Socialism vs Capitalism
- Thread starter What Would Jesus Do?
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Why don't you provide us an example of this "capitalist paradise" that has been implemented on this earth in its history to show that it can be "successful" in the way this propaganda postulates it can be. We've had so many forces pushing us in the direction of unregulated capitalism in recent years, that just has resulted in our economy and so many other things going in the tank. There are no examples of a successful "free market capitalism" that has not government that "gets in the way", because it hasn't and will never exist, other than in the minds of those who have been either paid by those at the top or who swallow the BS from those at the top to reward those at the top at our expense.
I almost wish I could go back to being ignorant. My only other option is to go back to school and take advantage of the corruption, which is the current path that I'm on. So, don't go learning too much, I don't want the extra competition.
And I find your current path hopeful. Maybe you will learn something.
Thought you couldn't provide us an example like I asked. Cronyism is what is being used by those who espouse capitalism as the ultimate form of governance where government isn't needed (because they want to run it themselves without cronyism, and screw us all in the process). You can't provide an example of capitalism running effectively without government regulating it, or without the government that is supposed to be regulating it being bought by cronyism. Give us an example.
Do you consider the Kochs capitalists? They're VERY well versed in using cronyism to achieve their ends through both parties, one of them has run as a Libertarian presidential candidate in the past, they help fund think tanks that provide this "capitalist dreamland" ideology, and their father of course had business deals with Joseph Stalin too. They run a huge amount of our businesses today that some would say is the example of being "capitalists" where they provide the capital to run these businesses as a capitalist would.
I didn't give you an answer because there's never been a truly capitalistic paradise.
And no, I don't consider the Kochs capitalists, and Bob Barr ran as a libertarian too, which just goes to show that the libertarian party really isn't libertarian, which is also why I've never voted for them.
And no, I don't consider the Kochs capitalists, and Bob Barr ran as a libertarian too, which just goes to show that the libertarian party really isn't libertarian, which is also why I've never voted for them.
So, is there anything other than a fantasy then that you are trying to point us towards to basically trash the one thing (a democratically elected government) that our forefathers set up to give power to the people to have some control over who runs this country. And we should throw this all away just because those saying that capitalism shouldn't have government that gets in the way of this "dream" being implemented say that it can happen, without providing a concrete example of how their solution works better?
About the closest thing that we have of a country that didn't have a government to regulate the actions of those engaged in capitalism was Somalia, and we know how that turned out!
Yeah, because the world has been one big peaceful place where no one starves to death and there are no wars.
First off the people have no more power. This country is run by an enormous government that is abused by bankers and other corporations. The rich keep getting richer at the expense of the poor. We're losing our liberties at an astounding pace.
And why do you guys keep bringing up Somalia? You're like a retarded broken record. Capitalism doesn't have militia's running around stealing from and killing people.
If those are the conditions you plan requires, I think you should consider that a 2nd clue. Buy a ticket to reality please.
It's an easy reality. You have a small government and no standing army. You allow people to grow their own food and build their own houses. You let them help themselves instead of regulating them to the point where they spend their lives in squalor and poverty.
Of course it does. You set the stage for the baddest thug with a bank account to take over. You must own the effects of your positions too.
The world has too many corrupt governments that has been exploited and screwed by capitalists only interested in their own well being and not others, which is why it is screwed the way it has been. I'll give you an example of where socialism has made its' people happier and actually has business run better as well.
Here are 9 reasons Denmark’s socialist economy leaves the US in the dust
There are other countries like Denmark who've followed similar strategies with similar results. These are real world examples and not fantasies with no examples. And we should go to some other BS system recommended by the crony capitalists in this country just because they "say" things will be better for all of us (and have been doing so for decades and haven't produced any tangible results in that direction).
The root of the word reality is real. Get real. This is some hilarious hippy dippy fantasy shit.
Yeah, which is why you need smaller government. If you make the government gigantic, there's no way that its NOT going to be abused by those with money and power.
Oh so that was a question, you didn't have a point? You're in school, let them teach you. While you're at it, take a philosophy class and maybe one on government too.
And the reason for that is the right wing ideology of our Supreme Court in their rulings that support the judicial activist notions of "corporate personhood" and "money is free speech", that have permitted the crony money to take over our government instead of staying independent the way it should have to make sure that capitalism doesn't get out of control and runs effectively for all of us and not just the few. If we didn't have so many people out their believing the Koch cronyists BS propaganda about capitalism in effect being a system of governance not needing our government to control it, we might have a government that actually worked and would work the way it should. Capitalism is an economic theory, not a theory about governance of society.
