Capitalism versus Communism Thread.

Post Reply New Topic

Under capitalism, some people lose. Under socialism, everybody loses.

Getting to the utopia envisioned by Karl Marx et al. I believe is impossible. So we make do with capitalism.

Socialism doesn't work and there is a very long track record of failed states to prove it. And what we have is capitalism isn't perfect and never will be, but most of the people who criticize it are either 1) Insanely wealthy, elitist, out-of-touch hypocrites such as Michael Moore who wouldn't be where they were if it weren't for capitalism or 2) Mad-at-the-world people with no money who know nothing about political systems and cannot objectively analyze the issue.

********************************************************************************************************

Check out my IMDB page!

Under Capitalism 0% unemployment rate is impossible to achieve, unemployment rates rarely fall below 5% under a modern Capitalist system in America. Providing full employment for all citizens comes at a cost with higher taxes and adequate public infrastructure.

European nations with mixed economies like Germany and Scandinavia have much lower unemployment rates and rarely have market failures like the corrupt American corporate dictatorship. Bailing out failing big corporations with tax payers money to increase debt is morally wrong and does not work.

One third of Americans do not have access to public education and public health system. A healthy educated workforce is critical for a nation's prosperity. Education and health in America is only available to those who can pay for it out of their own pocket and up front. It is too late to implement a good public health system or a good public education system in America.

Poverty, unemployment, lack of education/work opportunities and crime rates are linked. America leads the way in the developed world as being a terrible place to live if you are poor. However, America is a great place to live if you are rich.

You have no idea what you are even talking about. If you are free to give away your money to whom you please, then you are living in a free economy.


Let me fix your analogy for you:

Make a profit and keep it all for oneself and you are a selfish person.
Make a profit and have a large chunk of it taken from you under threat of imprisonment by the state, and you are a Socialist.
Work without pay for the state and you are a communist.

I believe you are referring (rather unfairly in my opinion, but that's besides the point) to a welfare state. That's not really socialism--under socialism the workers own the means of production (either directly, or via the government) and there is usually not a market based system (some schools of thought allow for a market though).

That was the result of statism, not capitalism. If you don't recall, it was the British state that colonised America and Australia. It was the British state that invaded Africa. It had nothing to do with capitalism at all. By your logic, the same conclusion can be reached of basically any societal construct ever. War is the fault of tribalism, war is the fault of monarchism, war is the fault of feudalism...


Riiight... You mean in those impoverished African countries that are living under an extremely repressive socialist/communist government? Here's a challenge - Find me a country that has been for the most part free market over the past 20 years that has a large portion of its citizens suffering from poverty.

Then find me a country that has been for the most part communist over the past 20 years that doesn't have a large portion of citizens suffering from poverty.

Here's a map for you to use:

[img][800:625]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Index_of_Economic_Freedom_2010.png[/img]


Anyone that is anti-free-market has not read or understood F.A. Hayek's theory of price signals. Want me to explain why this is extremely important and relevant?

Communism worked when tribalism was still at large. Why? If you're living in a tribe, how many people do you need to allocate resources for? 20 people? 30 people? Not very many. You could easily ask everyone in the tribe what resources they needed and share them accordingly. Not only this, but during this time we used very few resources. Wood, stone, meat, berries, etc. Not many things at all.

Now compare that to a modern society. There are almost 7 billion people currently living under our global economy, and there is literally an unfathomable number of resources in use. Now tell me how the hell you're going to organise and delegate an unfathomably large number of resources? How are you going to decide how many microchips to produce? How many tubes of lipstick? How many nails? And we can go into even more depth than that. How many SAB-C515-LN microchips do we produce? How many tubes of candelilla wax lipstick of the colour wine red do we produce? How many 6 inch as opposed to 9 inch nails are you going to produce?

Price signals are currently the only known way of allocating resources in the best way possible. Why? It is simple economics: If a resource is in high demand, its price will increase, and entrepreneurs will begin producing that resource. If a resource is being over-produced, its price will decrease, and entrepreneurs will begin producing the resource less. Simple, right?

And it is for this very reason that when you remove the price system, and allow a market to be centrally planned by a government, it will always, always turn out horribly. No government can correctly allocate resources in an efficient manner, it's simply to large a task. So what happens is you either end up allocating too few resources (e.g food during Mao's regime, resulted in over 40,000,000 deaths from famine, food in Venezuela, the housing crisis in Cuba, etc.), or you end up squandering huge amounts of resources.

Want an example of squandered resources? Check out these ghost cities in China. There was no demand for huge apartment complexes or shopping malls, and so huge amounts of resources were wasted, resources that could have been used to feed starving children living in poverty.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E[/youtube]


There is nothing good about centrally planned economies.

Then how do you account for the prosperity of the United States?

ruveyn

And how do you think those workers are going to pay for the resources used in production without forcibly taking other people's income? How are they going to pay for the machines they use? For the buildings they work in?

I suppose they could pool their money together and pay for it themselves. Oh wait, that's ownership of capital. So why don't workers just pool their resources together and own the means of production under the current system???
It can't have anything to do with the fact that managing production takes a skill and knowledge that most labourers don't have?

