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And the United States' powerful military is the result of capitalism generating wealth to enable to creation of a powerful military. The main way the US military contributes to economic success is by keeping nations stable and keeping the trade routes safe & open - all of which goes to the goal of allowing capitalism to flourish.
No, the United States' military is a result of Europe and Asia getting blown to bits in WW2, and us winning the Cold War. It has nothing to do with capitalism.
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Originally Posted by Intranetusa
Check your facts. The middle east policy is literally bleeding money. Corporations like Halliburton maybe made a few billion in profit, but the US lost trillions in the Middle East - so the US Middle East policy is still a huge net loss for America. Other countries such as China got many of the mining rights without spending a dime.
Check your facts.
Oil is pegged to the U.S. Dollar. OPEC must sell in U.S. dollars. Any country that hasn't sold in U.S. dollars has been invaded.
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Originally Posted by Intranetusa
As for the so called "petrodollar" - oil prices are the lowest they've been in decades, yet the currency is perfectly stable. Plenty of American oil producers are going out of business (especially Shale) due to the cheap oil prices. The vast majority of the US economy has nothing to do with petroleum.
So, now you're confirming what I just said?
The U.S. economy is measured in U.S. dollars.
GDP = Federal Spending + Non Federal Spending + Net Exports
The U.S. dollar is pegged to oil. Oil transactions happen in U.S. dollars. All countries measure themselves to the U.S. dollar. We have reserve currency status because of the OPEC treaty. Again, any country that tries to "alter" this geopolitical arrangement gets to taste the U.S. military.
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Originally Posted by Intranetusa
We are mostly a capitalist country with some social welfare policies. Don't act like capitalism didn't make this country wealthy.
Economic system is irrelevant. It's all geopolitics. If we were a socialist country with the same geopolitical alliances and position, we would still be a "wealthy" country.
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Originally Posted by Intranetusa
Also, capitalism is economic policy, while imperialism is foreign policy. The two are completely different categories. An imperialist country can be communist, socialist, capitalist, etc. If the US was truly imperialist like a century ago, we'd be enjoying the benefits of free Iraqi oil and minerals right now - instead of other countries like China.
Only the misinformed think the two are unrelated. Wealth is relative. The United States is wealthy because it controls a vast amount of resources. It uses trade agreements, geopolitics, and the military to do so.
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Originally Posted by Intranetusa
And imperialist is not the same as an empire. The US is not an empire because it doesn't meet the definition. The US government is Federalist, so the central government doesn't have anywhere close to the power required to meet the definitio of an empire.
Don't think too deep into it. The US has plenty of subsidiaries all over the globe. Dozens of countries use the U.S. dollar. We have allies. We control OPEC through domestic propaganda and military invasions. The U.S. is an empire. Don't think otherwise.
Capitalism is like a pyramid scheme, in order for it to work a large percentage of the people in the pyramid have to eventually lose(and of those people they all have to believe they have a chance to win)
So it hasn't "failed" it's worked the way it was supposed to.
No, the United States' military is a result of Europe and Asia getting blown to bits in WW2, and us winning the Cold War. It has nothing to do with capitalism.
Which had a lot to do with capitalism. Better economy won the arms race. Stupid arms race, I agree. Better economy was really why we won it though.
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Check your facts.
Oil is pegged to the U.S. Dollar. OPEC must sell in U.S. dollars. Any country that hasn't sold in U.S. dollars has been invaded.
Indeed. Point in fact, Canada. Also China and Russia, but Canada our friendly neighbor to the north of us, is the better example.
The (US) petrodollar was fairly ingenious as it means lots of countries hold the US dollar to trade for oil, which we then profit from. All? Certainly not. See above.
STOP having babies that you have no/little means to support.
STOP buying cars that are way above what you need and can afford.
STOP buying houses that are way above what you need and can afford.
STOP eating out on a regular basis, cook your own food.
STOP buying things that are not in your budget, that you buy on credit.
I know you are being funny but equating capitalism (a man made system) to gravity is a bit of a stretch. Unchecked, capitalism along with just about every economic/political system conceived by man can do harm.
I was using a funny example (depending on one's point of view) to make a serious point.
Gravity, like any other "thing", has great potential to cause harm when abused or misunderstood by man. Just like capitalism.
But I equate capitalism to gravity here because I'm making an important point about the nature of both: Gravity is intrinsic to the natural world, and capitalism is intrinsic to human behavior. In fact, the operations of human market activities mimic the survival "operations" of all life forms on Earth - from the lowest single cell organisms to the most evolved mammals.
