Hello, I have been rather tired of all the rather overly large companies that seem to influence our government. When policies are made around these companies and their "right" to capitalize on the working class, on the poor, on the hungry. I would type a rather large post to start but go to this link instead. It speaks exactly from where I stand. Bring your thoughts and opinions, try to keep it as a discussion, with open minds, a heated debate would be nice, but lets try to avoid personal insults, they only make things messy. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! http://www.eleggua.com/Economic/EvilCapitalism.html Tell me what ya think.
Wellll... not to duck the issue, but they have been giving this a pretty healthy workout in the Considerations on Capitalism thread in the Ethics, Morality, & Justice forum. I'm not too sure what I might add here. I will say that I don't find capitalism itself as an evil ideal. Flawed, perhaps yes. Rather it is the human factor in the equation (as it so often is) that causes people to be hurt.
Keep in mind there is a difference between Capitalism and a token economy. Capitalism is a token economy system. A token economy is not necessarily capitalism. What defines capitalism alone in comparison to other token economies is the lending of capital for interest (Not that I'm a Christian, but it's funny how their stories say Jesus Christ was against usuary, yet Christianity's major bastions are capitalist nations.). Nothing wrong with that idea really, loaning people goods or money and getting back more than you gave. However... Whether people start with different advantages or start on a level playing field, and regardless of how it happens, in any society which allows individuals to gain fair or unfair advantage through hard work, cheating and stealing, genius, or whatever, you will eventually have people with different resources. Some will have more influence, money, goods, or whatever, than others. Those with the advantage generally try to maintain it. Why? Well, I know I want my kids to grow up in as safe an environment as possible, with good education. A bit of biology and evolution there. My genes are more important than yours, so I'll keep whatever advantage I can get. So gaining such advantages is natural, whether you live in a capitalist society, some other token economy, or something completely different. Unfortunately, this leads to something else. Business and services and such are all different. If a private health care fund or a school is better than its competition, it costs more. Fair enough. So only those with the money can afford it. The wealthier people can get their hands on better education, health care, legal assistance, and more. This can apply over many generations. This leads to what Marx I think called Class Polarisation, which we see very clearly in the USA, Australia, and many other places today. Put simply: the poor get poorer, and the rich get richer. Whether it involves any individuals or groups having nasty intentions to their fellow man or not, this class polarisation is an integral part of any system which places value on material wealth for the individual (not JUST capitalism). Whether the majority get poorer, unhealthier, less educated, and have shorter lifespans due to intent from the wealthier portion of society or they just happen to be the unfortunate roadkill of a socio-economic system which holds no malice toward them at all, the result is the same. So is capitalism bad? Should it be abandoned? Well, until we reach some stage of development at which we can all have whatever we want by clicking our fingers, capitalism is useful for driving growth and expansion. Lending not for equal returns but for interest drives the borrower to grow and expand in order to satisfy the interest. The problem? This system is now working on a global scale. This quest to expand, and to repay interest, is global, in a world with limited space and resources. With such a pervasive presence, such a system can only really cause more class polarisation while cutting back on returns from growth and expansion, which is now sorely limited. We're at a point of diminishing returns. More space and resources are needed if this system can keep its returns in order with its negative effects. Perhaps getting out among the stars? New worlds, new industries? But there's a problem. That costs money. Those who might invest the money want interest. And such expansion carries no guarantee of interest.
Anti-Capitalists are a dime a dozen. Captialists at least pay them minimum wage -- whether they're worth it, or not. Feel lucky actually living off the abilities of others.
