A Boring Dystopia

Capitalism is interested in your ability to enhance the bottom line of the company you work for.

That's a very broad reading of Capitalism as a system of incentives. But when you break it down, you find that it isn't holistically profit-maximizing. It is locally rent-seeking. Which is to say, if we all work for a freeway that moves $10M/day in commerce and I - personally - have the opportunity to erect a toll gate that earns me $100k/day but inhibits $1M/day in commerce as a result, I will build that toll gate.

We saw this problem play out with the collapse of the Sears Roebuck Company under CEO Edward Lampert. Lampert took the capitalist ideology to its logical conclusion and began pitting individual departments within the greater corporate behemoth against one another. Consequentially, he dissolved all the economies of scale Sears had aggregated. Far from enhancing the bottom line, his business strategy dissolved all the economies of integration and scale that the firm had built up over its 120 year history.

Wherever the tenants of rent-seeking are applied, individuals with power will attempt to extract surplus wealth from weaker agents beneath them, even when that would destabilize the system as a whole. This can be disastrous for the "bottom line". We used to even classify it as such, labeling these behaviors as "price gouging" and "embezzlement". Now we see these initiatives as "creative destruction" and applaud their implementation.

Norway is actually a good example of this -- where pro-social regulatory policies (i.e. beneficial not from the perspective of capital, but from the perspective of actual societal conditions) are used to help mitigate some of the BS that capitalism produces.

Regardless... Yeah, it's a problem with capitalism. It's a problem that stems from the literal core of the 'system': utilizing 'capital' to find opportunities for the creation and extraction of 'surplus' from labor and its products.

It's great that regulation is able to reign in, in some cases, the deeply criminal BS that such a system naturally produces... But it seems like a huge overreach to assume this is possible "globally" (as it would need to be for a blanket statement like that to be true).

just deregulated capitalism

The line between "well-regulated capitalism" and "socialism" is entirely subjective. One man's big government job killing mandate is another's sensible growth-oriented reform.

So is in Czechia, public universities are free unless you repeat a year (and even then it is not very expensive and IIRC you pay a single fee, 2500$ Bachelor's, 3200$ Master's, and 20$ (yes 20) Doctor's, all per year - taken from my university). Textbooks are freely available in 99% of cases, the rest costs about 20$ printed but can be obtained for free in electronicformat, IIRC legally.

The quality is not perfect all the time, some curriculums are outdated or taught in strange ways, but it's ever-changing.

Of course, dorms and food are not free. But there are programs to at least partially accommodate that.

' Deregulated capitalism' is capitalism so it's 100% a problem with capitalism. And running things for profit with private ownership is the basic definition of capitalism...... so it sure doesn't sound like Norway's free education is 'for profit' unless I'm grossly misunderstanding.

Not real capitalism is just as much capitalism as not real socialism is socialism...

Not just education, but profitability as well. Doctors and Engineers are incentivized more than educators.