Capitalism Does Not Drive Innovation

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Are there any self-avowed Socialists who have patented something useful?

(Something other than just one more method of taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the poor, of course.)

How many patents have been granted to Capitalists?

There seem to be a lit of self-serving claims about what socialism supposedly is, and how socialists supposedly are.

It's cool that you think socialists consider anyone making more than minimum wage to be "rich" - even though socialists are also the ones fighting to raise the minimum wage, so how does that make sense - but far be it from me to drag logic into narnia - meanwhile I hear the word "billionaires" a lot. Last I checked, 80K is a long way from a billion.

Not only that, but lets do some math. Ignoring taxes completely, someone working 40 hrs a week, at $10/hr, makes $400/week. Times 52 weeks, is $20,800/yr. Taxes would make that lower. NOBODY at a pay rate of 10/hr is making 80k/yr, unless they're working 160 hrs /wk, which is insane, if not lethal. Go ahead, say "but, time and a half!" - in that case they'll ONLY have to work 120 hrs a week. Which is still 50% more than your supposed "up to 80 hours!" or w/e, and still THREE TIMES the load of a full time job. Plus, a 40 hour week is 8 hours a day 5 days a week, 120 hours of work per week would be 8 times 3, which is 24 hours. So in this magical land where people make 10/hr to earn 80K in overtime, they work 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. Sounds reasonable to me!

Oh, and that's with time and a half - at straight hours (cos nobody even pays full time, let alone overtime now) that's 32 hours of work in a 24 hour day, 5 days a week.

Making it SEEM like socialists want to tax people who make 80K "to death" is just a way to make sOcIaLiSm!! ! into the new boogeyman. BILLIONAIRES. BILLIONAIRES. Not Steve Schmidt's Auto salvage making 90K / yr. The hope is that Steve will get spooked into thinking they ARE going to come for him. BOOGIE BOOGIE SCARY!! ! THEYSA COMMIN FOR YOU, STEVE!

BILLIONAIRES. And speaking of, fun fact. Guess what you end up with if you tax the top 40 multi billionaires and take 75% of their total worth? 40 mutli billionaires. And oh how they'd suffer, STILL BEING MULTI BILLIONAIRES. Boo hoo! Think of how hard their underpaid labor force worked to earn all that money for them! Now they can ONLY buy EIGHT superyachts instead of SEVEN!

And I'm not even sorry, I don't care how "hard" you think you "worked", there gets a point where you're just being a greedy POS. That point is in the billions. No I don't "hate all billionaires". But I do dislike the ones that actively fight attempts to pay people fairly so they can keep hoarding wealth they didn't earn.

I'd like to meet these supposed socialists who supposedly want to "tax to death" people who make 80K/yr. Most times I hear "raise taxes" it's also in the same sentence with "billionaires". Not millionaires. BILLIONaires. So where are these supposed socialists who are fretting about people making under 100K?

"They're out there! Trust me! They exist!"

Cool. Anyways...

As far as "what socialists have contributed", and "not inveting anything", you're not going to find evidence of that in patents. Patents are by definition a capitalist invention. A patent is to protect an idea so ONLY YOU can make money off your idea. That's capitalism. A socialist wouldn't do that, that's the opposite. They would do like Volvo, having invented the 3-point seatbelt, INSTEAD of patenting it, they gave it away freely, in order to save lives. The capitalist thing to do would have been patent it, and charge extra for it. So smugly sneering at "how few patents socialists have made" kinda misses the point.

Capitalism does indeed drive innovation. But it innovates things like making disposable products that now have to be repurchased constantly, generating reliable revenue. Like ways to prevent or eliminate competition - the very competition that capitalism supposedly creates, that supposedly drives innovation - is actively fought in capitalism - competition is BAD for capitalism. It's called a "barrier to entry". How to push or keep people out of your gig.
Capitalism doesn't lead to competition - it leads to monopolies. And at that point the winner isn't who made the best product, it's whoever was able to drive everyone else out of business first.

But hey, at least it's fun hearing all these wacky zany strawman socialist stories, of supposed SoCiAlIsTs! who just happen to have all these funny ideas like wanting to tax middle class people more, instead of BILLIONARES.

