OrionAnderson at [unixtime wrote:1171070793[/unixtime]]
When deciding between capitalism and communism the questions you ask are: is the profit I can wring out of the workers under capitalism greater than or less than the profit I can reap through corruption based on the rank I get in the communist regime?
I believe our fundamental difference of opinion is this.
Society isn't just measured by it's current ability to sustain its populations. It's measured by its ability to grow in the future as well. Socialism, as I've said before, is awesome at producing goods. And goods sustain a society, but they don't advance it. Technological developments enhance society, not the incredibly efficient manner in which you produce shoes.
Since we don’t know much about you, certainly not what position you’d get under communism, we can’t say which would be more lucrative for you specifically.
Now, I'm not entirely interested in just helping myself as you seem to think. But I do know this... People are motivated by hope and desire to make things better. Nobody likes stagnation where your life is as it is and nothing will change that. People are even more willing to endure some really shitty work solely for the prospect of hope. It's really why the US took off as the country it is. The whole American Dream of becoming rich and famous drew all sorts of people here. Heck, they knew they had to endure hardship and that they may never achieve that goal, but they came nonetheless.
Despite how awful we treat our workers, there's still an abundance of workers. They don't all go flying off to China or Cuba, and we're not holding them here by gunpoint. So we must be doing something right.
Socialism sounds nice for people suffering right now, because it's a quick fix. But once you get into socialism and realize that you've hit the glass ceiling. Then it starts to suck, because there is no dream of more success, there's no hope of improvement. That's your life, period. And people get pretty depressed when there's no hope. Yeah, you can get them to make a nice pair of shoes or other boring repetitive tasks, but you certainly won't get them dreaming up many new ideas.
And heck when it comes to ideas and inventions, nobody can dispute American ingenuity. We developed the first atomic bomb, the lightbulb, the computer... hell it's hard to look at almost anything relatively modern in your house and find something that wasn't an American invention.
And why are we so good at that? Hell, China's population outnumbers ours by a heck of a lot... but you know, I don't see lots of innovation coming out of China.
Who or what do you care about?
If I was to suggest the perfect society, it would be one where effectively, your pay is determined by how much you benefit society at large. If you hurt society, you get punished.
Natural competition is going to be a part of life, So generally you just accept that businesses are going to compete, but you make sure that they don't do stuff like pollute the environment. But a little oneupsmanship is a good thing, because it means your businesses are constantly trying to improve things. Cheaper and better ways to ship goods, new services to offer the public and so on.
In socialism there's really no reason to ever improve anything, because the government owns all the crap, and has no competition ever. You keep thinking that the government is going to be nice and start giving out all these new features and benefits, but there's absolutely no reason for them to. They can just leave everything the same from year to year and nobody can do a damn thing about it.
The government's role should be one primarily designed to steer independents in the right direction, sometimes going as far as to independently fund projects for the common good. So if a lot of people are dying of cancer and corporations don't seem to care, the government can fund that research with tax money.
If you really want to make higher education available to everyone who wants it, you need more than free schools. You need free food, apartments, and health care to support them through school.
Well yeah, the poor are going to have to work harder on that. They may not be able to choose the exact school they wanted or may have to risk going without health care. And I can sympathize, but that's just the way things go. You need much more luck to make it as a poor person, but so long as it's still possible, that's the best we can do.
As soon as we go to socialism, you effectively doom everyone to failure, because nobody can succeed at all. Remember, socialism is awesome if you just change to it, but if you're born under it, then it's an incredibly static society with little to no room for advancement.
Talented people improve society, not workers. If you want society to improve, you must reward those with talent, even if it means somewhat punishing your existing workers.
FrankTrollman wrote:
But Capitalism is a system based on competition. And as we know, a competition has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Somebody loses, and somebody wins. There's no restart, it just goes until all the losers can't play anymore and then it's over.
Well capitalism tends to work more like a counterstrike deathmatch server rather than a single game. Sometimes you get some people winning and doing well, but others eventually join, sometimes people team up to bring down the big guy and so on.
Not to mention capitalism also has the government to help regulate buisnesses. Note that I'm not promoting an entirely free market economy where companies are left to do whatever the hell they want. I think some Anti-Trust legislation is a good thing.
You want the competition to be constant, and sometimes you need to throw the underdogs a bone and handicap the big guys to ensure that the battle continues.
And while capitalism can collapse, so can socialism. It just doesn't fall apart in the same way. Capitalism creates problems with its low class, and eventually it falls apart in a mass revolution of rich versus poor. Socialism on the other hand alienates its talented people and eventually falls apart due to competition with other non-socialist nations who steal away all the talent. Not to mention socialism is much more vulnerable to a corrupt government because there is no freedom of the press (the government owns all news). So it's real easy for the government to lie to its people when everyone works for the government.