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The big recipients of government welfare in this country are the folks in the upper 10% of the income range. The rest is just crumbs from the big table.
The bottom have over 125 social welfare programs costing near $1 trillion a year.
That is 1/3 of the budget.
The 1% has over $17T that we know of, and unknown Trillions that we don't. $1T is a big pile of crumbs, no doubt, but its a damn big cake...
Except that Obama and the Democrats continue to perpetuate the myth that that $17T is all sitting in a vault somewhere -- easily seized and "redistributed" to their simplistic clientele.
I'm quite sure that Bernard Sanders knows just as well as anyone else that the majority of the new wealth they condition their followers to envy is represented by common stock -- a lot of the value of which would erode if the country ever moved toward the confiscatory tax laws in effect in most of Europe a generation ago.
Capitalism doesn't crush people. Capitalism is simply a system of goods and value exchange. It makes no implicit assumptions about the allocation of resources or labor. People who don't succeed in Capitalist societies can blame many things, but Capitalism itself isn't one of them. It's an entirely voluntary enterprise. It's also completely natural.
Capitalism doesn't crush people. Capitalism is simply a system of goods and value exchange. It makes no implicit assumptions about the allocation of resources or labor. People who don't succeed in Capitalist societies can blame many things, but Capitalism itself isn't one of them. It's an entirely voluntary enterprise. It's also completely natural.
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Originally Posted by Hangul313
You're obviously not talking about America.
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Originally Posted by TrexDigit
Theory ≠ practice
Nope. We're talking about America, and about all market economies, because while capitalism offers a large upside potential, it also has a far more-challenging underside. Once a business is in operation and begins to grow, the entrepreneur has to go looking, and continuously, for people willing to labor at a rate less than what he keeps for himself, and the myriad of regulations forced upon him by Ivory-Tower politicians and their clientele can make that task a hard one, And the continuing de-industrialization of North America, with smaller amounts of capital (which increases productivity) invested per worker. is making the task harder every day.
A quarter-century ago, when Jeff Bezos founded Amazon Fulfillment, he didn't take long to discover that while everyone loved watching the orders come in, the profits required to renew and expand the operation required somebody to unpack, sort, repack and ship the merchandise, The greater the volume of product, the more simplistic and tedious the work became, And people whose noses are held to the grindstone usually don't take much satisfaction in simply moving to a higher level of the pyramid, and the process, while Der Krapwerk trickles ever downward.
It is, unfortunately, the basic nature of how most human effort is organized, whether it's "moderated" (and partially stagnated) by socialism, or harshly competitive. The alternative is the government-backed "mercantilism" that spawned a two-act global war that killed tens of millions between 1914 and 1945. Don't blame the messenger for the message.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 03-10-2016 at 07:35 PM..
Comparing relatively homogenous nations with ours is dishonest. Cherry picking 3 or 4 nations on Earth, despite widespread social nets world wide, is also dishonest.
For those who defend socialism simply look up Hong Kong and China on that list. Similar demographics, one went down the socialist, the other the capitalist road in 1949.
I think one problem is the use of the word socialism. Socialism originally refers to the state physically owning the means of production. What the West has devolved to is the individual nominally owning the means of production but the state controlling and confiscating the output of production. We are closer to fascism than socialism. It would be hard to sell the welfare state under the Fascist Party banner though.
Last edited by Ibginnie; 03-18-2016 at 08:13 PM..
Reason: deleted quoted post
This......nowhere in capitalism are the taxpayers/lower classes expected to bail out a business that had a poor business model and then failed.
The problem is not capitalism, the problem is those who scream capitalism and then involve themselves in financial shenanigans that capitalism will tell you are going to fail and then demand they are made whole again.
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