I will tell you why. The Workers are revolting.

ruveyn

The 80/20 principle at work. The top 20% wealthy elites in the US have most of the wealth and power to rule over the majority 80% of the American citizens. America is great if you are a rich multi-millionaire or billionaire but if you are not a millionaire in the US you are poor. America is a great place only for the rich who have all the opportunities for success and access to elite private education and elite private health.

Federal Government spending 25% of the annual Budget to feed a military to monitor the world out of paranoia. Private health system only and millions of sick people without insurance left to die in the streets. Private education, education is not freely available to the lower socio-economic classes. College education is private only and paid out of your own pocket or private loan shark companies to fund education.

The rich get richer and the poor just starve to death in the US. The US has one of the most pure market economies that is great if you are rich. If you are poor well tough luck. The US does not give a hoot about its most disadvantaged citizens and its foreign and domestic policies clearly show that to the world.

European nations care a bit more about their citizens than the US. European nations use a mixed economic system: they have some degree of a welfare system, stronger Unions that fight for workers rights/conditions, universal public health systems and universal public education systems. Crime rates and incarceration rates in Europe are considerably lower per capita than the US.

In the US millions every year are forced to sell their own home to pay their medical bills when their private health insurance runs out or is rejected due to pre-existing conditions or some other lame fat cat, blood sucking corporate excuse. It is common to be homeless, sick and dying in the US. Millions of people who became sick not by choice end up homeless, sick and dying on the streets in the US.

US Capitalist system is so great if you become sick, homeless, dying on a street in the US. Forced to sell your own house because your useless private health insurance company left you high and dry.

Some do, actually. It's the cooperative movement. In Canada about a third of people are members of credit unions, which are basically banks that use that model. There is also Co-Op, a cooperative grocery store. I think there might be some others too. But how well socialism would work is besides the point I was making. I was just pointing out that welfare states aren't truly socialist (I call them quasi-socialist myself).

[quote="Dark_Lord_2008"
Under Socialism/Capitalism Greed and Corruption is bad. Every worker should be available to work and earn a living and paid according to how much they contribute towards society under Socialism or paid equally regardless of skill under Communism.

.[/quote]


We can objectively say how many widgets a worker turned out and we can objectively say how many hours a worker devoted to a task. What we cannot objectively assert is the -value- of the output to society. That is a matter of opinion.

ruveyn

"Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.".

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.

The third world: China, India, Thailand and Phillipines et al make most of the world's consumer goods, have most of the factories, steel works, etc. More jobs are being outsourced to third world cess pits with poor working conditions and low wages as low as $1 per day.

Mexico and Latin Americans are hungry for the lazy American jobs is what Corporate America tell their citizens in Business Reports. Western world citizens are apparently lazy and demand high wages than third world nations.

Universal wage, lower wages and conditions around the world to compete with third world nations is the solution. It is much easier to lower western world wages down to third world nations instead of lifting third world nations on par with western world nations.

American gangster Capitalism is working wonders pushing its virtues of global free trade, liberalisation and pushing the American Dream.

~facepalm~ I really do need to take a minute....


Okay. We're not talking about resources.
We're talking about who has access to them, and in what proportion.
GROCERY STORES can and do exist alongside starving people with NO MEANS TO BUY FROM THEM.
They have no means to buy from them, because the "tribe", however large, DOES NOT GIVE THEM THE MEANS.

No, it only incentivizes the very worst parts of it, as opposed to the others

Social Darwinism is a barbaric ethical argument.

Um. What? A hierarchical group of social animals can be said to have an infrastructure.

Capitalism: private ownership of the means of production.
I own all the fishing poles.
I'm going to let 2 of my PPR homies do the fishing. I get a lot of the fish, they get some, and everyone else gets very little or none. What? You and your family will starve without a supply of fish? Tough. THAT'S FREEDOM, BABY.

This is exactly the scenario being indicted here, on a scale of millions and millions of people and hundreds of nations.

Actually, neo-con "free" market (~snort~) propaganda rhetoric aside, "welfare states" are usually nations where the socio-economic gap is not ALLOWED to grow nearly so wide as it's bottom tier citizens would DIE without welfare. If you're opposed to the idea of welfare, you should be advocating a system whereby people are not sentenced to death for the crime of being poor. Otherwise you're either a hypocrite, so indifferent as to be sociopathic, or an outright sadist who orgasms at the idea of an expendable underclass dying in the streets.

It is hardly "collectivist" to advocate a non-lethal economic system.

Charitable and voluntary means for feeding the hungry exist.

At the very least the hungry and poor can be given access to dumpsters in the back of restaurants. But there are more graceful ways in which the hungry are fed in the U.S. It happens every day in every part of the country. If there are people actually starving it is because they are too stupid to take advantage of charitable efforts made on their behalf.

I will bet a dollar you believe the only way of taking care of the poor and hungry is through government action. That is an erroneous position.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 20 May 2011, 5:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The starving hungry poor have nothing to lose. They may as well steal food from the shops, from a private farm/orchard or out of the bin. A homeless person can also access soup kitchens and if they are women and children homeless shelters.

A prison sentence and a feed and warm bed to sleep the nights is much better than sleeping on the streets exposed to the elements. In a homeless person's situation: prison would be a step up. Steal a loaf a bread or some other grocery item may result in a hand chopped off in some parts or maybe the death penalty in the Middle East.