Because we have to either have Brazil's economy or North Korea's. There are no other options.
I truly don't understand what the libertarians have against the Middle Class. The Middle Class keeps our economic pump primed. Otherwise it's just a bunch of empty sucking and sputtering. If we do well by the Middle Class, the rest of the country does well. (Or in the case of the poor, they do better.)
That's an odd statement.
The "Middle Class" is destined for aboliton, according to the tenets of Marx. The middle class is the "decadent bourgeois" he described as a creation and result of capitalism. Marxism calls for, but cannot realize, the abolition of all classes in society. A fantasy of immense proportions.
Libertarians and free marketers SUPPORT the middle class. And in a country like America, it is LUDICROUS to assert that the middle class is hated by the right wing. They created a Bill of Rights that paves the way for and protects a middle class existence. Property ownership and inheritance and political freedom.... it's a necessity for the middle class to exist.
There are other economic systems. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
The best form of capitalism was the kind we had during the 1950s to mid-1960s. Deregulation unbalances capitalism -- all the time, every time. Without checks and balances, the tendency for capitalism is toward wealth inequality. (And don't get me wrong, some wealth inequality is a good thing. That's the reward for playing the capitalism game optimally -- pulling ahead of the pack.)
We don't have to abandon capitalism and go straight to Marxism. That's stupid. We should go back to the kind of capitalism that works -- the T. Roosevelt/Taft/Eisenhower brand of capitalism. That kind of capitalism works very, very well.
There is no "brand" of capitalism. There's only one, and it is the basic economic reality for all of humanity. You're confusing social policy and political structures that REGULATE economic behavior for what you perceive as different "brands" of capitalism. But in fact, these are NOT capitalism. These describe how a society REGULATES capitalist behavior in its borders.
North Korea restricts capitalism to the dictates of the Dear Leader and it's practice to the state alone. It's probably at the bottom of the global economic freedom scale.
Cuba restricts capitalism to the state, with a few exceptions for heavily regulated private enterprises mostly controlled by the ruling elites.
Hong Kong is probably the worlds most economically free country, where capitalism is practiced with very little intrusion by government.
The USA is further down the list from Hong Kong. Still high up, but not high enough.
The Marxist idea that capitalism can be "abolished" is nonsense. Or at least, nonsensical until such time as commodities and material goods can be created magically out of thin air, using some sort of Star Trek technology.... or pixie dust and voodoo.
You must have missed that sentence that reads, "And don't get me wrong, some wealth inequality is a good thing."
Total skewing of wealth inequality turns us into Mexico or Brazil. Is that what you want? In those countries, roughly 90% of the population live in poverty. They have a middle class of 8%, with 1% wealthy and 1% uber-wealthy? Because that's where we're heading.
The richest man in the world is Mexican, after all. I wouldn't want to be the richest man living in a ****hole, stuck in a fortress for fear of being whacked by narco-terrorists. Warren Buffett gets to visit his beloved diner in Omaha several times a week and nobody messes with him -- at least for now.
Whether he missed that sentence or not, his point is still valid. Wealth inequality is not the "concern" of capitalism. It is the concern of the people in a society, as to how much or how little "inequality of wealth" they will tolerate. Mexico and Brazil are not the victims of capitalism. They are the victims of half-baked Marxism disquised as "liberation theology". The only reason those countries haven't fallen into communism completely is because the multi-party systems they have could not be overthrown for a one-party system. What happened in Russia and North Korea and China probably won't happen again. People have seen the results of those 3 revolutions and realize that Marxism isn't something they want to see happen to them. Thus, they resist attempts to do away with democratic representation.
Mexico and Brazil are the victims of socialistic bad policy and corrupt officials behaving the way they behave in typically socialist societies where the rule of law doesn't apply to the elites.
Capitalism has clearly failed to produce an adequate supply of housing in this country affordable to people who earn less than median income.
When half of all low-income renters are spending at least half their income on shelter, that looks like a failure of capitalism. A lot of those people are eating only because government gives them food stamps and private charities give them food.
How do you explain this phenomenon? I've studied it extensively. And I can promise you that the lack of affordable housing is NOT because carpenters, masons and electricians just DON'T feel like building smaller houses that cost less. Rather, builders are induced to build larger, more expensive houses to make bigger profits because of ARTIFICIAL forces created in the economy by social policies and false consumer incentives created partially by easy consumer lending. The lending industry is DRIVING builders toward the largest profit margins.
It used to be 0% before 1913. 0% is the best rate and the only fair rate.
Yeah, that'll work.
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