Capitalism & Minimum Wage How do we define "worth" in this context? And let us not forget that they pay it under Congressional order, not voluntarily, and that a minimum wage earner has an annual income below the poverty level. There is enough wealth in our society to assure workers a livable minimum wage, allowing them to pay for housing, food, and the means to survive. According to a study titled "A Decade of Executive Excess if U.S. workers had seen their pay rise at the same 481 percent pace that industry captains enjoyed during the 1990s, the minimum wage would be $22.08 an hour. The minimum wage hasn't kept pace with inflation for 30 years. Observe the gap between the incomes of executives in Fortune 500 companies and that of their workers. In 1980, CEOs in these companies earned, on average, about 45 times what their workers made. In the late 1990s, a big-company CEO can earn 419 times what a US worker makes. In our society, it seems clear that the value of one person's hour of work is very different from another's. To some degree, this is certainly how it should be. But when a double standard is used to make these decisions and when the process employed favors the stronger over the weaker, unfair "weights and measures" are being used, and injustice and oppression can occur. Increased income, for most of us, is tied to the growth of the economy. Minimum wage, on the other hand, is an arbitrary policy decision made by Congress. Even those earning wages above the minimum but well below the median income for their area are caught in a dynamic that works against them, but not against higher-income earners. Inflation Inflation's effect on low-wage earners is quantitatively different from its effect on higher-wage earners. It is not simply a matter of degree. For higher earners, an increase in prices means a few less choices. For the low-wage earner, it can be a matter of survival; it could mean the loss of shelter. This quantitative difference is also reflected in how public policy manages inflation. The Federal Reserve often raises the interest rate when the unemployment rate remains below 6 percent, a minimum threshold analysts believed necessary to avoid inflation in a robust economy. In other words, zero unemployment and livable wages are not to the advantage of the country's economy. Consequently, we seem to have established a permanent underclass in our society, but our moral traditions and sensitivities do not allow us to own up to that fact. Instead, we convince ourselves that everyone has equal access to the American Dream, and have developed welfare programs for those "temporarily" in poverty.
No more, no less While capitalism is by no means without it's problems, I think I would be hard pressed to find a system right now that I can argue is significantly better. Don't forget that capitalism, regardless of it's flaws, is good for promoting invention and technological advance. It's largely because of the effects of capitalism that we can talk afford to take the time to talk about it. I guess my opinion is that capitalism is no more flawed than any other economic system I've seen, but with that I have to add that capitalism also does not lack flaws either. No matter what economic system a nation uses, there will always be corruption within it because human beings are corruptable. It is an unfortunate fact that people with the most power are often the most corrupt, and that their corruption affects more individuals because of their power.
Re: No more, no less Are we corruptible because of the personal power and benefits afforded by that corruption? If this is so, we should strive towards a system that does not reward with power. I do not have an alternative proposal, necessarily - just thinking out loud at the moment. I'll ponder this and get back to you on this train of thought. Welcome to the forums, Deus Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Peace.
Deus, welcome to the forum I only have two questions, for I'm not going to disagree with your post: * What is the purpose of society? * What is the purpose of financial economy? I'll even tip my hand a little: I'm curious about what people expect of their economies. I hear capitalists, for instance, talk about financial empowerment; observationally, money becomes more important than the people it serves. The people, in fact, often seem to exist to serve the money and its economy. Many capitalistic justifications include empowerment of the self; while I'm all for this, the result seems to be that people are focused entirely on their selves and their immediate profits; as Marx once noted: If you pass a law to hang all the Capitalists, they will sell you the rope. So a Capitalist might note that Nobody should be entitled to the produce of MY labor. In fact, in the thread Goofyfish pointed toward, you can see that argument posted. This inward focus seems to subvert the idea of one's neighbors. Why be so socialist as to finance public education? Certainly, you're not obliged to wish for your neighbors the happiness and security that education can bring; but what about i]you[/i]? Is your life more profitable if your neighbors aren't A) stealing from you or killing you, and B) dying before they can pay you for your services? Capitalism, so focused on the advantages gained by the self, continues to view alternative theories as an attack against the self. Capitalists ridicule other economic theories for conceptual faults found within Capitalism itself. Capitalists project their own fears onto alternative economic theories. They'll tell you about the slavery of socialism, and they'll post Rand out their yangs while ignoring fundamental Capitalism (Adam Smith, Hirschmann, Machiavellian influence, &c.). Nobody talks about Capitalism in terms of the necessity of resource supply versus human (market) demand, but in terms of empowerment and self and wealth. So we turn to a mind on the Socialist side, Oscar Wilde, who noted that the goal of Socialism is to reconstruct society in a way that makes poverty impossible. Hardly a slavery, eh? To know that nobody's going to be stealing from you out of hunger? To know that everyone can afford education? This, of