It’s less that Capitalists are bad at Capitalism, and more that Capitalism contains within it contradictions that lead to its own demise.

Yep. He had a lot to say about social welfare, how horrible poverty was, how shitty monopolies are etc.

I don’t really want to rehab Adam Smith or crapitalism but when even the poster boy for the scholarly justifications for this system would be like “excuse me, what the fuck?” maybe alarm bells should be ringing?

Capitalism is based on the theoretical right of ownership in an era where only feudal aristocrats could own anything, in the present day and age many people in a capitalist society own their home and primary mode of transport and there isn’t a law per-se that restricts anyone from even being allowed to own a home or car or horse or whatever other than being under aged.

The next step is the degree to which that right should be that you can in theory own a home, vs the right to own a home in fact. IE, the equality of opportunity vs the equality of outcomes. This is another dimension in which class struggle is in fact intersectional with identity politics, as that same equality of opportunity vs equality of outcomes struggle is what defines a lot of modern race and gender relation conflicts in the present day, or at least what did before the right decided to drag us all kicking and screaming back to the 50s, the 1850s.

He is not against the concept in its entirety but throughout the wealth of nations he’s quite critical of large and absentee landholders. In another chapter he points out how Tennant made improvements drives up rents which in turns discourages improvements for example.

He thinks of land rents as a monopoly and that monopolies are bad but I believe he imagines lots of small land holders competing to improve their land for their tennants and thus strengthening the nation by increasing how productive land can be.

This uh… did not happen, as I’m sure I don’t have to point out to a comrade :p

The innovation of capitalism is that the right to own land or other capital assets isn’t an exclusive right of the aristocracy. There is no law in letter which says you cannot ever own a home, and that is a new thing in the west. The next capitalist innovation was that you don’t have to own something to have the rights of people who do own things, which was unheard of prior to the liberal capitalist revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s.

It’s important to understand that things we take for granted in the present day did not always exist, nor are they necessarily guaranteed to keep existing unless specific effort is made to prevent them from being destroyed by the forces that want to go back, in today’s day and age, that being the emerging class of inheritance billionaires who through various means are acquiring more and more outsized political power as well as more and more outsized ownership of resources, creating an in fact reversal of the liberal reforms of the feudal system which even Marx hailed as a huge and essential step in the right direction for the era it happened in.

You are not permanently tied to your landlord, nor is your landlord your judge and president. You don’t usually work for your landlord, either.

Capitalism is different. It still sucks and exists because of the squeezing out of surplus value. It isn’t feudalism.

As for economies being lowly tools, they’re not. They’re quite literally the most important part of society. They’re how we eat, drink, and survive. Unfortunately we live in a class society, and have done so ever since a couple of dudes during the dawn of agriculture started racketeering. As a result, “a few thousand sociopath families” have distributed resources in their own favour for a very long time, and will continue to do so until class society and the state are abolished.

let LAND_PRIVATE_OWNERSHIP = False

Obviously… reactionaries these days aren’t even trying. smh my head.