In answer to the OP:
So what? Life isn’t fair.
That is a very hard lesson. Children hate that lesson. I still hate that lesson. But Life isn’t fair. You can either deal with it or kill yourself (I strongly reccomend the former). And it isn’t going to become fair no matter how much you want it to be and no matter how much your work to make it fair.
The other thing to consider is that a free market absolutely CANNOT exist without the rule of law. If I’m free to come over to your factory, or workshop, or farm, and hit you on the head and help myself to whatever goods you’re producing then what you have is not capitalism but fuedalism.
That’s why the idea of corporations taking over and transforming the world to a ruthless consumerist society doesn’t make sense. If a corporation took over it wouldn’t be a corporation any more. What would be the point of producing goods and services and exchanging them for tokens that entitle you to other goods and services when you can just force other people to produce goods and services for you? If corporations “took over”, the result wouldn’t be a Dilbert style dystopia, but rather a typical third world dictatorship.
Unless you have police to catch criminals, courts to punish criminals and adjudicate disputes, and soldiers to protect society from invasion, you don’t have a free market. If I can take your goods or ruin your goods at whenever I like, what reason is there for me to exchange my goods for your goods in a marketplace? A corporation without laws regulating its behavior isn’t a corporation but rather a bandit gang or feudal aristocracy (same thing, really).
I’ve said it before in this thread and I’ll say it again: I bring no alternatives to capitalism. This thread is purely a discussion of what is wrong with capitalism and why. In that context, your reply is a cop-out.
That’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that the system itself, even if that system is just the agglomeration of people’s ideas about it, is fundamentally biased towards those who have money instead of those who work harder and/or are more creative.
We’re talking about both. My point is that the rough-n-tumble reality differs from the ideal so significantly as to defeat the purpose. And it’s not due to people misinterpreting the theory, it’s due to the unequal distribution of resources. The analogy to mathematics isn’t people making arithmetical errors, it’s there being not enough numbers to solve equations, and some people can use the numbers and some can’t.
Well, imperfect information is a reality of life. Perfect information only exists in the idealized textbook version of capitalism. Capitalism unfettered (indeed any economic system unfettered) will eventually spin out of control, hence the need for ethical and legal guidelines to control damaging excess.
If you’re trying to reinvent the wheel, the boys in marketing have a whole campaign planned for you.
Ah – so your position is that the bias of a capitalist society to reward existing wealth is . . . what? Unethical? A violation of the expectations of some people? False advertising?
I’m not certain that I understand the nature of this critique. I think it is a pretty well established principle that an accumulation of wealth is advantageous in a free market. Is it only that observation which you are addressing or do you see some deeper implication of that fact?
This is the same cop out that smiling bandit used: “Life’s not fair.”
SM, to address what you said I should better enumerate the consequences of capitalism’s flaws. As AHunter3 said,
Any system that requires a poor class and also requires that people need money to obtain the basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing, health care) automatically forces that portion of the population into poor living conditions. And that’s wrong. That is my objection. Currently a third of the world’s population lives in such a state. That’s two billion supporting arguments backing up my position.
The latter two. As you said:
From my experience I would replace the word “often” with “more often than not”. I suspect Spatial Rift’s experience might have been the same. Long before I learned the definition or the distinguishing characteristics of capitalism, I learned that capitalism is what makes America great. And what’s great about America is that hard work always pays off and everyone has an equal chance at success.
The question, as you already pointed out, is whether capitalism has failed to meet their expectations or they’ve failed to understand capitalism.
I wonder to what extent a widespread misconception of a word can actually redefine it. With a broad concept like capitalism it seems possible. One could say that capitalism, as they define it, has failed. More to the point, it never existed.
“Life’s not fair” is a cop-out?
I shudder to think of your opinion of 2+2=4.
Anyhoo, you’re misinterpreting AHunter3’s statement. Capitalism doesn’t really “need” poor people as an aspect of being capitalistic; but any general system of comparing characteristics (in this case, wealth) is going to reveal a bell curve of some kind, where some are extremely high, some are extremely low and most are in the middle somewhere. I can see why it may be emotionally satisfying to assume that the existence of a Bill Gates is only possible (if not the actual cause of) thousands of people living in slums, but it’s wishful thinking at best, self-deception more likely.