course, as opposed to Capitalism, which requires a poor working class: someone noted the minimum wage. Aside from pointing out that the minimum wage sucks because Capitalists don't want to pay a fair wage to begin with, we might note that without this poor class that has little to no buying power, goods would be too expensive to make a Capitalist economy work the way we envision. One of the reasons Capitalism has poor people is that it needs them. It's good enough for most people to innovate according to necessity, so that each innovation really only covers its immediate need. But much vital research isn't getting done because there's no money in it. It would seem that currency, which has the potential to elevate the human condition, now presents problems toward the human condition. Specifically, currency has more value to human beings than the human condition. This is the greatest evil of Capitalism: that wrong things in the world don't get fixed because they're too expensive. If anyone can tell me the exact value of a dollar from one day to the next, I'll drop my assertion that currency in America is a fiction. I've asked economists: they can't do it without limiting the manner in which that value is expressed. That is, none can reach the true essence of the value of a dollar. "Expensive" is a fiction that only takes on a practical dimension of reality because we choose that it should be so. Capitalism says that it should be so. The premise of Captialism centers around capital--money. That should tell us something right there. thanx, Tiassa Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Well, this could be a whole discussion in itself, but I'm going to give my general opinion and say that society exists because human beings have found that we can achieve more as a group that we can as individuals. Thus, society exists to maximize what we can achieve, to increase the fruits of our labor. If I understand you right, you are asking my opinion of why we use money in our economy instead of some other means. I would say that the purpose of an economy in general is to allow for the exchange of goods and services between individuals. A financial economy allows for more and easier transactions between individuals because instead of exchanging goods and services themselves, we can exchange goods and services for little metal circles or slips of colored paper that we agree have some kind of value. I agree that Socialism is preferable to Capitalism in the ways that you have pointed out, however, I wouldn't say that Socialism is without it's flaws. For one, anyone who has to pay taxes out of their paycheck, knows that the government takes quite a chunk. Socialism requires a significantly large government to function, since government controls health care, education, utilities, and the means of production. This necessitates that a citizens forfeit a lot of the money they earn to the government to pay for these services and for the government's regulation of them. This is good from the position of people who do not make much money; they gain good health care and education without having to bear the full financial burden. On the other hand, people in careers who make more money have to shoulder the financial burden for their family plus they make up the difference for those others who make less money. Now, this may generally be the more humane approach to the situation, but I don't doubt that a lot of the people in the higher income bracket would feel pretty slighted. Also, Socialism, since it is a little like Communism, assumes that everyone will do a fair day's work. Unfortunately, there will always be individuals who are not willing to do a full day's work. In theory, Capitalism deals with these people better; they suffer financially if they do not work sufficiently. However, we all know this is not the case, there will always be richer people who do less work for more money, and there will always be people who are poor factory workers who work hard to scrape out a living. Although the people in Sweden and other Socialist countries seem pretty happy with Socialism, I would say that people in the US are overall satisfied with Capitalism. Perhaps it is a matter of culture, or perhaps both systems have their advantages and disadvantages.
Japan is the 2nd largest economy in the world. Theirs is not quite capitalism. Someday Chinese will take that spot. By then China will not say they are Capitalists. I think the economic model differs from country to country. Having just posted in the Enron topic, I think we did pretty good in the last 30 years but dark clouds are ahead. If large corporations like vampires try to suck too much blood out of us, we will die - the middle class will disappear as the trend has just begun. So they will have to get together and figure out how to suck a little at a time. The other solution is more government control which will happen if Republicans can not solve the economy and are thrown out. Since the information revolution died in the vine (due to the government's ineptness) I do not think there is anything out there that will take us to the next century. I will not be surprised if the real DOW stays at 9000 (adjusting hype) for the next 10 years. My prediction is that the middleclass will gradually disappear to the lower class - and in doing so keep the rich where they belong...time will tell....
Wow. I consider myself to be pessimistic, but this is a little too dim of a prediction even for me. I hope you don't mean this like it sounds.
I am sorry Deus, the trend has already started - and there is no factors in the horizon that will change things. You have to look not internally but the global business dynamics. Even though G8 nations are trying to control it, the stability factors may be beyond their control. What worked in the past may not work because the world has changed. I have not seen any system either at major companies or with the government that are integrated and can handle complex business dynamics. That is why Cisco lost 399 billion in value - they did not know the external parameters, otherwise, they could have spent say 1B to bring stability to their landscape.
