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Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

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Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#41

Post by gremlinsinc »

genocide_throw wrote: post #33
cmahler7 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me examples that come anywhere close to Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc?

Sure! America did it twice: native genocide and African slavery.

if this were reddit..I'd say "Username checks out...".. but this isn't reddit.

One thing I'm curious about...Trump says Let's make America Great again--was he talking before white people came and before the genocide? Or after? Was he talking about Slavery? Or the lynch mobs of the KKK? What about criminal enterprises and suffering during Prohibition and the Great Depression?

Damn, I long for the an FDR style leader to come along, well at this point we need quite a few to fill congress and start making America about the people again, not corporate interests.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#42

Post by gremlinsinc »

jandrese wrote: post #38
notspanishflu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a reminder -> social democracy is not socialism.

Why not? The state takes resources from the wealthy and uses them to provide services to the general population. That's socialism in a nutshell.

Try again. Socialism is where the government controls ALL means of production. They set how much toilet paper is produced daily, and they do it based on arbitrary means not supply and demand.

Social Democracy -- is capitalism with some programs added in, heck Police, Fire, and Roads maintained by the state are SOCIAL DEMOCRACY programs -- maybe you should have to pay if you want the fire truck to come put out your fire, call 911 what's your emergency? And can I have your credit card?

Dictionary definition: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole

Under social democracy you can still start companies, still own businesses, nobody's taking that away, we just want to make sure that those who earn the most off the backs of the people's work contribute to lift up those who are burdened the most at the bottom.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#43

Post by tengbretson »

zzzcpan wrote: post #34
cmahler7 wrote: post #5

Socialists/Communists not satisfied with 200 million+ deaths, must want to hit an even 1 billion. Blows my mind people can even be calling for socialism while we have a real time implosion going on in Venezuela right now. It's ending like every other socialist regime in history, cannibalism, famine, riots, and murder. Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous. Actually…

While socialism/communism were good excuses to concentrate enormous amount of power and dictate every aspect of people's lives, the ideas were never the problem. It's just those concentrating wealth want you to believe otherwise, so they can keep get wealthier and wealthier. It's not that hard to help the poor without a dictatorship, the system is already in place in every country in the world, just one small law and…

Thats an incredibly unfair comparison. You're judging communism based on the merits of its intentions and ideas, meanwhile condemning capitalism for its failings in practice.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#44

Post by pzone »

smt88 wrote: post #6
LyndsySimon wrote: post #4

This article reads to me like a long list of problems caused by government and blamed on capitalism. I'm biased though - I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and I've spent orders of magnitude more time considering these sorts of questions than the vast majority of people who are not so politically involved.

Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you has spent less time considering these sorts of questions than you have? As a counterpoint, I'd suggest the thousands of political-science, economic, and philosophy scholars who all disagree with you (as do the vast majority of humans who have ever lived and appreciate the social contract). You may be correct and everyone else may be wrong, but I don't think it's accur…

Overall you make a good point. In the context of this article, I tend to think the OP comment has thought about it harder than the author. These articles like "Down with capitalism, didn't you hear 51% of millennials don't like it! And what about that fire in london?" are invariably written by radical left-wing disciplines where the authors have no evidence of deep understanding of the issues - here anthropology.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#45

Post by pzone »

smt88 wrote: post #10
cmahler7 wrote: post #5

Socialists/Communists not satisfied with 200 million+ deaths, must want to hit an even 1 billion. Blows my mind people can even be calling for socialism while we have a real time implosion going on in Venezuela right now. It's ending like every other socialist regime in history, cannibalism, famine, riots, and murder. Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous. Actually…

You mention Venezuela, but what about India? France, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Denmark are all arguably socialist -- certain much more so than the US. Any economic system fails when practiced by corrupt or incompetent governments. There are many failed capitalist states, too. Edit: if you want to talk about scaling, China and India are debatably doing well (or at least improving rapidly), and both countri…

None of those countries are communist. They have large social welfare states, and tax rates that might push 50%, but essentially rely on the free market for most economic decisionmaking.

