were mostly unformed, Not Even Wrong opinions, so I might add onto them to make them worth discussing. I'll try to be charitable to my old self too and not Flanderize it. I'm going for serious, and though I can't tell you what to do, I'm looking to start a real discussion. Everything nested under this comment after this sentence is in character:

I’ve been looking at this subreddit for a little while, and I have to say I’m somehow both disappointed and surprised by how biased it is in favor of capitalism when there are plenty of legitimate economic views outside of and even against it. Reddit is usually either to the far right or far left and rarely in the middle and I feel this is a case of the former. There’s so much to say, and I’ll probably leave out a lot, so I’ll just give you a point-by-point, stream-of-consciousness analysis of some points that are overlooked.

• Capitalism is basically the private ownership of the means of production, not necessarily and exclusively a market economy. There are other forms of market economies, such as market socialism, which offer the benefits of a market without the private ownership of the means of production. I am not a market socialist and I am not prepared to defend it; I’m just pointing out the existence of alternative to capitalism that preserves some of its features you apologists seem to be concerned with.

• Capitalism naturally isolates wealth into small pockets of ownership. Liberals will propose measures to remove or at least ameliorate these conditions, but it is an essential feature of a system in which the means of production are privately owned. The only solution to a system in which people can be very rich or very poor is one in which industries are democratically controlled by the people that work in them.

• Capitalism allows an international force of criminal violence operated by multinational corporations to protect their unjust holdings of factories and other workplaces from the people who work for them and their efforts for workplace democracy. A tragic example is the murder of three union workers in my birth country of Colombia by Coca Cola. Although these charges were never realized in a successful court case, it can hardly be expected that a trade union in Colombia can compete in American courts against such a powerful institution as Coca Cola.

• On the subject of Latin American countries, the history of U.S.–Latin American relations is rife with corruption and overthrow in the name of protecting U.S. capitalist interests in the western hemisphere from soviet communism. Perhaps the most famous example is the U.S.-sponsored coup against Chilean socialist democracy and the assassination of its president, Salvatore Allende. This crime against humanity was perpetrated for no more noble reason than to protect U.S. business interests from the possibility of Chile nationalizing their own industries. As a person of Latin American heritage, I am deeply angered by the U.S. using its clout to try to quash the rich history of Latino people’s movements.

• Finally I will make a defense of the more potent efforts of the U.S.’s own labor movement. It goes without saying that the labor movement is to thank for the eight-hour workday, the weekend, and countless workplace safety measures and policies. You might not agree, but it is hard to argue that these things could ever happen under unregulated capitalism. I will go even farther to say that the manager–worker relationship is inherently wrong, but beyond that inert condemnation that it is destined to be overcome. Industrial unions such as the IWW may not have the power, but they have the potential in structure to unify all workers against all owners and create workplace democracy with direct political democracy. The existence and success of worker cooperatives prove that worker self-ownership is possible, and theoretical structures such as Parecon lay the groundwork to a free society with the necessity of these organizations built into it.

I don’t expect I can convince people like you who have so immersed themselves in the limitations of the contemporary world and define themselves in terms of them — and I don’t wish to. My only wish is to even briefly expose you to possibilities for a free society beyond your conceptions of one held captive by capitalism and the social and political structures that nurture it. I don’t think I can change minds, much less societies. But what I can do is leave you with the impression of a thought, one which another may deepen and so on until the truth is a part of you, and you can choose to deny it or become it. That’s all I can do.

(😉)