To be fair the correctional system in its current form in North America is primarily constructed and controlled by capitalist interests.

Idk, I've never made enough money to live on and at this point never expect to. I'd rather do something I'm passionate about while I die under capitalism, than sit here feeling useless while I die under capitalism. Shit is depressing and unsustainable.

Fully agree with this. Anything in the arts immediately comes to mind. Not just performing arts either - history, literature, and philosophy fields have a lot more uncertainty with income than others.

This is one of the reasons why I favor UBI and universal health care. I think there's a growing deficit in overall creativity, leisure, and social engagement that the arts and other so-called lower-income jobs provide to society. And its not that people care more about money. You just dont have the option to pursue these jobs when your income level affects life or death decisions for you and your loves ones.

I had a friend as a kid who made straight A’s the first semester in school every year, then straight F’s to the last semester where he’d pick it up just enough to pass. I remember a teacher laughing at him because his cousin blacked his eye while he was fighting his mother, “Oh, you mean a girl did that?”

Once he got to high school he couldn’t pass the 9th grade because the strategy of passing the first and last semester didn’t work anymore. He dropped out and got his GED. He took the test one time, scored 90% higher than average.

He slept in class every day because he spent his nights prepared to fight his dad when his dad attacked his mom.

I remember in middle school when the regular teacher was out long term for surgery, he handed a test to the substitute and she cried and apologized for not paying closer attention to him. She worked with him after that and he passed her class.

The last time I seen him, he was strung out on heroin and doing nothing. We went to school together from the 3rd grade until he dropped out and I only ever seen two teachers really try to help him. Police came to the school one time to photograph his bruise covered body and nothing ever came of it.

He used to write stories and give them to me on the bus. I asked him if he kept writing. He told me he hadn’t since his early 20s.

I can’t stand to think about how many kids out there have so much potential, only they’re stranded on an island with nowhere to put it.

Usually when people are in favour of getting rid of capitalism, they’re also in favour of getting rid of hierarchies such as class divide.

Education is anywhere from free to really cheap in Germany, and we still don't get many people from poorer families into uni.

I am not German myself, but I am familiar with the system. Please correct me if things have evolved, but...

I thought the post-elementary education system in Germany was a tiered system. University admission requires completing the Abitur exams, but one can only feasibly do this if they've attended Gymnasium, or the "highest" tier of high school. It may be possible to do if one gets very high marks in Realschule (mid tier), along with Abitur preparation courses, but it's virtually impossible if one attends Hauptschule (lowest tier). These schools are not intended to provide university preparation, but instead provide a general education to prepare students for trades/vocational careers.

Whether a child attends Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium is decided at 9 or 10 years old, and is dependent on performance in elementary classes and teacher recommendations.

And when one considers that a child's educational performance is directly related to both familial socioeconomic status and parental educational attainment, it's not surprising that poorer people are less likely to attend or complete university.

Capitalists' dominant position within the class hierarchy necessitates exploitation of the working class, and this is maintained by fomenting division. This tiered system is just one manifestation of how society can be stratefied and divided.

Just watched a Bad Sports episode where a champion race driver couldn't break into the sport without become a drug trafficker to pay for it. So yeah that's already happened, just in Florida.

This is way more the problem than people missing out on going to medical school when they really wanted to.

Most people who are in the United States and want to go to a high paying career, can take out student loans and achieve something close, assuming good grades. Not that there aren't problems with that scenario, but everyone wants kids to get high paying jobs, society is organized around helping those kids.

Meanwhile, some people would be great authors or philosophers or artists if they didn't have to spend time making the money to survive. Those are valid goals that are being oppressed by the system.

And in the same way the global system is oppressing billions of people who are born as the rural poor and just not able to do much beyond subsistence farming.

Or real estate, advertising, etc.

Capitalism wastes talent.

So is in Czechia, public universities are free unless you repeat a year (and even then it is not very expensive and IIRC you pay a single fee, 2500$ Bachelor's, 3200$ Master's, and 20$ (yes 20) Doctor's, all per year - taken from my university). Textbooks are freely available in 99% of cases, the rest costs about 20$ printed but can be obtained for free in electronicformat, IIRC legally.

The quality is not perfect all the time, some curriculums are outdated or taught in strange ways, but it's ever-changing.

Of course, dorms and food are not free. But there are programs to at least partially accommodate that.

Capitalism is interested in your ability to enhance the bottom line of the company you work for.

That's a very broad reading of Capitalism as a system of incentives. But when you break it down, you find that it isn't holistically profit-maximizing. It is locally rent-seeking. Which is to say, if we all work for a freeway that moves $10M/day in commerce and I - personally - have the opportunity to erect a toll gate that earns me $100k/day but inhibits $1M/day in commerce as a result, I will build that toll gate.

We saw this problem play out with the collapse of the Sears Roebuck Company under CEO Edward Lampert. Lampert took the capitalist ideology to its logical conclusion and began pitting individual departments within the greater corporate behemoth against one another. Consequentially, he dissolved all the economies of scale Sears had aggregated. Far from enhancing the bottom line, his business strategy dissolved all the economies of integration and scale that the firm had built up over its 120 year history.

Wherever the tenants of rent-seeking are applied, individuals with power will attempt to extract surplus wealth from weaker agents beneath them, even when that would destabilize the system as a whole. This can be disastrous for the "bottom line". We used to even classify it as such, labeling these behaviors as "price gouging" and "embezzlement". Now we see these initiatives as "creative destruction" and applaud their implementation.

Yeah we need to increase the size of our medical schools, but investing in education isn't a political priority. The "Why should I pay for sometimes education?" group is loud. "Who cares if it improves the country, I want lower taxes!"

You probably live in a social democracy, universities being public means there's some flavor of socialism (as in social democracy, not communism) in your country, with a regulated free market and capitalism.

Capitalism can keep people from studying because they need to work instead, or maybe they were in a low-income area and didn't get the chance to go to a good school to get the grades or knowledge they needed before higher education, etc.

Capitalism effects every facet of our lives, even in developed countries where we try to spend money to counter it's damages.

To be fair, it's not just an America problem.

I feel that innovation flow through me when I go down to the supermarket to pick from my selection of 27 brands of cola based soda, and 39 varieties of plain salted chips.

Also, there are mechanisms in place(assuming this is an American post). I know because I'm taking advantage of them.

I'm poor, at a respected university, and about graduate with a Bachelors. Might have spent 3k overall on school. Pell Grant was amazing.

Aint a perfect system, but still works a lot of the time