Why capitalism?

Posted by someone with a name called communism. Erm.... I note your comments about 'this is not a discussion about communism' and your infinate wisdom on Cuba and Russia, but having just come back from Cuba where the majority of Cubans accept that after the death of Castro capitalism will prosper I would question your reasoning. Capitalism thrives in Cuba. Didn't you know? It may be hidden but it thrives.

You cannot call yourself communism, use the forum to force your own views and then smugly express the fact that this is not a debate about communism when you are furthering the debate itself and indeed opening up the variety of topics within by your own suggestions.

Perhaps you wanted to debate capitalism but you cannot effectively debate capitalism without discussing the alternatives. Sadly, communism is not a realistic alternative and there are plenty of countries around the world who have tried it and given up on it. China is perhaps one of the last true bastions of any significant size and concern within the world and its rapidly turning capitalist.

Smoke pot and dream - Communism sucks and has failed

 

Do you seriously think that the best humanity can go is capitalism??

And you are a walking waste of oxygen.


Is it very difficult for you to keep a constructive level?

 

I do not believe the best humanity can go is capitalism but its one hell of a better alternative than communism. My views only of course and I respect others views but its not like communism has been tried and tested successfully is it.

How about you astound us with your theory on Utopia then. Tell us something we don't already know and share with us your plans for an alternative to communism or at the very least an example of where communism has actually even worked. Perhaps I should re enter the forum under the identity of Facist. Now that would get you going wouldn't it.

It is not difficult for me to keep a constructive level if the topic and the debate is open for all without ridicule and attempted belittling of replies that you get.

As an alien how do you view the human race?

 

Capitalism is a million times better than communism or socialism, which is really only playing into the hands of complete totalitarianism. That's probably way Bush is such a socialist, as was Hitler.

Socialism may sound good in theory, and it once worked well on a tribal level. But it could never work on a national, let alone global, level. It's naive to think it would.

And like capitalism, socialism was created by the big banks. So, anyone who claims to be socialist or communist is every bit as naive as they claim capitalists to be.

The problem with capitalism is that it has been exploited to no end. But a socialist government would be even worse.

 

I would like to hear how you consider Bush a socialist. Elitist oportunist in my mind does not a socialist make. His policies do not seem to fall in line with those that I would consider typical for a socialistic leader. Please elaborate

 

Are you mainly refering to his Brave New World idealogy of lack of civil rights and human privacy?

 

Just look at Bush's government spending record. Look at how the size of government has increased since he's been in office. Bush is a closet socialist posing as a conservative all the way. Anyone who thinks Bush is a conservative -- other than for the phony religious and moral BS -- has been misled. Bush makes Clinton look like a rabid fiscal conservative.

 

He has rung up quite the tab hasn't he.

 

Fair enough, I'll try to restrict my posts to capitalism as much as possible. But you have to acknowledge that any discussion about "Why X is good/bad" has to include some discussion on the alternatives to X.

Putting aside the argument that the West exploits poor countries (as that's really a separate debate), a quick look at some easily obtainable statistics will show that there just is not enough to go around. Look at a place like North Korea: the GDP per capita is only $1,300, and the 2003 annual economic growth was a dismal 1% when the world average was 4-5% (CIA World Factbook). No matter how you divide that $1,300 among the North Koreans - even if you divide it perfectly equally as communism attempts to - there's still only $1,300 per person to work with, which is hardly an ideal standard of living. And with very few exceptions, even lower-class Americans earn much more than $1,300. Even an American holding a minimum wage job would earn nearly ten times that amount.

Putin is not a capitalist, he's a kleptomaniac dictator. Replacing the "rob from the rich to give to the poor" mentality of communism with "rob from the rich to give to the political elite" is NOT a change that improves the economy.

And why couldn't they pay the bill? Because no foreign companies wanted to invest in the Russian economy because of Putin's dismal record of doing exactly this sort of thing.

Once again, kleptocracy does not equal capitalism.

You're right, vague "suffering" must be the fault of capitalism. People like Stalin, Mao, and Lenin were all great humanitarians, and regular patrons to their local orphanages.

Sure. It's better to have a few people poor and the rest middle- or upper-class, than to have everyone uniformly poor.

 

Kandahar - Well said

Just as I was about to discover the glorius achievements of communism in Russia, China and North Korea you put things back into perspective.

You have to admit though, in as much as capitalism has succeeded in a major way ( through lack of any alternative ), communism has been equally as disasterous for the countries where it was practised.


In Russia millions died under communism, same in China. Cuba has been more fortunate of course but I don't think we could regard it as a success in North Korea unless of course you like lots of red flags, nice uniforms and plenty of marching.


