Poll: Capitalism VS Communism VS Socialism
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Well there is a very limited number of choices ... but although I put down Socialism I have to say has a former member of the Portuguese Communist party. If someone came out with a logistically viable form of communism (in a democratic setting) I would very much like that.
Although after spending so much time studying and debating the communist ideals, values and applications I am convinced that communist only serves a purpose as an opposition party.
Although after spending so much time studying and debating the communist ideals, values and applications I am convinced that communist only serves a purpose as an opposition party.
So you would support faulty system if it guaranteed work to several more people instead of using the money saved for example public projects (more jobs)?ninjablu said:
Military: It costs like hell with little to use except randomly invading small countries screwing your economy in the process.
NOTHING works. theres gotta be some form of balance in government if we do it completely anything, then it doesnt work.
the people at the bottom need a chance to NOT get stepped on, and opprotunities to rise up.
sometimes your just born rich or born poor, it just happens, you generally dont deserve everything you get and you generally dont deserve to go without everything you go without. all you people going "pure capitalism" have to remember something, if it exists, it can be bought. that includes a blind eye from law enforcement or "understanding" from a judge/jury. when someone gets too much money they become too powerful, and as we all know power makes sunshine and gumdrops for all.
the people at the bottom need a chance to NOT get stepped on, and opprotunities to rise up.
sometimes your just born rich or born poor, it just happens, you generally dont deserve everything you get and you generally dont deserve to go without everything you go without. all you people going "pure capitalism" have to remember something, if it exists, it can be bought. that includes a blind eye from law enforcement or "understanding" from a judge/jury. when someone gets too much money they become too powerful, and as we all know power makes sunshine and gumdrops for all.
That is like saying that poor people should suffer simply because they are poor.TomNook said:
Let us also consider what the "lowest rung" entails. Over the past few months countless executives have been fired, countless more are under scrutiny or have lost their power due to incompetance. Anyone here really felt the effects?
The guys who come every day and take our trash away. Let's do without them for just one month and see what happens. We would all be living in plastic caves carved out of our own discarded burrito packets. And what about the sewer and water workers? What about those guys digging ditches in the street while the rain freezes their asses off? You may not care too much about them getting a decent standard of living but you sure would notice if your toilet never flushed and your taps never worked. And hey - people picking up trash out the street for minimum wage? People beneath contempt in our society which measures success by nothing more than bank balance. Without those souls we would have bubonic plague all over again. Gone shopping for food today? How do you think that food got there? Someone had to go farm it, and then someone else had to go pack it, and then someone else had to put it on that shelf, and then some other sod had sit at the till pressing buttons for hours on end so you could buy it. You always have the option of starving though, or going out and catching your own food.
See what life is like without that "lowest rung" keeping all the higher rungs up there, it's hell. That's what it is. Society only works because some people do work that, frankly, involves cleaning up everyone elses shit, or willing to spend a large amount of their life doing something that effectively is shit. They don't deserve punishment for basically making civilized society possible.
You might want to run that through a fact-check: many countries in Europe had literacy rates of between ten and forty per-cent prior to the advent of public education.
What? So you're arguing that social services have never helped provide the general public with access to resources they didn't have before? That doesn't pass the means test you just proposed above, with regards to education. And by the way - since you don't seem to know - other institutions than the government helped redistribute wealth prior to the advent of socialistic government intervention (and governments have always intervened; the notion that they shouldn't or wouldn't is pure fantasy); whether it be collectivist churches of Native potlash ceremonies. Compassion, y'know - it's just a pretty innate thing, organized or no.
I guess freedom includes the "right" to be denied access to any kind of opportunity as a result of your social stature, since that was often the case in societies prior to when the redistribution of wealth became intensified. Moreover: how are you supposed to make an "educated" decision about whether you desire "education" when you're not educated? Contradictions riddle your arguments: by your logic, the entirety of the poor in society are simply "choosing" to be poor rather than existing in circumstances whereby many of them are not equipped to generate wealth.
Also - and I'll mention this quickly, for the sake of brevity - any attempt to completely extricate the government from daily life would quickly be followed by the societal takeover of another institution, and perhaps one less preferable: an agglomerate of corporations, for example.
Fact-check, again: read about those "dime-a-day" schools - in Pakistan, not India by the way. They're rag-tag classrooms, they don't offer a hundredth of the services in western schools, their workforces are ununionized and untrained, there are no post-secondary options, etc. To bring this up in relation to this discussion is merely daydreaming: if we implemented a similar system in the west, our workforce would be unfit to compete in the global marketplace within a generation.
