The system will fall

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Government doing its magic. Privatizing profits and socializing losses.

Governments have been doing this since God invented dirt.

ruveyn

I think dirt was around for quite sometime before any governments were ever formed.

God didn't invent dirt. It's an entirely natural, if incredibly complex, phenomenon.

Corporations (or just about anyone doing business) privatise profits and socialise losses. Governments in the pay of corporations let them do it. That's why we need governments controlled by the civil society to stop them.

It's time for a whole new model, Ruveyn. The current one didn't work.

You are quite right. It looks like the Crony Capitalists have won, thus far.

We have fallen in the pit of Soft Fascism.

By the way the expression "since God invented dirt" means ever since when. Not to be taken literally.

ruveyn

I happen to be one of the Capitalists. You can have my deductions when you pry them out of my cold dead hand. If I had to pay in after tax income, I would spend less. If tax rates were higher, I would spend more.

The question is Tax Demand. America must have a Military force that can fight and lose three wars at once. It is part of our international program, we give discount cupons to sell weapons, most of which only last a few years, need to be serviced, spare parts, and keep our factories humming.

Social Welfare is Law, and 85% or more goes to run the program. Buildings, workers, who do not fall under Spcial Security, Medicare, they know, so have their own programs. By not having a single program, the States also run one, all the money for Widows, Orphans, the old, sick, injured, goes to support upper middle class State offfice workers.

10% of the population gets 1% of the GDP. Then they get the lowball Social Services. If the bottom 10% got 2%, we could fire most of the government. The poor are used to being poor, good at it, and still save. With twice the income, generational inner city poverty would cease, slumlords would starve.

Education is local, it is all very inferior to places like Bulgeria, Albania, who run the whole country on what we spend for a local school district.

In America if it was not for school districts, we would have few university grads. In other countries educated people work, here the teach, badly.

We do need testing, of the people who would teach. We test the students, who were taught by people who do not understand the subject, but are Union. In Right to Work States, it is that old Church and Courthouse gang, that spends all the public funds on their people.

The system does fail many, so we have Police, Courts, Jails, to hide the failures, and create more jobs.

This is how taxes are spent, middle class welfare. There are enough of them to continue voting themselves in office. At 35% of the voters, another 15% and they are good forever.

They are Drones, sitting behind a desk, making as much a month as the poor see in a year.

So I am a Radical, I would call for a floor on income, and offer CCC type jobs to all. This would make most government obsolete, take a fifth of low wage workers out of the labor market, drive up wages, to the point people could send their children to Private Schools.

This would greatly reduce the cost of government, It would free up an educated workforce that has not been productive.

If 3% of national income went to the bottom 10%, they are the people with drive, who want a better life, and they would strive for more. They would become a consumer class.

We do need higher taxes, Estate taxes, so the bulk of the money winds up in Fort Knox, in gold, belonging to the Nation.

Higher taxes mean larger deductions for those who invest, employ, and might get the idle rich and trust babies thinking about real work, like grandpa used to do. All income should be taxed at the same rates. All income should pay Social Security.

The economy would quickly adjust, higher wages call for better thinking, it always works when there are consumers.

Poor people are a bummer. The last time they were abolished, WWII and Korea, the post war boom was good for twenty years. Killing them costs more than just giving them money. Then they bred another generation to keep wages down. We need to get rid of them once and for all.

It will take some new programs, combining education and work, Health, Education, Welfare, and a bank account, will ruin the poor forever.

We have the projects, a lot of New Orleans and Detroit need to be torn down, restored to wildlife. It is way too expensive as a Government Capitalist project.

Student loan debt should also be worked off, teach those university brats to work!

We do not have problems, we are the problem.

Alright what would real capitalism look like then? and what does crony capitalism even mean?

I think that is a little extreme.......how do you propse to get rid of all of us on the bottom of this financial class hierarchy?

Also, I would be working if I could hopefully my dad will be able to hook me up with some work in a couple months or whatever, but maybe they should quit lying to highschool students and coercing them to go to college without really understanding what it is that's expected or how much the loans are going to add up.

