> Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.

There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets. You can see this given that (let's momentarily discount Marxian economics) Austrian economics, Keynesianism and MMT are all considered variously "consensus economics" within different groups (and libertarians tend to favour Austrian economics while actual economists don't), clearly economics is not a hard science with decided models.

> The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:

Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp

> Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.

I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there): https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/who-kil...

Have you considered that perhaps it is you who has been misinformed?

> Pure Dunning-Kruger over-confidence.

Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed. Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.

https://www.hetecon.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Olsen_AHE...

The paper notes that corporations can be converted to worker coops, but in actuality this rarely happens because workers don't have the capital to enact a buyout.

And with that, I'm done with this argument. I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up, because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth. Resorting to historical revisionism about child labour just shows me that you're constructing your conclusions first and making the facts fit that conclusion. Your arguments against left-wing analysis of capitalism have consisted primarily of pointing at the USSR and China, which does not address the critique of capitalism, it just creates a new critique of Leninism. Oh, and calling Marxist analysis "victimhood politics", which isn't an argument.

None of that is meant as an insult - we all have biases, but we should aim to examine them in order to more accurately assess our environments. That's the hypocrisy I find with rationalists being libertarians: they don't even approach Marxist critiques of capitalism, they just ignore them or attack strawmen in response. If you truly believe that capitalism is not meaningfully critiqued by leftists, you should be able to address their concerns directly, even steelmanning their positions.