And Ezra has hit upon another flaw in the pure capitalist system: An inherently inefficent workforce, because if you don't force them to go to school, and they don't get educated, then they're next to worthless in the modern world.
Wheras with a socialist system one is guaranteed that the workforce will remain at least in the majority viable for both current and future employment.
Tis much the same with private hospitals. The NHS, for all morons may critiscise it, is reckoned to give one of the highest standards of care in the world (including private institutions). The additional benefit of this is that the workforce lives longer, works harder and is less riddled by disease than in America, and even more so under the delusions of pure capitalism.
Botton line: Communism is the complaints of the working man, wrapped up by compassionate or paternalistic intellectuals. Pure-Free-Marketism is the whining of the idle rich, wrapped up by self-serving or paternalistic intellectuals.
Mixed economics is the complaints of all, sundry and so forth matched into a system that, y'know, works, unlike the two highlighted above, and manages to deliver a degree of compassion into human life.
Wheras with a socialist system one is guaranteed that the workforce will remain at least in the majority viable for both current and future employment.
Tis much the same with private hospitals. The NHS, for all morons may critiscise it, is reckoned to give one of the highest standards of care in the world (including private institutions). The additional benefit of this is that the workforce lives longer, works harder and is less riddled by disease than in America, and even more so under the delusions of pure capitalism.
Botton line: Communism is the complaints of the working man, wrapped up by compassionate or paternalistic intellectuals. Pure-Free-Marketism is the whining of the idle rich, wrapped up by self-serving or paternalistic intellectuals.
Mixed economics is the complaints of all, sundry and so forth matched into a system that, y'know, works, unlike the two highlighted above, and manages to deliver a degree of compassion into human life.
Because you still want shit. A TV, a car, a girlfriend that's not missing teeth. You still want to be rich. You are motivated by the possibilities above you.TomNook said:
The real issue is that when the lowest classes get pissed-off and dejected, you know what happens? You get a revolution. No matter how hard a nation tries to keep the lowest class down, by limiting education, making health-care unaccessible, quelling riots. If you have enough dissatisfied people, they will eventually say "Fuck this!" The problem here is that whenever a revolution happens (lately, anyway), you end up with a "worker's paradise." We all know that this doesn't work. That's why you need a capitalist society that helps it's weakest citizens. A social democracy.
None of the world's problems right now can be put upon the shoulders of welfare recipients. It's the top 5% that have screwed everything up. Do welfare moms have any blame for what's happening with the big-3 auto makers? No. It's shitty management (let's built vehicles that get 10mpg, cheap gas will be around forever!) coupled with the big-3 having to play legacy health-care costs to retired workers.
We call it Europe. It works.EnzoHonda said:
Something I must agree with. Capitalism has it's flaws, and blaming the consumers for them is, as Keynes said, rather like blaming the longitude lines for meeting at the pole.EnzoHonda said:
Due to the way that our modern system of capitalism is set up, there NEEDS to be a very small percentage of people that are fabulously wealthy.SenseOfTumour said:
There are 3 components of production today:
1.) Raw materials
2.) Labor
3.) Means of production (machines, assembly lines, factories)
This is an oversimplification, obviously, but it is adequate for the purposes of this discussion.
Labor is provided by the working people. Raw materials also come from labor, as are the means of production. This sounds great, the people have all the power, we can all live together in a workers paradise.
However, this simple model makes a few assumptions that cannot be made in the real world:
1.) Homogenous labor -- skilled and unskilled labor are treated the same.
Obviously, allowing for salaries that are varied to a degree eliminates this as a valid counterpoint to your suggestion.
2.) Most efficient allocation of resources
This is the main problem for your proposed system. In any society that uses money, production must meet the needs of individuals. If I company doesn't make something that people want and can afford, they will go out of business. With an even, or almost even distribution of wealth (within a few hundred percent), consumers will still strongly tend toward buying consumer goods and services. With everyone making $500,000 or less, very few people will want to save up their money for several years in order to buy a multi-million dollar machine with the vague promise they will make more money at some point in the future.
This is all well and good, because there are already plenty of machines out there... But these machines break down, and eventually productivity will fall, and people will need to save up even longer just to buy a single machine.
If you don't believe me, imagine if you made $500,000 a year. What would you do with it? Buy a car? Buy a house? Chances are you would have a much better standard of living than you do now, but I'm pretty sure you would never think to give it all up so that you could buy a machine at some point in the future.