Well, on a nit-picking level I feel the need to point out that there is no meaningful way in which the entire world’s population can be treated as agents operating within a capitalist market. You really can’t use the 2 billion as supporting arguments for anything conclusion regarding a capitalist market system.
More meaningfully, I will agree with Bryan Eckers (though I am not certain whether the misunderstanding is yours or Ahunter3’s) that nothing in a capitalist market mathematically implies a significant portion of the population need suffer deprivation of necessary resources. “Poor” is a statement of relation. It is true that some portion of a capitalist population will always exist at below the median “wealth measure” (pick whichever one you wish), but that is simply a function of the definition for median and the opportunities for wealth to shift between economic agents. Nothing requires that the “poor” segment of the population be deprived of basic necessities.
I’m waiting for Liberal to hijack this thread so he could discuss problems he’s had with FedEx drivers or how funny he found the latest episode of the Daily Show.
Xtisme, we agree again! I too feel that the rich generally come from the poor and the middle class, most especially the middle class since most poor people go through being middle class on the way to being rich.
If you agree with that, you MUST agree with my next notion, which is that the capitalist economy which maximizes income and opportunity for members of the middle class is the one that will be most successful, because that’s where our economic engine is really centered. A healthy, successful middle class is the best way to ensure a strong economy.
Unfortunately, the rich often translate their economic power into political power and use it to pass laws and regulations that strangle the growth of the middle class by concentrating wealth in the upper classes as is happening right now under Bush. That’s why Republicans tend to harm economies while Dems help them.
You’re a Democrat, Xtisme, admit it!
Why do we have to run a capitalist system from some overarching intellectual system? Why can’t we decide what we want from a capitalist system and then put in place whatever laws and regulations seem to work to bring about those results? Say, we think the wealthy are grabbing too much of the resources in relation to the middle class, leaving them overworked and underfunded and thus without the leisure and energy to create new economic giants? We pass laws encouraging such a result. Maybe they work, maybe they don’t. We dump the ones that don’t work, keep the ones that do, move on to the next set of problem.
A very simple feedback loop, in short.
Evil Captor:
Cite?
Seriously, I’m pretty sure (and will endeavor to find my own cite) that most of the rich come from the rich, and most of the poor come from the poor. There is a massive amount more economic mobility than there was a few hundred years ago (when there was very damn little of it) but the general trend is still for stratification levels to endure from generation to generation, and for people to marry and reproduce with others of the same economic stratum.
You’ll find an occasional billionaire or Senator born to virtually illiterate parents who lived off welfare, who despite attending schools in economically challenged areas took and clobbered the MCAT tests and got a Rhodes scholarship, or came in at just the right time as a brand-new technology or resource-exploitation method came of age and got in early, or some such thing, and parlayed every gain into a platform from which to reach for the next one.
Is it still overwhelmingly more easy to absorb information in grade school if your parents taught you to read and helped you with algebra and trigonometry and got a friend from the Country Club to let you do an internship, and handed you an interest-free family loan of $125K for equipment or the first six months’ rent on your office space to let your pursue your notion or invention-idea, and introduced you around to several of the state’s legislative and judicial power-brokers (the ones you didn’t already know from playing squash with their kids back when you were in prep school together, that is)? Yeah.
Likewise for poverty. I myself have been counted among New York City’s homeless population, having landed rather badly in the region in 1984 and run through a succession of jobs that didn’t work out and run through my resources until I was dead broke. Alongside of other residents of the shelter for homeless men, I found out how damn hard it is to get up and out when you can’t leave a contact tel# and address when applying for a job, and when you dont’ have anywhere you can store paperwork and come back to it later to attend to it, and where so much of your time is spent looking for a place to sleep for the night and a soruce of food. And yet I did get up and out, in large part because being from a middle-class family I had excellent grammar and adequate math and, more to the point, the ingrained constellation of behavioral habits and work habits and attitudes and expectations and whatnot that are part of what it means to be middle-class. And so I intuitively worked the system, chatting up the social workers, doing my own research, learning the official rules and who to call to obtain enforcement in my favor, sensing when I could stand up to petty authority (and how), not to mention being eligible for college and skilled at doing homework and so on. Had I been born to a family enmeshed in poverty I would have lacked many of these resources and might well still be on the streets.
