INTENSITY²
Politics, Mature and taboo => Political Pundits => Topic started by: RobertN on June 12, 2006, 11:48:40 AM
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The thing I love most about Capitalism is that it is hopefully coming to an end soon! :laugh:
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To be replaced by post-apocolyptical landscapes akin to mad max films
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If you are poor, you get a choice of how you choose to starve to death. Its all about free-market consumer choice, you see. You can either beg on street A or street B depending on what takes your fancy. (That is until the cops come and gun you down....)
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You get to decide which business becomes your master...er, um...employer. :P
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Corporate logos make such a lovely replacement for mediaeval coats of arms.
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Corporate logos make such a lovely replacement for mediaeval coats of arms.
LOL yes it is just the feudal system all over again.....
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Capitalism is an arse!!! LOL
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The stupid people win.
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Capitalism is the world that We Live in sorry to say but it is the Truth of this World Today.
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Capitalism is the best way to distribute scare resources through the laws of competition, demand and supply. Capitalism is the fastest way to increases the standard of living of world's population, capitalism brought us all the goodies like the Internet for us to use and come together in this great group.
Capitalism to the disappointment of it's opponents will provide the solution to the world's environment problems. ;D
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Capitalism creates the bitchiest losers.
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Capitalism creates the bitchiest losers.
:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
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Delighted to ;D
Capitalism promotes competition.
Competition brings people to work to their highest potential and push whatever gifts they have to the limits.
Competition in this sense also entails technology, entertainment, and the quality of everything that comes out.
When something gets overpriced other companies move in to make profits and by the laws of demand bring the price back down to a reasonable rate. This and what I already mentioned about competition conjunctively help maximize efficiency. In the past government has even noted that when you create artificial price-ceilings or floors blackmarkets occur and cause it to happen regardless, only difference is different people reaping the profit.
Capitalism has a natural quality check - consumer choice, and when a company does become monopolistic it doesn't take 'big government' to have them break up into smaller corporations.
Its a flexible system and with minimal stoking from the sidelines can withstand more hard blows than most other systems, at least for what's been shown through history. The times it hasn't root causes were found, learned from, and corrected.
Although you have to pay for healthcare you also don't have the government slowly being able to tell you more and more what you can or can't do when it comes to those services - also since the doctors are as well payed as they are you tend to get the best of what the world has to offer.
Capitalism encourages a lot of spending and by spending you give it back to the same businesses who pay their workers to make more of that product. The man is us and vice a versa.
You can choose to be your own boss if you have a skill you really want to persue and are willing to put the time and effort into doing the research and figuring out the practical ends of what you have to do in order to make that dream a reality.
You have a progressive tax system where if you aren't really making that much you probably aren't getting more than 20% from your check and more than half of that is returned to you after tax season rather than getting 40 or 50% sometimes yanked out of your paychecks.
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Capitalism is Idealism and that is what makes it work in the end.
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Pure capitalism is efficient and flexible to begin with, but is inherently prone to converting to feudualism with time, as certain groups and individuals amass wealth and power and become entrenched in the system, reducing the common folk to economically-induced serfdom. This process will always occur, but is greatly accelerated by governmental manipulations at the behest of economically powerful sponsors.
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v nice post, peter.
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Pure capitalism is efficient and flexible to begin with, but is inherently prone to converting to feudualism with time, as certain groups and individuals amass wealth and power and become entrenched in the system, reducing the common folk to economically-induced serfdom. This process will always occur, but is greatly accelerated by governmental manipulations at the behest of economically powerful sponsors.
good one, pete.
life is cyclical. human history and nature shows that. i am just wondering how close we are to a rebellion occuring.
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Peter is right. 8)
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Capitalism works WITH the fact that people are selfish rather than trying to work against it or despite it.
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Post the things you love about Capitalism!
Very little, if anything.
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i could be happy trading with shells and rocks again 8)
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I live in the upper middle class, and am a member of a capitalist society.
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Capitallist Society work because everybody wants something.
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Capitallist Society work because everybody wants something.
it works better if everybody GETS something.
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But everbody does even You McJaggerr do you not.
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No, it doesn't work better if everyone gets something, because then there isn't as much incentive to work. Theoretically if everyone gets something, no matter who works, then everyone could choose not to work until the backup supply runs out. And then the population will slowly die as precious supplies become unavailable, until there is only 1 person left, at which point they are no longer a member of an economy.
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Capitalism creates competition, which can be good for consumers. But it also creates winners and losers, and some of those losers are insurmountably ruined while some winners have done so well that only a loss of huge proportions could ruin them. All others keep trying to be one of the latter party.
