Squid Game is back. The market voted with its clicks and wallets and Netflix obeyed, producing two more seasons of the hit Korean thriller, which many have argued is a critique of capitalism. The show follows desperate and greedy contestants as they try to make their fortunes in a deadly underground game. Their suffering is watched by the ultra-wealthy VIPs who fund the sadistic spectacle. While they may enjoy the show’s pulp violence, some Netflix subscribers surely like to think they are consuming thoughtful social critique at the same time. However, Squid Game’s critiques of capitalism miss the mark.

Squid Game fits the anti-capitalist mould with its themes of exploitation, inequality, and ruthless competition. Nonetheless, the game is a poor metaphor for market capitalism. The contestants are recruited under false pretences and prevented from leaving. In a free market, people enter into contracts voluntarily, without fraud or coercion. Forced labour—literally at the point of a gun in the show—is more characteristic of pre-capitalist systems like serfdom and anti-capitalist systems like communism. Under the latter, all labour is forced in the sense that everyone must work for the state and attempts to leave that state can be deadly. However, some have it worse than others. Many Marxist regimes have used labour camps to brutally exploit and punish suspected enemies.

Communists can also sell their subjects’ forced labour abroad. Cuba sends thousands of doctors to work overseas while its own healthcare system crumbles. The regime converts their labour into both propaganda and hard cash, keeping up to ninety percent of their earnings. These doctors endure isolation, threats of retaliation, and harsh working conditions. Life is even worse for the North Koreans who toil in Chinese factories. They describe “enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be ‘killed without a trace.’” Their hard currency earnings are stolen by the regime to buy the loyalty of the elites. Imports of luxury items more than doubled in the year after Kim Jong Un became the third Supreme Leader. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on imported high-end alcohol, electronics, and luxury watches in a country that is chronically reliant on foreign food aid. North Korea’s juxtaposition between the lavish lifestyles of regime VIPs and the suffering populace hews closer to Squid Game than does South Korean capitalism.

Squid Game is also a poor guide to how markets create and allocate wealth because it is a zero-sum game. There is a fixed amount of prize money and each contestant’s share increases as other contestants die off. Many critics of capitalism see wealth in these zero-sum terms. It is one of the reasons behind their fixation on wealth inequality and calls for aggressive redistribution. To them, the poor are poor because the wealthy took their wealth. However, this focus on redistribution detracts from the market’s capacity to enrich entire societies by generating new wealth.

The market can be a positive-sum game because it is possible for all participants to walk away with more than they started with. For example, Korean poverty was at African levels when the peninsula was split into a communist North and a capitalist South after World War Two. South Korea’s increasingly market-based system encouraged entrepreneurs to build successful businesses like LG and Samsung. They created better-paying jobs and grew the economy. Quality of life surged. South Koreans even grew taller as their nutrition improved while their Northern siblings starved and shrank. Today, the country boasts one of the world’s highest standards of living and the average South Korean is more than thirty times wealthier than in 1960. Night-time satellite photos show the Southern half of the peninsula literally aglow with prosperity while almost all of the North is shrouded in darkness. Prosperity also led to greater freedom. At the end of the 1980s, South Korea’s growing middle class facilitated its transition to democracy.

Squid Game’s creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has told reporters that the new seasons of the show explore the question of whether the majority is always right. In Season One, with one exception, all decisions about the contestants’ lives are made by the game’s authoritarian controllers and brutally enforced by armed guards. The game resembles a communist gulag in which the inmates are worked to death. In Season Two, after every round, surviving contestants vote on whether to end the game. A majority vote to stop would supposedly allow everyone to go home with an equal share of the prize money accrued thus far. But most contestants vote to keep playing. By doing so, they increase the prize pool while reducing the number of living contestants with whom it will be shared. Contestants thus vote away others’ rights and even lives. Hwang may be making a classical liberal case for the need to balance democratic rule with rights-protecting institutions to prevent the tyranny of the majority.