[cwsx]

> I'd even argue the general idea of capitalism is virtuous by default.

I wouldn't, in my opinion:

Capitalism incentivizes selfishness at the detriment of others that are "playing the [capitalism] game" or anti-competitive practices. It also pushes people to hoard resources - think Tragedy of the Commons or anti-competitive practices in general. The incentive is to reduce the amount of resources available to competition while increasing your holdings, allowing you to repeat the loop but with higher chances of success.

Providing something others find useful seems like a lucky side effect that often isn't even true, there's a lot of industries who have no intention of providing something useful (like stock trading, short trading especially). Most companies are trying to reduce costs as much as possible, reducing the usefulness of their product/service to the lowest point that people will still pay for.

But I agree with your other points - just because capitalism breeds selfishness it doesn't mean all parties are going to the extremes.

[throwawaymaths]

You can't be totally selfish and function in a capitalist society though. To obtain capital at some level you have to provide something that someone else wants.

> It also pushes people to hoard

you don't get really rich by hoarding. you get rich by investing in others.

> short trading especially

no. short trading is the least greedy form of investment. your gains are hard capped and your downside risk is unbounded. long trading has unbounded upside and hard capped downside. if you are shorting aside from exceptionally weird cases, you are acting on information you perceive that other people dont see (like you think the CEO is defrauding the public) and you are praying to god nobody bails out the company.

[derektank]

This is obviously not directly related to the original article, but I don't understand what you mean when you say stock trading isn't useful. Do you mean brokers aren't useful? I don't understand how this could be the case when many people want to own stocks (one major reason being that they want to be able to draw on capital gains to provide income in retirement, either personally or institutionally as part of a pension).

[sapphicsnail]

This is _not_ my personal opinion but I think people would argue it doesn't produce anything. If you hold that making money isn't inherently useful a lot of businesses don't make sense. Brokers are just trading abstracted pieces of companies around whose value is subjective. I've heard it described as Pokemon cards for adults.

[BrenBarn]

I'd argue that most people don't "want to own stocks". What they want is (to go from your example) "to have a comfortable life even when they're not working anymore". They just want stocks because that's an available mechanism to achieve that. Similarly people don't want to sit in cramped airline seats, but there aren't available alternatives in many cases.

Capitalism prioritizes making money, not satisfying people's needs and wants.