[Phaedor]

Because people equate capitalism with America, and "fuck everyone, get money" is literally required by law there. In 1919 Henry Ford was sued by minority share holders because he wanted to increase wages. "The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

If you want to claim that America reached "hyper-capitalism" and stopped representing capitalistic ideals 100 years ago, then sure what you are saying makes sense . But I think most people equates capitalism with america.

[OldHand2018]

That's a poor reading of that Wikipedia page, it says pretty much the opposite of what you have written.

Anyway, there is an old quotation attributed to Horace (about 65 BC):

Be but great, With praise or infamy—leave that to Fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible with grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place;

That's an English translation from Alexander Pope, somewhere in the 1700s. Maybe he made it up.

Either way, you can't blame America.

[Phaedor]

Please explain how the wikipedia page says the opposite of what I wrote.

Here I will spell it out verbatim from the article:

- By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased.

- The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.

- The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments.

- The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.

The court ruled in favor of the minority share holders.

[gavinray]

I will absolutely agree that America's economic system is nothing close to resembling capitalism.

I view capitalism the same way I view communism -- both are bleeding-heart idealism that never works out in practice.

But hey, at least on an individual/personal level you can pick that hill to die on, however futile it may be.