Money is a medium of exchange. It is used by exchanging it for something else. A loan involves trading money in the present, which is more valuable, for money in the future. What produces value here is surrendering present goods indirectly through the intermediary of money. The creditor gives up consumption so that others can consume or produce earlier than they otherwise could have in absence of the loan. This is the value produced by loans in the eyes of the debtor.

> Now you're getting it!

Notice how any market automatically involves said accounting immediately when money is used. Your earlier insistence that markets and capitalism are distinct cannot be maintained.

You might have noticed that I was not dismissing the costs of gambling. I was pointing out that merely pointing to the cost does not establish that a thing should not exist or that it should be regulated. Just as pointing to the benefit does not establish the opposite. Rather, that depends on whether one regards the benefits as worth the costs, which is not something established scientifically, but is a political matter based on your preferences and ideology.

> The rules and conditions of the game must be fair, even if the outcome of the game isn’t.

What counts as fair depends on the standard you use. I say what is fair that which serves a social function. Insider trading serves a social function because it more efficiently communicates knowledge about production to others. The arbitrage of insider trading which people abhor motivates insiders to eliminate those information asymmetries by engaging in insider trading. The specific profit that insider trading endows to insiders which people lambast as unfair is, in fact, the source of its fairness, because it communicates knowledge previously unknown to the market.

Communication of knowledge is also a productive activity. Laws which restrict it are unfair because they preserve or limit the means by which information asymmetries are eliminated. Laws against insider trading force information asymmetries to remain, causing a permanent rent to exist. The insiders, rather than reaping a temporary profit that communicates information, now are motivated to benefit from their information in ways that do not share it with society at large; their insider information becomes an economic rent, but one without any social function. This is quite unfair.

The social function of prediction markets is similar to that of insider trading. If you want to perpetuate unfair rentseeking, then please go ahead and regulate it.

> Housing is not an asset to society or the economy, it's a drain that wastes money on preserving human life.

You are equivocating between asset in the sense of 'generally useful thing', and the sense I used above which is a capital good. Housing is obviously a useful thing and necessary, just as all other consumptive goods like food, clothing, etc. That makes it an 'asset' in the former sense to people (there is no such thing as useful to the economy, which is just an abstraction). But housing, food, and clothing are not assets in the latter sense. I.e., paying for housing is a consumptive act and not a productive act. There is nothing good or bad about either, the distinction is simply a distinction of economic function. Eating is important, but eating uses up resources; it is consumption. Cooking is important, but it is not eating, you don't get anything out of it until you eat; it is production. Both rely on each other, neither can be given up completely without harm.

Thus, a proper balance must be struck, because it would be foolish and self-destructive to only consume. If there was only consumption, then this would simply sacrifice your future and you would not be able to survive after you have used up what was produced before. The question is about whether you want a stable, regular, and lasting way to be able to have valuable things like housing, food, and clothing. To do that, you have to refrain from consuming your entire stock of assets, you have to refrain from using up all the resources you have. But that is what you would to if you took all the capital that companies have saved up and consumed it. The purpose of my original post was to point out that you can't look at production as if it were consumption, they have different roles and if you mistake production as an opportunity to consume, it is self-destructive.

Replying by ignoring this distinction and instead making a strawman will not prevent your perspective from being self destructive.

The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.

The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.

But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.

It may be expressed in terms of money, but these are assets and capital. You wouldn't find a fab a very comfortable or satisfying place to live.

The reason the numbers get so big is the gargantuan accumulated savings that are prepared to fund the similarly gargantuan ventures. The large numbers are supported by maintaining and sustaining the capitalized value by profitable investment and depreciation.

When you talk about rent, while it may be expressed in the same unit (money), the economic function played is very different. Here, it is consumption rather than saving/investment. If the dollar equivalent of all those assets went towards paying rent, while it would secure housing for some time, it would eventually become completely exhausted, and so too would housing security. Large pools of assets are simply not a way to get stable housing, it would only consume the large savings society has accumulated to be able to undergo those big ventures. It would be short-sighted and harm us in the future.

The cause and solution to rental instability is to be found in housing, building, and land policy that restricts the production of housing.

I don't really see what you have presented as an "argument" against polymarket. [1] tells us that it has costs and benefits. Well everything has costs and benefits, but those are subjective anyway. That is not an argument against it and cannot be, because no science can tell you what is good or bad (i.e. what counts as benefit or cost), let alone whether the good outweighs the bad. [2] tells us that polymarket exhibits the same property as any other securities market, which is that only a very small amount of players tend to make a profit. Again, that is not an argument against it unless you want to include some kind of resentment or digust that some profit more than others.

Inequality of profits is both expected and unconcerning. The social function of the stock exchange is not to ensure everyone receives a fair or equal profit, but to ensure that the pricing of ventures and assets is correctly (as is possible) adjusted to expected future demand of consumers. For polymarket, the function is to express information about expectations of future events. There are straightforward economics reasons why polymarket and similar institution tends towards expressing our expectations about future events.