Thank you, man, I think you did an awesome job of laying it all out. Definitely appreciated in the world where nobody seems to know or care what exactly the terms mean any longer!

I think your concept of socialism as an artificial religion is awesome and I’m definitely using it next time I get involved in a social-economical discussion.

It’s actually a very interesting thing, albeit maybe outside the scope of The Private Citizen, and I think you’ve made a very important point. While it’s obvious capitalism is failing (as evidenced by negative interest rates that simply make no sense in capitalism), and it can hardly work in the economy where the cost of developing a product is huge while the cost of making multiple copies of it is relatively low (as in 3D printing) or approaches zero (as in software development), many people (even those who actually read Marx) fail to understand that the very notion of “socialism is what comes after capitalism, the same way as capitalism is what comes after feudalism” is just a wild (albeit educated) guess by Marx and followers, not a scientific fact.

In many ways the Soviet propaganda was based on this very concept: as the technology evolves, capitalism is no longer the optimal system and will have to be replaced by socialism, just like capitalism itself replaced feudalism, so we should practice socialism right away because it’s inevitably coming one way or another (and communism comes next, but that’s still in the future). The obvious fallacy here is that we don’t really know for sure socialism comes next after capitalism, and even if that’s so, we don’t really know for sure what socialism really looks like. You did a great job of outlining just that, so thank you again!

Best of luck with your vacation trip, and looking forward to the new episodes!