Those primarily in the Republican party that voted for presidents that gave us that 5 justice majority on the supreme court that have enabled things like Citizen's United decision to put corporate cronyism on steroids in breaking down our government should be looking at themselves for who to blame for putting in place a corrupt government that no longer serves us. They shouldn't be going after us who want a strong government to regulate capitalism properly, and bring back the days before Reagan when we had one of the top economic systems in the world then when it was more properly regulated then, and our society wasn't being divided in to an unequal mess that it is now, that will lead to another depression (and probably worse with climate change hanging over us now) that it almost collapsed society with back in the last century before FDR took over and put back in a system that helped us recover from those "capitalist" mistakes. We need someone else that doesn't hold back on taking on those "economic royalists" the way that FDR did in his time.
You're looking at the symptoms and not the illness.
You're also a democrat shill at that. What is happening to this country is not party related.
If it is small where it can't regulate even more powerful corporations, then WHO stops the economic royalists like the Koch brothers from abusing us, which they have been for so many years now since Reagan? The big reason why they want government out of the way is that they don't have to spend billions of dollars corrupting it to do what they would want to do it for less money if they were able to do everything they wanted without a government in the way. And they could go even further doing that too, with more money to do so that they wouldn't be spending on corrupting members of government.
Crony capitalism is a subset of and the logical consequence of capitalism.
It's what Republicans are referring to in their speeches talking about how wonderful capitalism is - when, for example, they praise what we have now and want to scare us by using the S-word ("socialism") when talking about Obama or, more recently, Sanders.
It's what Lou Dobbs and Larry Kudlow and the other business talking heads are praising when they talk about cutting regulations and the wonderfulness of the TPP.
It's what the WSJ and Fox are praising when they talk about deregulation.
So yes - absolutely - it's fair to talk about today's crony capitalism as capitalism.
Sure, you can join with some communists who reject the USSR as not being real communism - by saying our US oligarchic system isn't pure capitalism. But like it or not, it's being sold by nearly everybody on the right as "capitalism."
No. No it isn't. Crony capitalism is the logical consequence of capitalism and big government. Crony capitalism can't happen without big government. Who would the banks and corporations use to facilitate their abuse of the system without government?
Who nominated those five justices on the Supreme Court that gave us decisions like Citizen's United, which HAS made our government and the election process more corrupt? Huh? REPUBLICANS!!!! Democratic Party justices stood in the way of that.
Now, I will agree with you that there are many Democrats (DINOS!!!) who have helped take over enough of its party's power through people like the Koch brothers that contributed to the DLC and helped run that corrupt organization within the Democratic Party, which doesn't make the Democratic Party immune from criticism of corporate cronyism.
And Obama teamed up with Republicans to pass that big PILE of SH** set of free trade bills (TPA and TPP) the way corporatists unite together from both parties even if they split on many social issues that are intentionally provided more attention by the corporate media that likes us being divided on those issuesl Those free trade deals have facilitated the murders of people in places like Columbia where prosecution and apprehension of trade related criminal activity weren't being enforced, or in many places in Africa and South America, where the environment has been totally trashed and many people killed in the process while corporations move in to sack those countries of their resources (which also contributes more to the environmental mess that is contributing to global warming when we lose more of our rain forests, etc.)
But there are many in the Democratic Party and even an independent such as Bernie Sanders, who has more traditional Democratic Party beliefs, but works outside of that party now to avoid being more under control of the likes of the DLC/Third Way corruption that has infected it with those loving crony capitalism.
I've still have yet to see any decent effort from Republican constituents to unite together to help us get rid of this corporate cronyism that is infecting both parties to different degrees. The sooner we can have a stronger effort from Republican constituents to give us back more leadership like we had with Eisenhower (who I'd probably vote for today over any Republican nominated or Hillary Clinton) if he were running, who also warned us of what would happen with the cronyism he saw starting with the military industrial complex that was starting during his day to get big power.
So though the corporate cronyism is a problem for both parties, the Democratic constituencies are doing far more to try and bring it down than Republicans are at this point. Less government isn't going to fix the problem of government being corrupted. EFFECTIVE and powerful government answerable to us is what is needed, and has been missing for a LONG time!
You realize that traditional democrat beliefs were those of small government, right?
Not that I don't disagree with much of what you said. I just have a hard time with you trying to absolve the democrats and blame this almost strictly on the republicans.
Not that I don't disagree with much of what you said. I just have a hard time with you trying to absolve the democrats and blame this almost strictly on the republicans.