The augmenting aspect of it is something I definitely appreciate; the fact there are people with insurmountable losses isn't. Not so much because they actually exist (that is inevitable in a competition), but there are too many of them. Newcomers on whichever market need guidance and protection, or else they'll be quickly pushed out by the 'big guys' who get stronger everytime they'll do such a thing.
Another negative thing about it is that succes is too much dependant on short-term demands rather than actual improvement. This can be seen whenever a company brings out yet another product that was nearly similar to the original (most notably in the mobile phone industry) but also when one of those 'individual and original but too small'-companies have to shut down or are eaten by a bigger fish.
If it weren't for the various social laws that most of us in the western world have, these problems would even be greater. However, because of the conflict with the 'work hard enough and you can become a mogul'-principle these laws will not create the greatest amount of profit that we could get from competition. That's because governments are afraid to loose the succesful (=rich) partys of their society, as they're good for investments and tax income.
I guess, no hope, that's most of the politicians of today will see that investing in intelligence and necessary means for survival are far more important things than to invest in money above all things (and think about those other things later). Roughly speaking we are only using like a quarter of our potential, as the other part of the whole is too weak to participate in the competition due their own problems.
I realize that this world will never be Utopia and I've also said that some problems will prove to be insurmountable without drastic measures, but in the way that most people are utilising capitalism right now, we are holding ourselves down.
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No, it doesn't work better if everyone gets something, because then there isn't as much incentive to work. Theoretically if everyone gets something, no matter who works, then everyone could choose not to work until the backup supply runs out. And then the population will slowly die as precious supplies become unavailable, until there is only 1 person left, at which point they are no longer a member of an economy.
have you ever heard about the concept of the invisible hand of the economy?
the importance of disposable income?
and how every dollar spent is actually generating 100= some odd dollars for the economy?
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I've heard of those concepts, but since they're kind of hard to understand muchless observe unless you are looking at a large scale economy, and you have detailed information on its operation for a long period of time, i think it is a bad idea to simply have faith that it is true.
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Capitallist Society work because everybody wants something.
it works better if everybody GETS something.
If your saying get what they need independent of labor rather than needing to work to earn it there's a major motivational problem. Here's an experiment I might suggest - next time you need your car worked on take it to a mechanic, find out what it'll cost to get it fixed, and pay them before they have completed the job or before they even start. Then keep track of how long it takes em. The problem with us as a society is while some people will do things just for the sake of taking pride without the screws needing to be put to them most people can't summon the motivation and the trouble is when things get too easy people get acclimated, they'll fight tooth and nail to keep that new amount of ground in terms of wanting to get more for less, and its a direction where once you head off toward that you have a very difficult time doing that. When you look at the riots that happened a couple of years ago in France, didn't that happen because they had something close to a zero-firing policy with workers and that they were getting ready to change things to how businesses deal with that here in the US? Again, I think people tend to always want more, even if they're new pattern of action is rotting away the foundations of what gives them what they have today to where it jeopardizes their tommorow they still want that to magically dissappear or be someone elses problem, they take things for granted that they do have, and tend to be furious to lose what they were already taking for granted just because most people are inherently selfish wether it's deliberate or not and I think the fact that we naturally have that need for social heirarchy pretty much means you could have robots doing all the work, us all living in the lap of luxury without having to do a thing for it, and the world would still be a crime-ridden sesspool maybe even more violent than it is now and just much filled with all kinds of assholes and problems. What I kind of think is that the only thing really keeping us from reverting back to pure-bread monkeys is the hammering and discipline that society instills on that - meaning without work and without having to toil for what we want it directly rots integrety. Yeah it sucks but I think its just inherently part of what we are - animals that have tried to train ourselves to be something else and somehow through religion and then the repealing of religion have now forgotten just what it is we are or what we have to do in order to keep ourselves in check.
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Good points, techstepgenr8tion.
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The part I like best about capitalism is that it is proving my decade-old hypothesis that it is destined to fail thanks to a little thing called "human nature". We, as humans, are programmed to accumulate as much as possible... it is in our nature to improve our lot in life. The problem lies in scarcity.
1) For one person to gain, another must lose. This implies that poverty is a necessary requisite to stay competitive and maintain growth.
2) With accumulation comes the resources for further accumulation. This means that it is next to impossible for one born in poverty to live the American dream of working their way through the socioeconomic ranks via hard work and persistence despite what pro-capitalists say.
