Why Capitalism has bad vibes
I'm broadly in favor of capitalism (that is, people being able to freely make exchanges of goods and services for currency and to retain ownership of what they receive) as the only really workable economic system. However, there is an accompanying ethos/aesthetic of the particular contemporary instantiation of capitalism which rubs people the wrong way spiritually (for lack of a better term). Some aspects of this are:
1. The idea that corporations are/should be primarily profit maximizers and the fact that they make useful things is an indirect consequence of that goal. People would prefer that firms committed to creating a beneficial product as the primary goal and treated profit as a secondary goal. And worker wellbeing should be a constraint that operates in parallel with both goals.
2. Ethical violations and lack of accountability to political institutions (i.e. the people) due to lobbying and other forms of corruption. Corporations that are too powerful for the state to bring to heel (or worse yet, are involved in writing policy) are basically not subject to the rule of law. Large corporations becoming powerful entities may be inevitable, but at least then we would hope that they would of their own volition commit to rigid, comprehensive standards of how they treat their workers, consumers, and third parties.
3. Large impersonal corporations, while good at making products for cheap, take the social aspect out of economic transactions. Every economic transaction need not be social, but something is lost when the personal connection you might have had with your local grocer in yesteryear has been replaced with some anonymous delivery service.
4. There is a similar loss of sociality when it comes to the employee-employer relationship. Hierarchical structures are natural, what isn't natural is to have a firm with tens of thousands of employees where the grunt at the bottom has no access to person on top making decisions about company policy.
5. Advertising everywhere. It's obnoxious and pernicious, we all hate it, and it consumes every aspect of culture. Companies using advertising to create needs that didn't used to exist is sociopathic but it's completely normal in our societies. Not to mention advertising being used to overthrow extant positive social norms for basically no reason other than to make a quick buck (e.g. convincing women that smoking cigarettes was empowering or whatever).
6. Monetary wealth being used as the primary measure of wellbeing in a society to the exclusion of everything else. (See: the decline of the humanities, the decline of the family, the decline in religion, the decline in birthrates, etc.) People intuitively have a sense that there are things in life that are more important than money, but modern societies don't have strong norms or institutions thar promote those things to an extent that even remotely parallels the Cthulu of capitalism.