Crony capitalism is what is needed to neutralize big government that exists when they control it through that avenue to do the SAME F'ING THING they'd do if they had not government in place that they currently have to spend a lot of money on to "control it". If we had no government in place, then we'd have no avenue to hopefully retake that government at some point and throw out the corrupt politicians and put in decent ones to fix the corrupt work it has done in the past and reestablish proper regulation that has been lost for such a long time now.
You ought to blame those that are running the show (the banksters and other corporate bosses that pay the government to do their bidding), not the institution that has been corrupted. If you take away the institution that should be governing and controlling the actions of banksters and other corporate oligarchs, then you take away any hope of reestablishing a true democracy again, and you'll have people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson turning over in their grave hating those that basically screwed up the American Dream they tried to provide us and the world with earlier.
What page and table were you referring to?
If you were referring to Table 1 on page 17 you were partially correct. From 2005-2010 the United States was in the bottom decile in wealth growth rate.
But, we have rebounded. From 2010-2015 we have climbed into the top decile in wealth growth rate(6%) Tied with Columbia, trailing only Sweden.(Thanks a lot Obama; for real)
Most of that report says that North America is still holds the most wealth in the world and it's wealth is growing.(even as an average by citizen USD)
So we're still dominating.
Then what medium do the banks and corporations use to facilitate their power over the common man?
1) We were never a true democracy.
2) How do you propose we remove corruptness from the government when 97% of the people vote for the same two corrupt parties?
Just for the record, I'm not talking about completely removing government, I'm talking about making government much smaller.
As I noted I'm not absolving ALL Democrats as a general entity here, as there are many that have joined the already corrupted system (by things like Citizen's United, etc.) that has been set up to encourage those that will be corporate cronies to run in both parties and discourage and get in the way of candidates that won't be answerable to corporate cronyism. There are a number of pols, whether they are in districts that are gerrymandered in the Democratic Party's favor to put all of the Democrats in one district and have the rest of them spread out as minorities in other districts to give more seats to Republicans, that are trying to take on this cronyism, but they are primarily Democrats at this point. I just don't see any good and decent conscious efforts from Republicans to be analogous to the progressive caucus of Democrats to fight this cronyism.
How we define a government as being "big" or "small" is something I think you need to explain. It should be as big as necessary to do its job in serving the people's needs. Just like if business sees that it needs to be big to meet the needs of the market it serves, it will try to get bigger too, and at times there may be good reasons to do that too.
The key is whether you have those trying to drive it to be big so that they can control other businesses (and the market) in the case of business to create oligopoly, or in the case of government, build up a big enough corrupted entity to control elections to keep other voices out of government by not having a parliamentary system, instant runoff voting or other reforms that might provide us the chance to have more third party participation, and more voice of the people being a part of the government, and not an "oligopoly" of two parties that the oligarchy wants to control through crony capitalism. You make that entity of two corrupted parties too big, and you have what perhaps you are trying to describe as "big government". But that isn't an issue necessarily of it being big "sizewise", but being big enough to squash out more democratic processes of controlling it and keeping it the size it needs to be to serve voter constituents properly.
The larger the government is, the easier it is for people with money to abuse it.
Do you or don't you want a true democracy? Now in the beginning, there were interests trying to keep women and slaves from voting, which is one reason why we all don't currently have the *right* to vote as one of our rights given to us by the bill of rights. And that was what was specifically abused in the 2000 supreme court case used to stop recounts being done by Florida to try and correctly and more definitively find out who really won Florida's vote in that year and what problems might have gotten in the way for all of the votes to be counted, and voters who should have voted to be allowed to vote.
I just indicated in my previous post a way before I saw this post of helping to remove the problems of a two party system being bought off. Instant runoff voting is probably the most practical means to do that now within our government to do this, as it would be a change in voting system to allow third parties to run and not split voting that would let a candidate without a majority of support to win elections that our current system has in its winner take all means of deciding vote counts. Read up on instant runoff voting, and find out how it could enable more candidates to enter races more effectively and make it harder for cronies to "buy the field" of candidates to do their bidding. A parliamentary system that is in place in many other countries would take a more substantial overhaul of our government that I'm not sure we'd like to do at this time. IRV only affects the voting processes, not the structure of our government, and I think would be a good incremental step at this point. Australia has this in place in their country at this time. They also have mandatory voting too, where you get fined if you don't vote there as well to help make sure that everyone participates in selecting their leadership.
When you say "making it smaller", I think again, you need to define what that means. What the corporate cronies is wanting something smaller (which is fed out of their think tanks like the Cado Institute, etc.) so that they can control it more easily with less dollars being spent on it. I think the better term I think that we want as a goal for size of government isn't "big" or "small", but "right sizing" it, and sizing it by terms defined by representatives of US, and not those that are buying the system (that we have too much in place now corrupting it).