These reasons are the reason that our poverty rates are increasing while CEOs make record salaries (with bonuses) each year. This is why our economy APPEARS to be doing well while looking at the mean average but when removing outliers the picture presented is far less optimistic. This is why people like Warren Buffett can afford to eat filet mignon and bald eagle eggs for breakfast every morning for doing the same amount of work that a bricklayer who can barely afford to feed his family fried chicken does. Now don't get me wrong... Bill Gates is awesome; he's donating as much or more than most NATIONS to medical research in AIDS and such. Even so... without someone to scrub the toilets what would David Lesar, CEO of Halliburton, be doing with his time? Scrubbing toilets. Each job is just as important as the next and there's no justification for the vast disparity that exists in pay.
Let's look to China who has really come up with an ingenius form of a planned market economy. The government takes control of the economy and molds it to market forces while increases in personal freedoms has gradually come to include increasing amounts of voting rights which will eventually put the general populace in control of the government. Now, I could get into this very deeply but just take my word for it that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP or CPC) is in absolutely no danger right now. China's economic growth has been unprecidented.... depending on who you reference, the average growth ranges anywhere from an unbelievable 8% to an unheard of 11% consistently over the past 30 years and slowed even just slightly as the rest of the Asian economies nearly fell apart in the past 5yrs.
Thinking about it carefully... it all comes down to accountability. We should definitally be allowed freedoms up to the point that our actions impact the lives of another. Now, for individuals this has far reaching implications. For companies, even small that actions a corporation takes impacts the community around them in a very direct way. Therefore, the community should have a say in the actions of the company. This structure would work very much like our current corporate structure: each company would come out with an annual report detailing it's history and plans for the upcoming year related to it's future growth projections and then the people in that company's district would be given the opportunity to vote on the annual report... just like regular corporations except the stakeholders would be district citizens instead of just stockholders.
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You make some good points, Cryono, even though I don't agree with all of them.
For example, you said:
Each job is just as important as the next and there's no justification for the vast disparity that exists in pay.
I am a stay at home mother. Are you saying that I should receive the same pay as McJagger, who is a longshoreman? If that is the case, why would he be motivated to work the long hours he sometimes works to just get the same pay he could get as a stay at home father? Don't get me wrong, I love that I have been able to stay at home with my daughter and raise her and it is worth it to me to do it for no pay, because it is very important to me. I feel lucky that I have been able to do this, but if I worked a traditional job, I would have been paid much more because my work would have had more value to people other than just my immediate family. I think that people who provide something of value to more people are often paid more than those who provide something of value to fewer people and perhaps that is why a CEO is paid more than the person who scrubs his toilet.
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You make some good points, Cryono, even though I don't agree with all of them.
For example, you said:
Each job is just as important as the next and there's no justification for the vast disparity that exists in pay.
I am a stay at home mother. Are you saying that I should receive the same pay as McJagger, who is a longshoreman? If that is the case, why would he be motivated to work the long hours he sometimes works to just get the same pay he could get as a stay at home father? Don't get me wrong, I love that I have been able to stay at home with my daughter and raise her and it is worth it to me to do it for no pay, because it is very important to me. I feel lucky that I have been able to do this, but if I worked a traditional job, I would have been paid much more because my work would have had more value to people other than just my immediate family. I think that people who provide something of value to more people are often paid more than those who provide something of value to fewer people and perhaps that is why a CEO is paid more than the person who scrubs his toilet.
Don't be confused, at no point did I ever say every job deserves equal pay, I said that there is no justification for the disparity that exists. How does one justify that one person makes US$11.2 million annually (Chrysler CEOs salary right before the merger with Daimler) while the line workers are making US$40k a year?
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You make some good points, Cryono, even though I don't agree with all of them.
For example, you said:
Really? I was half-asleep while reading it. -_-zzZZZ
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The best thing about capitalism is that with enough money, I can buy your sorry ass. Yes, I mean *you*.
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Capitalism is the only system that over any other system that seems to have worked over the years for the most part in the end.
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is it survival of the most motivated to satisfy their greed?
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is it survival of the most motivated to satisfy their greed?
In some but not all I believe, though it may have gotten worse over the years here and there.
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i personally view that brief statement as the bottom line description of capitolism.
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is it survival of the most motivated to satisfy their greed?
Wow, thank goodness I am a horrible person then! >:D ;D
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i personally view that brief statement as the bottom line description of capitolism.
FUCK YEAH!
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i personally view that brief statement as the bottom line description of capitolism.
I kinda view it as the bottom line of human nature, something we couldn't erase even if we wanted to (animal heirarchy being what it is and all) but oh well.
I also think Winston Churchill summed it up well when he said that democratic capitalism was the second worst system to...well...everything else.