I've been trying to find the difference between capitalism and feudalism, and other than "I have the money, so you work for me!" instead of "I am the king! (who had the money) so you work for me!" I can't seem to find the difference. Mansions instead of castles. Limos instead of carriages. Bodyguards and lawyers instead of knights and advisors. Trust fund brats marrying other trust fund brats inheriting daddy's fortune and empire, rather than neighboring kingdoms using an arranged marriage to consolidate power and keep it hoarded. Striding around telling people "do this!" or "make that happen!" and puffing about how hard THEY worked, while other people do all the actual labor.

"But, the people NEEDED the king / "job creator"! They couldn't have done it alone!" Ha, no, they didn't need the PERSON, they needed the RESOURCE. And by resource, I don't even mean "money". Land to plant food. Land to live on. Access to water and other resources. The PERSON only had value by controlling the resource. Remove the obstacle of the controller, and with the resource available, yah, the people could do it. I don't need YOU, I just need that river and those deer. But those are "YOUR" river, and "YOUR" deer. As though you MADE that river. Or MADE the deer. WORKED HARD for them, did ja? Or did you just "get lucky" and FIND a river and some deer, and say "MINE NOW!", maybe hire a few goons to defend it, and call yourself "king". Or "CEO".

But turn that around, remove the labor of all the people collectively working on things. The farm ain't gonna farm itself. The food ain't gonna cook itself. The clothes aren't gonna make themselves. Resources like land, water, and materials, exist regardless of people. Resources like labor, the ability to make things, to make new things, to make better things, to fix things, those depend entirely on people. A single person can START a company or a business, but it takes PEOPLE to make them grow into something bigger than one person working "really hard". And when it boils down to it, being more concerned with who "owns" what rather than who is actually doing the essential work, is like the guy who owns the wrench acting like he's more important than the guy who actually knows how to fix the car and does all the repairs. "But it was MY wrench!" I could have used any wrench... "But you used MY wrench! I"M a JOB CREATOR, you should be HAPPY I even LET you do this!"

Despite the rhetoric and malarky that "people don't want to work anymore", maybe it's just that people don't want to work twice as hard for half as much. Maybe now that information is recorded so thoroughly, and is so readily accessible, that we can now see over time how, despite being told that wages make things more expensive, wages barely increase, yet prices still go up, and by some STRANGE COINCIDENCE, so do corporate and executive profits. Almost as if, they COULD pay people more, and COULD lower prices, but then they'd ONLY earn 100 million dollars instead of 150 million dollars per year.

But, y'know, SoCiAlIsTs HATE THE WEALTHY!! ! Which is apparently around 80K, and not a penny more, cos they hate that income level, but not millionaires of billionaires, because I guess SoCiAlIsTs! don't know millionaires and billionaires exist I guess

The idea that "I own the means of production, so everything produced is also mine, even if your labor produced it, but don't worry, I'll give you back enough to survive, I wish I could do better, here's your pittance" sound pretty much like what soviet russia tried to sell as "communism". The only difference being, instead of the governmet owning the businesses, now the businesses own the government.

If a system "doesn't work" because greedy people subvert it, then it's not that it "doesn't work", it's that you're letting it be sabotaged. Russian wrote "socialism!" on the side of the box, but rather than being given everything, and then giving it back fairly, those in power got everything, and just kept it. Know what else that sounds like? The promise of "trickle down economics". Hey, give all the money to the rich! Then it will trickle down their lines of spending to everyone! Then we gave all the money to the rich. They kept it and asked for more. More tax cuts. More bailouts. "Trickle down", huh? Their wealth has skyrocketed. Everyone else's has stagnated and fallen behind. When does the trickle start? Know who rich people give most of their money to? Other rich people. Business to business transactions that spend millions or billions, but still only filter down to the workers as poverty wages. Money stays at the top as much as it can.

Socialism is antithetical to innovation and invention.  America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to "the common good" (e.g., Socialism), but by the productive genius of free men and women who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes (e.g., Capitalism).

Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft.  It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies do not work; they create poverty instead of wealth.  This is unarguable historical fact; and, as we have learned from countless examples throughout history, including now Venezuela, the main difference between capitalism and socialism is this: Capitalism works.