In many ways China is closer to pure capitalism than most countries on the planet. The vestiges of "socialism" primarily live on in their authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-owned-enterprises. China is slowly moving away from the latter two as their massive problems are uncovered.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#46

Post by pzone »

zzzcpan wrote: post #34
cmahler7 wrote: post #5

Socialists/Communists not satisfied with 200 million+ deaths, must want to hit an even 1 billion. Blows my mind people can even be calling for socialism while we have a real time implosion going on in Venezuela right now. It's ending like every other socialist regime in history, cannibalism, famine, riots, and murder. Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous. Actually…

While socialism/communism were good excuses to concentrate enormous amount of power and dictate every aspect of people's lives, the ideas were never the problem. It's just those concentrating wealth want you to believe otherwise, so they can keep get wealthier and wealthier. It's not that hard to help the poor without a dictatorship, the system is already in place in every country in the world, just one small law and…

Oh of course. Next time when we implement socialism, nobody at all will be interested in concentrating power and abusing it for personal benefit. How silly of me to think that might happen for the hundred and first time after a hundred times in the past.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#47

Post by bcassedy »

influx wrote: post #16
cmahler7 wrote: post #5

Socialists/Communists not satisfied with 200 million+ deaths, must want to hit an even 1 billion. Blows my mind people can even be calling for socialism while we have a real time implosion going on in Venezuela right now. It's ending like every other socialist regime in history, cannibalism, famine, riots, and murder. Meanwhile one of the United State's biggest problem is obesity due to being so prosperous. Actually…

This time they'll get it right. Don't worry comrade, ignore that in order to make it work, the government will take property from one person and give it to another at the barrel of a gun, whether they agree or not. This is more equitable.

This sort of "analysis" is absurd on its face. There is nowhere on Earth that you would want to live that doesn't have a government that takes property by force and gives to others.

Taxation is necessary to live in a stable society. The question is, how much to take and how to spend it.

We've seen how our current path works out. The rich accumulate more and more wealth and with it more political power until such time that the masses are sufficiently poor and disenfranchised that they engage in a bloody revolt.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#48

Post by jandrese »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #42
jandrese wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? The state takes resources from the wealthy and uses them to provide services to the general population. That's socialism in a nutshell.

Try again. Socialism is where the government controls ALL means of production. They set how much toilet paper is produced daily, and they do it based on arbitrary means not supply and demand. Social Democracy -- is capitalism with some programs added in, heck Police, Fire, and Roads maintained by the state are SOCIAL DEMOCRACY programs -- maybe you should have to pay if you want the fire truck to come put out your fi…

You've setup a strawman to argue against. Few people think that extreme is a good idea. History has proven that it does not scale well and is considerably less efficient at allocating resources than capitalism. It's also highly prone to corruption because the power is concentrated at the top, which is ironically exactly the same problem that capitalism has, even though those communist systems were built to solve the problems of capitalism.

In this US any talk about redistributing wealth will have your policy (and you) branded as a socialist.

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#49

Post by pzone »

Eerie wrote: post #31
cmahler7 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, probably a big part of why the standard of living has dropped so much in recent years. We should reduce the budget significantly. Government massively missallocates resources

Keep up the good work. You are such a great example of Poe's law. I can't even

What's with the ad-hominem? At least in the healthcare market, There are good reasons to believe that the massive government intervention is a bad use of resources.

People on Medicaid claim to value the services at only 1/5 of their cost. If you taking that estimate at face value, if you shut down medicaid entirely and just paid each former recipient 20% of the price you'd been paying to provide health insurance, they would be better off. You can debate those numbers and methodology, but it's very suggestive, and very real.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/07/med...

Re: Are You Ready to Consider That Capitalism Is the Real Problem?

#50

Post by smt88 »

pzone wrote: post #45
smt88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention Venezuela, but what about India? France, Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Denmark are all arguably socialist -- certain much more so than the US. Any economic system fails when practiced by corrupt or incompetent governments. There are many failed capitalist states, too. Edit: if you want to talk about scaling, China and India are debatably doing well (or at least improving rapidly), and both countri…

None of those countries are communist. They have large social welfare states, and tax rates that might push 50%, but essentially rely on the free market for most economic decisionmaking. In many ways China is closer to pure capitalism than most countries on the planet. The vestiges of "socialism" primarily live on in their authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-o…

I wasn't talking about communism.

> authoritarian government, restrictive social policies, financial repression and massive state-owned-enterprises

None of these are key tenets of socialism as the article formulates it.

As I've said elsewhere, historical socialism is not the socialism anyone is advocating. No one is suggesting Stalinism.

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