Enter the fabulously rich people. At some point, your life is comfortable enough that buying another $100,000 car isn't going to make you that much happier. So what would make you happier, if you have everything money could buy?... More money! And more money means buying more machines. Hiring more workers. Creating new jobs. Relatively little of the "wealth" of these incredibly rich people is in cash, it is in the form of stock in their companies, in the form of assets, the means of production which allow the workers to be as productive as they are, and keep the standard of living up for everyone.
Seeing people that are endlessly wealthy while there are still people that go hungry seems vastly unfair, but ultimately, very wealthy people are what keeps capitalism moving. While it may be unfair, some people being wealthier than you doesn't hurt you at all; quite to the contrary, you benefit from their wealth. The problem is the unwillingness of people to see beyond TANGIBLE things -- the true aspect of human nature that prevents capitalism from being utilized in its truest form.
The inclusion of socialism in the poll is pretty stupid: communism is already an (extreme) form of socialism, but so is social-democracy, which combines certain ideas of socialism and places them in a capitalistic free-market economy.
No, I don't support it. I didn't vote for Obama, so why would I say I would support him if he fixed the healthcare system unless I thought it was ineffective? Hell, even Bush tried to at least do something to help, and it was shot down.Dele said:
I'm just making the point that you can't wave a magic wand and fix it. And you have to consider exactly how many people are involved in that system. Sure, a lot of them can move over from the private sector and take government positions. I'm sure it will filled with bureaucracy to the point of asphyxiation. This doesn't change the fact that it's a big system to handle.
Military: You're right, but
-long list of justifications that you've likely heard all of before-
Nathan A. said:
Hmmm...a debateable point, but points for the rational, reasonable tone, moderate language and otherwise polite behaviour. Oh, and more bonus points for refraining from the absrudly overly-dramitised language that certain posters seem to revel in.
So you've already half-way won me over.
However, you're argument has some flaws:
1. Firstly, within a large company, or as it seems fashionable to call them, corporations, there is a degree of seperation between the CEOs, board members etc who control the firm, and the firm as an entity itself.
Simply put, A CEO will not buy machinery for a firm out of the money he's making as a salary. Rather, he will use the company's money to buy this. Now, while this seems to be a minimal difference, one must take into account of two factors. Firstly, that gross corporate earnings are subject to corporate tax, thus removing X% of them, and turning them into net corporate earnings. However, capital goods, labour costs and so on are ALL deductable from taxation, and so we have a situation whereby Net corporate earnings= Gross corporate earnings - Tax (Tax=Base rate of corporate tax- Existing Factors of production).
And the money said CEO takes as a salary comes as a factor of production. Therefore, the entirity of the Net Corporate earnings will go on purchasing more capital goods, more labour and to share divedends.
And your points also suffer from the fact that much of the upper echelon's earnings are saved. So, if these are increased, we will have increased saving. However, in a situation of a 'boom', that is, of a dramatic increase in supply, you will suffer from a demand-deficet (A shortage of demand) if your distribution of wealth is grossly uneven, as, simply put, the poor's aggregate demand will remain at equilibrium, as will the wealthy's, since, as you pointed out so well, the rich can only buy so many luxury goods.
Another flaw is your conclusion 'Very wealthy people are what keeps capitalism running'
A correct summation would be 'Very wealthy people are part of what keeps capitalism running.'
And as for stock markets...god, what a waste. I'll grant that initially, the boost provided to a company from floating itself on the market is a very good thing,but aside from that the whole thing is just, in the words of my economics teacher (a stout monetarist and right-wing to the core) Paper chasing papr. Fluff. It produces nothing, provides no service and contributes nothing to society save extra risk.
I voted capitalism, but......
All of the political systems in the poll can be proven to be flawed. Saying that though, we all have to find our own place in the world and capitalism is the most open system for those wishing to attempt to succeed.
Can any of us say that we fit neatly into any of these pidgeon holes? I believe in the free market, capitol punishment, and the old 'elitest' education system, All right wing/capitalist Ideas. So I'm a capitalist right? The problem with this is I also believe in socialised medicine, the welfare state, and Fair trade for the developing world. This makes me look like a socialist!
In truth I believe that a new political system known as 'pragmatism' should be invented!
"do what works!"
All of the political systems in the poll can be proven to be flawed. Saying that though, we all have to find our own place in the world and capitalism is the most open system for those wishing to attempt to succeed.
Can any of us say that we fit neatly into any of these pidgeon holes? I believe in the free market, capitol punishment, and the old 'elitest' education system, All right wing/capitalist Ideas. So I'm a capitalist right? The problem with this is I also believe in socialised medicine, the welfare state, and Fair trade for the developing world. This makes me look like a socialist!
In truth I believe that a new political system known as 'pragmatism' should be invented!
"do what works!"
