Something I’ve observed, and I don’t know of anyone on this forum has this opinion, but when the free market favors businesses, everyone says that’s capitalism and don’t get in the way of the free market, but when the free market favors workers, or a company decides to do something like pay workers more to keep them there’s a response that it’s woke and anti-capitalist. Is there an intellectual / non-emotional reason for this distinction?
Yeah it's called crony capitalism. It seems from my observations that as long as the money machine is focused on making business and political leaders more money, "the economy is great!!1!" and when the pendulum swings the other way (well, the one time or two in my adult life), "it's awful everything is terrible" despite other economic indicators to the contrary. Since media companies such as news orgs are part of the 4th estate, they also share some culpability by not sufficiently investigating and reporting. And maybe I'm wrong (probably so, in fact); these are just some observations from my perspective.