Is Capitalism really evil? We can all deny of being a capitalist but we all use products made by large companies that some would consider to be capitalist in nature. Many a time I've watched protests against capitalism and seen people, smashing windows of a McDonald's restaurant and screaming out slogans of the evilness of capitalism, wearing Nike shoes. Yet there they are saying with all their passion that people should stop supporting large companies that use cheap labour and keep down the poor to build their wealth.... hmmmm one could say there is a lot of hypocrisy on the part of many people. There is no perfect model of government that would satisfy the needs of everyone. It does not exist. We can have a laissez faire system but many would suffer as there would be no Government intervention. Or we can have a communist system where the Government controls all. Democratic Governments around the world are attempting to find a balance between the many extremes that exist, however in doing so, many will be unhappy with how it will affect them. But a balance must be found. Some will say that we should try and prosper regardless of the third world nations attempting to play catch up and some will say that we should use our wealth to help the third world nations catch up and be damned with trying to increase their wealth. Some will say that we need to balance in the middle... help the third world nations and in the mean time use the wealth we already have to become wealthier. There will never be a correct answer that will please everyone. There is no right or wrong here... Kind of like the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg... many will give an answer or an opinion, however none of them will be the right one for everyone.
Capitalism or Government, like any human idea must change with the awareness and aspirations of humans. As we become a global village, and information moves at the speed of light, we must take into account socio-economic factors everywhere. The bottomline is when we work, we produce more than what we get in return from our employer (except the CEOs) - that is the only way a company can make money. While we all understand that, when you introduce change to a foreign culture, it is difficult for them to accept change without the preparedness that goes with it. So, they misdirect their anger and lash out. Specifically McDonald intimidates and challenges them as a symbol of change to US culture. The people at McDonald do not understand. They think, if Coa-Cola and Nike is everywhere, why cannot BigMac. The solution is a gradual introduction and not rape of a woman you want to live with, the rest of your life (or intend to anyway) So, there is more to it than just a single thought. It is complex and managing complexity is an art based on science. This is the only place where art and science merge at the highest level. The government needs to evolve too. Most government workers in a capitalistic society like US are the bottom pick of the best people (the best go to business). And they have a difficult time managing change. They take away our nail clippers and sealed wine bottles on the plane. They strip search Pakistani females even though females are not in the profile. They worry about privacy and pedophiles and yet public restrooms do not have privacy partitions. Need I say more?
The trouble with capitalists is that they just never learned to share. It's a matter of sustainability. If you own the gold you will forever be defending it. We have all known this for soooooooooo long (Bible) and yet we rationalize our own stupid(temporary) greed. We all "get it" in the end, if we have time to think about it. Thank God I have. You are all (capitalists) so shallow. Read a booK!
wow what an interesting thread...I feel our system does give the advantage to the wealthy but we all have heard of success stories. I think paying more attention to the poor will fuel the economy better than the rich.. But we need some real changes as I am not for give aways either...How can we really help them make more money which will up the economy of our country???minimum wage dosn't really help them...heath care that sucks doesn't either...we just feed them and patch them up...lol.. If we can make more of them middle class it will fuel the economy better than helping Bill Gates make more money and it has the side effect of making Bill richer..but our system goes about it backwards....I don't know the cure just the illness....the trend to the wealthy is getting bigger...
For starters: Get rid of the middleman Between producers and consumers, there are too many layers that get a cut of the money by justifying their existence. Minimize that, you will boost the quality of life everywhere. Oprah does not have an agent that takes in 25% of what she makes. That is why she is the richest entertainer worth $988 million dollars of solid cash coming from a dirt poor family.
A real problem with wealth distribution in western economies seems to be how quickly meritocracy becomes winner takes all. A meritocracy is a noble goal. If you are successful, intelligent, and talented and create wealth you should be rewarded for it. This encourages hard work and improves the country's overall wealth. But at some point you have to stop and think: what about the people who simply aren't talented, intelligent and successful? Do we just abandon them? If, say, 20% of the population is not able to keep up, do we just throw them on the scrap heap to rot? Does not seem right. Many of this 20% will still be providing services that the rest of us want or need - sanitation, fast food, whatever it might be. They deserve a reasonable standard of living for their efforts. Peace.
That is why we have a minimum wage and welfare system. But it does not keep pace with inflation and changes in society. Today, in any major metropolis, both husband and wife has to work to make ends meet. For the female, it is no longer a choice. In Barbara Walter's special (20/20) on Saudi Women, they said that they would like to have the freedom to work or not work - but little they know that some freedoms come with a price.....
