How did you lose faith in capitalism?

For me, it was the decade of the 2010s¹ taken as a whole. I was a teenager when the Great Recession happened, and even with my limited grasp of American history I was expecting something like a "New Deal"² to be implemented. Instead, the Wall Street banksters got bailouts³ and the Main Street teamsters got nothing⁴. After almost a decade of social and economic decay, I gave up on capitalism after Trump was elected.My own country, Canada, covertly bailed out banks through guaranteeing mortgages⁵. Since the Great Recession, most young people have not been able to afford housing, and being house poor for those under 30 has become normal⁶. Only the top ~10% of workers are seeing any real wage growth⁷, while the rest are left to choke on the dust of an economy that is leaving us behind.Seeing Trump get elected was quite surprising. Everything I read before his election said that he would lose⁸, save a few A.I. predictions⁹. I wasn't that emotionally invested in the election since it was a foreign election, but I really could not believe the result. Trumpism was preceded by Brexiteering, and it seemed that all at once the whole Anglosphere was unravelling.I no longer believe that capitalism can be reformed into something that is tolerable to members of my class. Class armistices like the New Deal, the Great Society¹⁰, single payer healthcare¹¹, and other reforms are always gradually legislated out of existence by the bourgeois dictatorship. Young American workers are poorer than they have been in generations¹², and older American workers are only doing well because they were able to start their careers before the worst of the neoliberal reforms. In Canada, the quality of single payer healthcare has continuously declined¹³ since its inception for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason is that Conservative Party members "starve the beast¹⁴" every chance they can get for ideological reasons¹⁵.In the 21st Century, capitalism has changed from being immoral economics to bad economics. The nations of the world that are the most ideologically committed to free market fundamentalism consistently have the lowest economic growth¹⁶, the highest youth unemployment¹⁷, and since the middle of the 2010s, the most civil unrest¹⁸ coupled with some of the lowest quality of governance¹⁹. The West gets by on our past wealth, that is now being gradually depleted by bad economic policy, as market socialism pulls ahead²⁰. In an overcrowded²¹, overheating world²², an unplanned economy is bad economic policy and bad environmental policy.¹⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society ¹¹ https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/single-payer-healthcare-pluses-minuses-means-201606279835 ¹² https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-are-much-poorer-than-their-parents-data-show/ ¹³ https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/braun-how-much-patience-do-patients-need ¹⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast ¹⁵ https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/update-mounting-health-care-cuts/ ¹⁶ https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/06/european-economy-to-grow-at-its-lowest-rate-since-2013-imf-says.html ¹⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_Greece ¹⁸ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement ¹⁹ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14428930 ²⁰ https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview ²¹ https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Overpopulation ²² https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming >Russell became a Socialist. In 1914 he wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell explaining his political position: "It is clear the Socialists are the hope of the world; they have gained in importance during the war. What I can do further in philosophy does not interest me, and seems trivial compared to what might be done elsewhere. I can't bear the sheltered calm of university life - I want battle and stress and the feeling of doing something." 🔗 https://spartacus-educational.com/TUrussell.htm