C
charles cure
Guest
Dinosaur said:
i believe that the US/Global economy now resembles a mercantilist system, while attempts at real capitalism ended probably about 50 years before you say you think it did. as a matter of fact i would argue that capitalism itself is just as flawed as communism and cannot work the way that it was intended.
you should find and read the book: The Lost Science of Money: the mythology of money - the story of power by Stephen Zarlenga. he was president of the american monetary institute at one point and describes in detail the flaws of capitalism and the setbacks the world has suffered especially in regard to the reliance on the gold standard as a basis for value.
capitalism didnt replace feudalism, laissez-faire capitalism replaced protectionist mercantilism, and has arguably now evolved back into mercantilism. study history.
and it depends on where you look for the ordinary citizen in terms of whether you see benefit or not. yes, standards of working and living have improved in the US in the last 100 years. but look at the effects of US capitalist hegemony in a place like Latin America for example, where our capitalist democracy supports autocratic, basically feudal regimes in order to exploit cheap labor and open markets. capitalism the way it is practiced by western countries does not beget a rise in standard of living or working conditions anywhere else, but turns the world into its gold mine and nearly enslaves the workers of other countries to get a leg up on competition. thats the inevitable progression of capitalist policy as it seeks to maximize profit for the individual at the price of the many.
this is an indication of nothing. can you afford a new 3,500$ laptop that you see in a catalog? just because it is in a catalog doesnt mean the average person can afford to buy it. yes, i understand what you are saying, that if there wasnt some realistic possibility of someone buying an item it wouldnt be in a catalogue, but you have to remember that the average worker back then probably bought like one item per year from that catalogue.
just because there were no labor unions or welfare in 1909 also does not indicate anything. there may not have been a welfare program but that does not mean there was no need for one. i mean, some people were still living in shacks with dirt floors in some parts of our country until the late 1960's and Johnson's "war on poverty", so i think that there is a wide range of interpretations that can be made about capitalism and its ability to lift people out of states of feudal poverty and give them something better. i mean shit, in the 1850's we had a great laissez-faire system of capitalism and half of our nation's GDP was feuled by SLAVE LABOR. why dont you try asking the slaves if their quality of life was better than a feudal serf's? the point here is that if unregulated, business owners WILL exploit workers until they are literally worked to death in the most disgusting and abhorrent conditions possible as long as it creates an increase in the bottom line. that is how capitalism works, reduce overhead, increase profit. if unregulated, how is that not a formula that spells exploitation for workers? history proves this point, if it were not for labor unions and government reformists, there would still be dead diseased rats being thrown into sausage vats at meat packing factories and seven year olds working in coal mines. come on.
the industrial revolution allowed for the standardization of parts, and thus for mass manufacturing, which greatly reduced the price of nearly everything. it raised the standard of living by giving people jobs outside of subsistence agriculture, but lowered the standard of living at the same time by requiring the labor force to concentrate itself in cities with poorly equipped infrastructure to handle such an influx of population. so people go from living on farms to living in slums, they may make more money or have more leisure time, but income is not the only factor in standard of living.
similarly, the agricultural revolution in prehistoric times raised the standard of living of nomadic hunter-gatherers radically. they went from a life of wandering the plains in search of food, to building towns and cities, domesticating animals, and their population exploded. however, they then had to deal with increased incidence of disease brought on by poor hygeine and improper disposal of waste materials, and massive loss of land and property through conflict with neighboring peoples who needed to expand their land holdings in order to provide food for a massively growing population that was made possible by the advent of agricultural technique. nonetheless, these people experienced the same type of standard of living increase in a short period of time that you are attributing to capitalism, only they did not have capitalism. this is because the economic system has little to do with the rise in standard of living in either case, but instead it is the advent of new technology, regardless of economic structure, that allows for a standard of living improvement in the lives of the people.
well, im not claiming that. i said that theoretically i believe communism to be more morally positive than capitalism. i also said that i believed that communism didnt work in practice, i think that much is obvious anyway. i still dont think communism has been attmepted in the way it was meant to be, mostly becuase i dont think it is possible for it to be implemented as described.
if you are to label an economic system by its adherence to a particular theory, then we no longer live in a capitalist economy anyway, and capitalism has been dead for at least 100 years in the US. we instead live in a hybridized capitalist-socialist-mercantilist system, im not sure what you would call it.
again, i agree with you. but i am saying that its failure is due to its overestimation of human nature as it relates to a desire for fairness and morality. the "success" of capitalism all but proves my point in full.
WOW this is new !