That was exactly what I meant in the post you quoted. Capitalism is essentially freedom to work and buy and sell as you please. It’s an economic system. Our government (a political system) puts some restrictions on that freedom in order to achieve social goals that we, as a nation, agree upon. Of course, fiiguring out what we all agree upon in terms of social goals can be a messy process, but hey, it’s politics!
Well, AHunter said that, but that doesn’t make it true. Do you honestly think that the people in North Korea are living a poor, miserable existence because they are required to do so in order for Bill Gates to have his billions? Or the people in Africa? No, these people are desperately poor primarily because of corrupt and/or inept governments.
If you’re going to object that capitalism “requires” 50% of the people to have a standard of living below average, then there’s not much we can do to fix that problem for you. Perhaps you can investigate the Lake Wobegon phenomenon-- they’ve figured out how to make all the children above average in intelligence. 
Contrary to the assertion made (from a previous thread regarding wealth inequality) comes this article from The Economist:
Not that this says anything about what class the now-wealthy originated in, only that it is now relatively harder to ascend. I seem to remember some stats cited in that prior thread, but could not locate them with a cursory examination.
Isn’t it a more widely held belief that Republican legislation serves to free industries of law and make them less regulated? The rich/republican has nothing to gain by stifling the other classes. A capitalistic system works better if more players are available who are able to bring to the market something of value. Your theory would do nothing more than stifle the process and hamstring the economy.
Isn’t that what we do now? Isnt’ that what taxes do in general? How much more do you want to do this until we end up in Socialism?
It is a more widely held belief. But:
This is patently false. Using your term, the “rich” have (close to) everything to gain by eliminating competition.
Yes, on the whole. But the class of “the rich” is comprised of individuals, each of whom is in competition. Less players means less competition means only that individual can profit. And furthermore, receive all the profit.
My post was badly phrased, giving the impression that I disagree with you, when in fact I agree with you. What I meant to say was that most new wealth is GENERATED by the middle class rather than the upper class. What upper class people generally do is manage the wealth they inherit, sometimes very well, sometimes very badly, most of the time, with mediocre skill. Those middle class people who break into the ranks of the wealthy are generally there because they’ve either created new sources of wealth or proven brilliant at managing wealth, or in a few cases, are extremely lucky. A medicre talent for managing wealth or creating new wealth will likely remain middle class at best.
That’s what I mean when I say that most new wealth is generated by the middle class. It doesn’t imply a large amount of churn between class barriers. My thought is that even a talented middle class wealth manager needs a certain amount of luck to succeed in breaking through to the wealthy class, and that the harsher conditions are for the middle class, the less wealthy and stable a given society will be.
We can’t mandate “luck” for middle class people, but what we CAN do is make sure that they have the time and the opportunity to launch new projects and generate wealth, by making sure the middle class in general has those options. This also has the advantage of maintaining the middle class as a strong domestic market for goods and services, also generally good for an economy. And a strong middle class also has a tendency to exhibit an upward pull on the poor, who typically move in and out of the middle class depending on what kind of jobs they land.
Unfortunately, what we have right now is a wealthy upper class systematically cannabilizing the wealth of the middle class for their own aggrandizement, with the aid of conservative ideologues who see any restraint on the wealthy’s ability to wrest wealth from the middle class and the poor as socialism.
Mind you, I’m not advocating socialism or soaking the rich. I think it’s to the best interests of the RICH that the middle class is strong, because they benefit from increased wealth in society in general as much or more than anyone else. Their incomes grow, and they benefit from the social stability a large middle class affords – that is, they don’t have to live in heavily guarded enclaves because everyone wants to kidnap[ their kids and rob their homes.
I completely agree with all of this. Our present society is not fair. What’s more, it’s not at all well organized to take advantage of the energy and talents of the poor and the middle class. Our system isn’t just unfair, it’s stupid and self-defeating.