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While you seem like a nice person with a heart, many right wing/libertarian people do indeed view the poor as sub-human. I read it on the Internet all the time.
Libertarians and right wingers do NOT see the poor as 'sub-human'. Most in those two camps advocate for individuals giving their own time and money to those in need and not the government. Helping the poor should be a moral obligation, not a legal mandate. Conservatives give more money to charities than liberals every year.
Libertarians and right wingers do NOT see the poor as 'sub-human'. Most in those two camps advocate for individuals giving their own time and money to those in need and not the government. Helping the poor should be a moral obligation, not a legal mandate. Conservatives give more money to charities than liberals every year.
That's somewhat qualified though, because for one thing charity is a tax write off, and another thing if you're going by support for the Democratic or Republican Party, as opposed to people who identical as "liberal" or "conservative", the disparity disappears.
Blue states also give tax money to red states, keep that in mind.
There's no way to tell. Capitalism is merely the best system we've found so far.
As long as we are dealing with imperfect humans, every system they're in, will be imperfect. The systems that compensate for their imperfections the "best", will be the "best system".
and will it last forever?
As long as there are liberals on the planet, even the best system cannot be guaranteed to last forever.
One of the main flaws IMO with capitalism is the belief that the wealthy have as a rule worked hard to deserve what they have.
That isn't a flaw of capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system. It doesn't believe anything about the wealthy one way or the other. Capitalism is merely a method of allocating resources.
It's irrelevant whether the wealthy have worked hard for what they got or not. That really has no bearing upon life whatsoever. Whether some billionaire earned his money through hard work or whether it was through family connections does not affect my life one bit.
And even if it did, the answer to that problem would be capitalism. Not your socialism. Economic mobility is far greater in a capitalist system than it is in a socialist system. If I wish to be enterprising and get myself into the upper socioeconomic class, then a free market affords me far more opportunity to do that than does the rampant cronyism and stifling regulations type environment that socialism promotes. Because while socialists love to talk about the plight of the poor, what they don't talk about is how their system affords very little opportunity for the individual to work his way out of poverty. Heavily regulating business opportunities and taxing away capital assets keeps economic growth at anemic levels in every socialist economy that's ever been known.
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While some wealthy people are indeed ingenuous, diligent self-made millionaires/billionaires, many of them are trust fund babies or had the privilege of being born into a rich family so they had a place to start. Money makes more money, so a truly free market would mean that the rich would continue to get rich, and the poor will continue to become more poor.
There's nothing wrong with this. Once the poor get too poor then the rich will have no customers for their goods and services and will be forced to reduce prices. As was said previously in this thread, the market corrects itself.
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Capitalism promotes a caste system where the rich are seen as being hard-working and moral and the poor are seen as lazy untouchable leeches and as a drain on society.
Capitalistm is an economic system and does not promote any beliefs whatsoever.
There is nothing about capitalism that uniquely promotes a caste system. There is no system at all, including the socialist one you profess, that does not end up with an elite. In your case the elite is simply the people at the top of government instead of the people at the top of business.
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If Ayn Rand's rabid followers had their way I'm pretty sure it would lead to systematic mass murder of the lower classes. Imagine the Holocaust except instead of ethnic groups being targeted, they would exterminate the homeless, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants, etc.
And if the lower classes were systematically murdered, then the rich people would have nobody to sell their products to. You need to use some reasoning here and not just emotions. You seem completely stuck in a feelings based rich vs poor mentality. Use more logic, less emotion.
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I'm not an ideologue the other way either though. I absolutely loathe left-wing privilege theory too. The kind of people who believe that because I'm white and male, I couldn't possibly know true suffering and everything I have (which materially speaking, is hardly anything) I obtained unfairly by being a white man.
That has nothing to do with capitalism. Two completely separate issues.
lookig at nations that have switched to market capitalist system or started the chnage 'its clear that market capitalism is a movement that is sweepig the world like never before. Of course that alos means those who benfitted most from it in past;now have large numbers to comptete with which bring distruptions to those use to li ttle competition.
Location: On the "Left Coast", somewhere in "the Land of Fruits & Nuts"
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Originally Posted by kidkaos2
And if the lower classes were systematically murdered, then the rich people would have nobody to sell their products to. You need to use some reasoning here and not just emotions. You seem completely stuck in a feelings based rich vs poor mentality. Use more logic, less emotion.
You were doing fine until you started getting snotty and arrogantly talking down to folks for disagreeing with you. Which BTW is a great example of what happens when the all-too-human qualities of grandiosity and a sense of narcissistic "entitlement" enter the "system" (Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, et al). As Greenspan famously admitted, we can never depend on the people involved to properly regulate themselves, no matter how ideal the rest of the system.
And even today, as the middle and lower classes are being economically decimated, while the wealthy just keep getting wealthier, the market for luxury goods and services is actually soaring worldwide.
So I have spent the better part of an hour reading through this entire thread. By the end of page 1 it became clear I would need to do some organizing of opinions to keep everything clear. Boy has this baby run the gammit of political topics. Now being my analytical, organized self I have copied most of the posts, created headings, and added opinions under each heading color-coded by poster. I now have a 15 page word document and a desire to take a course in economics, politics, or foreign policy.
The headings I used were: Limitations of Federal Government, Ideologists, Ideologies, Corporate Regulations, Corporations as Governments, Globalization, Welfare, Education, Debt, Healthcare, and Technology.
Granted many of the topics covered could be listed in multiple areas and I had to go with my guy for a lot of them. However organizing thoughts in this manner helped highlight some common themes. It also helped delineate the informed and specific thoughts from vague ideas.
What I find interesting now are the things not covered, at least not with enough focus to warrant a separate heading. There is really no focus on solutions, only problems and predictions for the future, all of which are pretty dire. There is little talk of environmental impacts or overpopulation technological advances, or debt. As we continue to diminish our natural resources and increase the number of people on the planet how will that impact our politics.
And we seem to view the economy as a deity beyond our control. But isn't the economy an ideal shaped by the actions of humans? I guess socialists or communists hold the view that we can collectively work to control the economy to the betterment of mankind. Whereas conservatives or libertarians believe the ecomomy is an uncontrollable monolith that we must learn to work with instead of against it. And the moderate would argue the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Furthermore there was no mention of social politics, as if they are a to be discussed separately from financial politics. Yet as we use our economic regulations to encourage popular social ideas, can these be left out of the discussion?
I now have more questions and only one answer after a couple of hours of reading an thinking. We need to regain control of our representatives so they represent individuals and not our corporations. That seems to be a theme of agreement from all sides.
Does anyone think that capitalism and the law of the jungle (as opposed to anarchy which is simply lack of hierarchy and is probably better achieved with socialism or cooperative economics) are kind of the same thing? The free market undermines the power of democratic government, contrary to popular belief, because it allows wealth and power to snowball and concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. It's really just letting social Darwinism run its course without interruption.
There's no way to tell. Capitalism is merely the best system we've found so far.
As long as we are dealing with imperfect humans, every system they're in, will be imperfect. The systems that compensate for their imperfections the "best", will be the "best system".
and will it last forever?
As long as there are liberals on the planet, even the best system cannot be guaranteed to last forever.
Liberalism is a parasitic ideology. It can not exist by itself. Capitalism is the perfect host for it.
Liberalism dies when the host is dead, it is when every body is equal in their misery, the system collapses and turns into a tyranny.
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