Capitalism is a success through virtue of the fact that the human race has been unable to find a workable alternative.

 

How should wages be determined?

Well Pinochet was a dictator. Most capitalist countries aren't dictatorships.

 

Dan,

I've never found Wilhelm Reich's original 1933 'THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM' in english.

Yet, I agree with what we all know of his profound psychoanalysis that; 'Fascism is a manifestation of our repressed sexual insecurities to the point of neurotic preoccupation'.

99.9% of us, however, are still clueless, and still have no idea that business, politics and religion, are simply a deceptive masquerade hiding the naked truth of our Primate Sexual Hierarchy.

Clueless, because our ego represses our true motivations from our conscious mind into the depths of our sub-conscious.

Clueless to the overwhelming use that we Primates make of deception as our main tool in our struggles to mate and survive.

This is why Political, Moral, or Economic analysis of Capitalism are superficial, and merely symptomatic.

Business, Politics and Religion is sex by other means.

 

OK, so on the face of it we have accelerated our scientific gains and our increases in consumption of goods. But what good is that when we are accelerating towards a brick wall that is at the end of all this.

The basic fault of the capitalist system we have built is that you cannot have exponential growth on a finite planet.

There are limits to growth.

We are using all the energy now to feed and house 6 billion people, without thinking about how we house any of their children, because the capitalist system only considers now!

By considering now and the near future it has done us well by lifting us from the medievil system to where we are now.

But in the 1960's and 1970's lots of theories came about all concerned with the fact that we were very close to reaching several limiting feature of this planet that would not allow us to continue economic and population growth for much longer.

Instead of being a useful sensible system that takes that on board and sets the best scientist on the planet towards testing and working out those problems. And then having the political will to actually try and solve them, we just decided not to.

Too many Rich people were busy getting richer to consider the fate of the Human race. Who cares if their children will be killed in hunger riots or just of starvation, they can buy seven Hummers now!!! Wow.

Well, I say, the writing has been on the wall since the 60's and 70's and the capitalist system has shown that it will refuse to read reality. It will just accelerate toward the cliff.

Within the next 25 years there look like being so many limits to Human existence it will be overwhelming.

The first limit is energy, and its happening now.

 

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the "problem" of overpopulation. As our technology accelerates exponentially, our planet will be able to shelter more people. Only few thousand years ago, the maximum world population was around a hundred million people.

And we can overcome them with science and technology.

You falsely assume that the world's population will continue increasing exponentially. Most sociologists expect that it will level off by about 2050, at 12-15 billion (which WILL be economically supportable by that time). Remember, it's only poor, rural countries that are reproducing exponentially. As soon as a country becomes modernized, its birth rate drops. In Northern Europe, the birth rate is lower than the replacement rate. In the United States, it is just barely above the replacement rate. The rest of the world will follow these trends when it modernizes.

This may have been true...by 1960s technological standards. However, it was a silly prediction to make even at the time because it assumed no future technological progress at all.

Capitalism is the best solution possible to controlling the population. It has proven that it produces the strongest economies of any system. Strong economies show that they generally have lower birth rates than poor economies. Therefore, capitalism will eventually reduce the birth rates in the third world.

That's a shockingly ignorant statement, and indicates to me that you don't know the first thing about economics. No one gets rich by "buying seven Hummers" - they get rich by saving their money and investing it wisely. Just because LeBron James and Jay-Z do it don't mean that all rich people live that way.

Quite the contrary. The next 25 years will lead to a much better life for humans all across the planet. Biotechnology and nanotechnology will join forces to make significant improvements in everything from medical care, to food supply, to computer power, to energy. The world will likely be so different in 2030, you wouldn't even recognize it as human civilization if you were dropped off there today.

Energy? A problem? Nay, new forms of energy will be one of the crowning achievements of the late 2000s decade, and early 2010s.

I guess we'll see whose right in 25 years.

 

We don't have enough resources for the rest of the world to modrenise. Hydrocarbon production will be in decline by the end of this decade, and without oil and gas for fertilizers and pesticides we would strugle to feed 2 billion people let a lone the 12 - 15 billion you talk about. From the 1960's onwards Humans ecological footfrint outgrew the size of the planet. at the moment our ecological footprint is at about 140% of the land area of the planet. We have already overshot the carrying capacity of the planet.

We will see a lot sooner than 25 years time that the technology will fix us attitude is fundamentally flawed.

It is simple laws of physics. We as humans arrogantly think we can beat reality and we have decided to learn the hard way that we can't.

