Arguing with Words

This next clip is from Abdul El Sayed, and I'll just say it -- the man's on fire lately. In a landscape full of performative points, he's actually getting at something important. Watch this. That's not wrong. But it's half the definition. Capitalism isn't just markets moving capital to where it's productive -- that's the mechanism. The other half, the part that actually separates capitalism from every other system that also uses markets, is who owns the means of production in the first place. The factories, the land, the capital -- privately held, not owned by the state, not owned collectively. Markets plus private ownership. Leave out the ownership half and you've described something that could just as easily be market socialism. To be clear -- none of that changes the point he's making. His definition was sufficient for what he needed it to do. I'm filling in the rest for you, not for him, because this is exactly the kind of moment that could tip into two people arguing about what capitalism actually is instead of what's broken with it. He headed that off before it started, just by telling you what he means. That's the whole game. We'll come back to it. Worth slowing down on what he just described, because it's two different moves stacked on top of each other. Horizontal is buying up your competitors -- the same business, just fewer people running it. Vertical is buying up your own supply chain -- the businesses that feed into yours, so nobody upstream or downstream can squeeze you. Do both at once and you haven't just won the market. You've made it structurally impossible for anyone else to compete on the market's own terms. Then -- and this is the part that actually turns it political -- that same capital gets spent buying the people who write the rules. At that point you're describing something else wearing its name. And that's the part El Sayed doesn't quite let himself off the hook on. But there's something else he says right after this that matters more than any of it. Here's the part I actually want to leave you with. Not the economics -- the words. Notice what's actually happening in that exchange. Charlemagne isn't asking capitalism-good-or-bad. He's asking something more pointed -- where progressives get lazy about capitalism, dismissing it outright with no qualification -- and he closes by asking the real question underneath that: what's actually good about it, what's worth keeping. And El Sayed doesn't defend the word or concede it. He stops and gives you his definition. The moment he does that, the argument over whose definition is correct should be finished -- whether or not you agree with it, you now have something specific to argue with instead: is markets-plus-ownership the right description, does it leave something out, does it hold up. That's a real argument. But here's the honest part. It often doesn't end there. People keep arguing about the definition anyway, because giving up a word can feel like giving up ground -- reclaim the term and you get to say a lot in very few words, since everyone already agrees on the shorthand. That's the appeal. But redefining a word for someone isn't like pushing a software update -- their understanding doesn't just reload to match yours. It lands more like you're overruling their own read on it, their own creative license with the word. They hear you arguing with something like common sense. And that's a losing position, often even with people who already agree with you on the substance. Dictionaries aren't an authority on what a word truly means -- they're descriptive, not prescriptive. They just track how people are already using a word. Which means meaning isn't settled by logic or by who's more technically correct. It's settled by usage, and usage comes down to resonance -- whichever meaning spreads widely and sticks consistently enough becomes what the word means, fair or not. None of that means the definition fight isn't worth having. It might be the more important fight, over a long enough timeline -- shifting what a word resonates as, for enough people, can genuinely move outcomes downstream of it eventually. But it's a different mission, running on a different clock. You don't win it in a conversation or a single piece of content. It takes years, sometimes a generation, and it's won by resonance, not by being right in the room. So the real question is never whether that fight is worth having. It's whether it's the fight you're actually trying to have right now. If your objective is fixing a policy or solving an actual problem, drifting into definition repair isn't neutral. It's a detour into a different mission with a different finish line. And plenty of people end up running both at once without noticing -- which is exactly why so much of political argument never resolves, it just endures. Say Medicare for All and you haven't described a mechanism, you've deployed a slogan standing in for one. Two people arguing about it are often fighting two different fights simultaneously -- one about what the policy would actually do, one about what the phrase should mean -- and because neither fight gets fought on its own terms, neither one gets won. The word doesn't shift, and the problem doesn't get solved either. At some point, if solving the problem is actually your objective, the better move isn't a sharper definition of the loaded word. It's dropping the word entirely and arguing with the idea underneath it instead -- describing that idea in plain, granular terms rather than reaching for the label that's carrying a whole ideology on its back. You're not swapping one set of words for a safer set of words. You're arguing with what the words are actually describing -- the idea itself, stripped of the baggage the loaded term drags in with it. Argue with words. Use them. Don't argue over them.