For profit housing is not why the housing market is unaffordable. The housing market is unaffordable because of mortgage subsidies, overly restrictive zoning laws, and the fact that we tax buildings instead of land.

I love shows like this that go into the detail of the emotions different people in the process are going through. It shows a different kind of realism. I recommend the show “the night of” for the same reason.

Boycut companies with too much market power. They just happen to be quite concentrated in the US.

I’m not saying we don’t have things to work on, but it’s not black or white. Social injustice gets reduced over time in a democracy. Name a country that is not capitalist that has never done bad things.

Nope, but I’m from scandinavia, no oil money.

Edit: also, I dont like categorical descriptions, because reality is more complicated. But what is happening in the US is more specifically referred to as “rentier capitalism”. In Scandinavia, we have something like “welfare capitalism”.

Why not vote for Bernie then? Better than nothing. At least it may give a lot of people or the democrats faith that he could potentially win in the future.

I’m not saying that you need to give them your time, I’m just saying that voting for them doesn’t mean that you stand for what they believe. You can vote them and at the same time advocate for a different voting system.

Capitalism goes through different waves and has grown to accept government involvement insofar as to reduce market failures of which monopolies and externalities are some important ones. Unions are justified in capitalism by solving the market failure of asymmetric information.

Why do you think voting for a party aligns yourself with that party?

If two people want to attempt to unalive your mother with a 50% probability that they will succeed, and you have the chance to stop only one of them, reducing the chance to 25%. Does it mean that you align with whoever you do not choose?

I think this has only happened because of manipulation of the masses.

You have to see conservativism and “the conservatives” as separate things. One is a group that can hold many different views and another is a view point itself.

The word you're looking for is pluralism.

Centrism doesn't mean that you can't choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can't do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.

What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It's a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn't matter who.

The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can't decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn't automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.