Unfortunately, at 23, I am young enough to live through the hard times that are coming. Take the Great depression of the 1920's, combine it with the oil shocks of the late 1970's, and you are not even half way toward what we have in store over the next 25 years.

Despite all the technology we have developed, we have never managed economic or population growth, without a growth in our consumption of energy.

Capaitalism needs economic growth, and that in turn needs energy supply growth. when energy supply is in decline we will be able to do nothing but have a rescession. We will need a different economic system that is not based on growth. Again I say that there are limits to growth and science cannot change that. Science has delayed it till now, but only at the expense of a harder slap in the face when the time comes.

If we had started building a renewable infrastructure in the 1960's and 70's we might be ok now but capitalisms fails to take the future into account.

 

If you assume that oil and gas are the only sources of energy, then you'd be correct. But if you realistically look at the pace of our technology, you'll see that solar and wind power will most likely be the dominant source of energy in the 2010s, and nuclear fusion will be within our capabilities by the 2020s.

You can bury your head in the sand and be a luddite, but technology is changing the world whether you like it or not. We'll make as much technological progress in the first 14 years of this century as we made in the entire 20th century. You can either examine the trends and see that I am correct, or you can just make dead-end statements without the slightest basis in fact, like "technology can't solve any of our problems" (which is obviously just plain wrong).

That's a "law of physics"? That humans are incapable of improving their situation through technology? Perhaps you'd feel more comfortable living in the Middle Ages, since technology hasn't changed at all since then...

You are misunderstanding cause and effect. Why did the global population remain static or grow very slowly for all of human history, then suddenly spike in the 20th century? It's not because people are reproducing any faster; it's because our medical, agricultural, and energy technologies make it POSSIBLE for the earth to sustain more people.

Please direct me to the paragraph in any respectable science journal that states that the world is doomed when we run out of oil, since no other sources of energy exist.

...or is every scientist in America conspiring to hide the truth from you?

 

The UK produces 3% of its energy from Renewable at the moment with ambitious targets of 10% by 2010 that it looks likely to fail to achieve. The US only get 1% from renewables. How, in 6 years are we going to change to wind and solar being the dominant source of energy in the 2010's.

I'm nothing like a luddite, if anything you are the one burying your head in the sand. Technology is changing the world, yes. But we still need more energy next year than we used this year for ecconomic growth. Because of the internets ability to share information amoungst other things, the pace of scientific discoveries is moving forward very fast indeed I agree. But scientific discovery is different to actually building the infrastructure required to give us power. It takes 10 years to build and get an Nuclear power planet operational. Fusion is 25 years away and has been for the last 50 years. Fusion is ideal for the future but we need some serious bridging technology, and we need it last decade, otherwise there will be a decrease in the amount of available energy and so there will be a recession.

Its called exponential growth. Our population has been growing very fast for a long time. Its just that when 1000 couple have 4 babies then its not quite the same as 1 billion couples having 4 babies. Yes, in the 20th century medical advances have allowed us in the west to ensure much lower infant mortality and much longer lifespans which has definately helped.

Also, in the 40's and 50's we started using oil based pesticides and nitrogen from natural gas for our fertilizers. This has helped our food production stay easily above our food needs to allow the population to grow as much as it has. 10 calories of Hydrocarbon energy goes into every calorie of food that is in the shops in North America. In Europe I think the figure is closer to 6 to 1.
(Good article but long, page 2 of it is the important bit but the logic in all of it is worth following http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1845_308/ai_112796599)

If Oil gets expensive, what happens to food prices? What happens to plastic prices? what happens to transport costs? what happens to heating costs? what happens to electricity costs? (consider that the demand pressure will be moved over to gas as oil begins to decline).

With a declining resource, it will cost significantly more as the demand will outstrip the supply, as has already started this year.

Will a Princeton University publication do for you? http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/


None will say there are no other forms of energy, because there are, there are just none built now (soon enough) and there are none that will allow us to continue living this energy wasteful type of consumerist life.

Globalisation is over without cheap oil for transport. were going back to local economies and economic growth will have to be a thing of the past.


(back to topic)

Hence why capitalism has had its time and done the Human race well. But it would have been helpful if we had started moving away from it as early as the 1970's then we would be well set up now.

 

People have been saying that capitalism has had its time since communism first became popular. Simple fact of the matter is that nothing else has worked. If capitalism has indeed had its time just what is going to replace it and how and when?

 

You seriously believe Bush is a socialist?

 

Communism has nothing to do with totalitarianism.

When did we have socialism on tribal level?

What? Socialism was created by big banks? Please elaborate.

No, it has not been exploited to no end. It is an exploitive system (these are cold hard facts. There is no way of denying this). Why would a socailist government make it "even worse"?