I tried going to college and getting a degree, but that's not going to work out I would have never went if I knew what I knew now. some of the blame defenitly goes to this f*cked up system we have.

It means an unholy alliance of business firms (most the mega corporations) and the government. The government sees to it that profits are privatized and losses are socialized. When the corporations hit red ink, the taxpayers are looted to make up the shortfall. It is what you see in the news media day in and day out.

In a real capitalist system losing businesses will be allowed to die. No favors, no subsidies, no taxpayer funded bailouts. That includes the biggest banks.

ruveyn

Crony capitalism is a capitalist system dependent on close links between business and government officials, who are then responsible for tax breaks, grants, contracts and so on.

This should sound familiar.

Pure capitalism is an impossibility, since it depends on certain assumptions, such as Adam Smith's "invisible hand", which involves "the market" regulating itself under certain accepted conditions, such as the infinite supply of raw materials and the free movement of capital and labour. The whole idiotic notion has been academically refuted by Joseph Stiglitz (although any fool looking at the real world can see that these assumptions are faulty).

If pure capitalism were a possibility (or if we were to be stupid enough to try it), what we would see would be the rapid loss of those resources better locked up as short-term capital, such as forests. More and more money would end up being owned by the biggest, most ruthless companies (until one ended up owning just about everything!). There is a theory that this money would then "trickle down" to poorer individuals, but human greed shows that what actually happens is that it floods up.

Actually, capitalists like poor people. The more poor people there are around the more they can keep wages down (it's a simple supply and demand question). In theory "the market" provides jobs for everyone, but it doesn't because of its underlying fallacies, so at this point it makes more sense to have a pool of poor people.

One of the more interesting contradictions actually lies in the objection to taxation to pay for welfare payments to those people. *In theory* economies tend to be more productive if the money moves around faster (this is a bit of an oversimplification, but never mind). They certainly tend to grow faster (whether "growth" is a good idea, never mind sustainable, is another matter, but I'm trying to point out contradictions here). It is known the poor people tend to spend a greater proportion of their income that do rich people, who tend to save it. Therefore, to "grow" the economy, it makes more sense to pay more in welfare payments through the tax system.

The fact that the capitalists, crony or otherwise, object to this is simply further proof, if any were needed, that the rich b'stards are just in it for themselves.

So basically it's the kind of capitalism that exists at the moment......but wouldn't pure capitalism have quite a few problems of its own?

For the reasons I've just outlined (and others) pure capitalism (which is even less likely to be possible than pure socialism) would be just as bad, if not worse. Say goodbye to free education, free healthcare - you name it: the whole lot would belong to someone out to make a profit!

Yes it would be worse, I think I would prefer communsim with no government like it should be, but of course the argument against that is that humans will do nothing unless they get profit out of it. But I don't think that is nessisarly true.

Communism with no government. Well, by definition, communism has strong government because it requires central planning. Unfortunately, one reason that system failed (or so we keep getting told, but that's by people with a vested interest in us believing it) is that the workers were not motivated to work. There probably needs to be some degree of motivation in the system, but capitalism is geared up for that only in the threat of destitution if you don't follow the rules, which is no way to run a society.

Psychologists have known for many years that not working is closely associated, and often causes, what is usually called negative affect - which is to say depressive and related disorders.

The possibility most alternative thinkers are currently looking at is self-government by civil society, with some things being run more centrally - to ensure fairness, in effect, with natural monopolies being run centrally, and small-scale business run locally, with means to ensure nothing gets "too big to fail".

Sorry, natural monopolies would include public utilities (perhaps with incentives for local production in some cases) healthcare, education and so on. They are defined as "a condition on the cost-technology of an industry whereby it is most efficient (involving the lowest long-run average cost) for production to be concentrated in a single form. In some cases, this gives the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual and potential competitors."

There is no "free" education. Public schools in the U.S. are funded by way of property taxes. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

The cost of schooling wretches with no homes is borne by the taxpaying property owners.

It is better to teach people to read since that will enable them to earn their livings. So it is a good investment up to a point. Unfortunately U.S. public schools to a poor to mediocre job of teaching basic reading and calculation skills. Americans rank below some third world countries in literacy, science and math.

ruveyn