I think you’re overstating communist egalitarianism. Communism is egalitarian in the sense that it doesn’t recognize classes - a communist is opposed to the idea of an aristocracy for example. But they have no problem with the idea that individual people have differences. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is a clear acknowledgement that people are all not the same.
The greedy people are 99.999% of everyone, I’m sorry to say. Unless you’re living out of a cardboard box and donating all of your money that you earn to charity beyond the little you need to stay above 90 pounds, you’re one of them too. And the people who climb in the hierarchy, aren’t the most greedy, they’re just the ones whose talent is producing money. Truly greedy bastards generally don’t end up becoming much because no one trusts them or wants to deal with them.
I think corruption, cronyism and backoffice dealmaking are problems in any economic system.
Overpopulation is less of a problem in modern Western countries where, if anything, low birthrates may become a problem in the future. But I think the issue of population management is independent of the type of economic system.
It appears that Ambrose Bierce didn’t do an entry for Greed in the Devil’s Dictionary, but I imagine that it would go something like this:
Greedy: A person who does not give enough money to charity to earn a sum total less than me.
Never said different.
Quite so. My post was a response to Sage Rat positing that the blessings of medical science are mixed.
You can move up into the wilderness of Alaska if you wish. Ain’t no one making you accept a low infant mortality rate, pharmaceuticals, and sterilized equipment.
Actually to expand on what I said earlier - In a pure unregulated laissez faire capitalist system, companies and banks that were not sustainable would simply go out of business, regardless of the repercussions. However politics are such that we believe that certain businesses and industries are “too big to fail”. We allow them to be propped up with subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks and other special deals. Ultimately these lead to inefficiency and corruption since their success isn’t based on their ability to meet societies wants and needs but based on someone’s arbitrary decisions.
That may be the practical realities of “Big Business” but it isn’t really in the true spirit of “Capitalism”. In fact, it’s really a form of Socialism.
Not perfectly but much better than communism.
If only the winters were warmer and the mosquitoes more kind.
In the Bizzaro World in which we live, yes.
Garbage. The world is not divided between self destructive starving people and the greedy. You are attempting to defend greed by creating a ridiculous definition that defines anything but near-suicide as greed. That is NOT what people mean when they use the term, as I’m sure you well know.
Garbage again. The ones who get to the top are they ones who TAKE the most money, not the ones who make it. The ones who leave a trail behind them of ruined and impoverished lives. “Trust” doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter if you trust the guy who takes over the company you are working for so he can run it into the ground for his own profit. He’ll get his money whether you trust him or not. And he’ll get his next CEO job whether you trust him or not; unless you are one of his fellow wealthy greedheads you don’t have a voice in the matter.
In a “pure unregulated laissez faire capitalist system” the success of companies has little to do with “societies wants and needs”, and everything about what they can lie, cheat, steal or force out of people. Using people as slave labor or crippling them because it’s profitable or selling poisonous medicine doesn’t serve “societies wants and needs”; it serves the bottom line.
And what makes you think that life in a society built according to the ideologically pure principles of the Free Market and Capitalism would be anything but a nightmare for most people ? Why should anyone with sense CARE if the economy is ideologically pure, anyway? I’d rather eat edible food, kept that way by the Evil Socialist FDA than die of food poisoning for the greater Glory of Capitalism.
How is trying to force a pure form of Capitalism on people any more sensible than trying to do the same thing with Communism ? Threads like this show that the difference between the two sides aren’t as great as they like to claim; both are pushed by ideologues who care more for pushing their One True Economic Faith than they do about the consequences.
People are hypocrites. The same reasons you use to say that Bill Gates is greedy, some kid in Ethiopia is using to say that you’re greedy.
So exactly how many rich people have you known personally? Oh, none you say? Gee, whodda guessed…
I’ve had friends who lived in trailer camps and friends whose family owned megacorps. I’ve seen people who were perfectly content wearing nothing more than a toga and living in a hut with a dirt floor, and people who were stressed out and dissatisfied by all the benefits of the modern world. People are people at every level of society and regardless of where they live. Some are assholes, some are great people. It’s unfortunate that Hollywood indoctrinates our young to think that wealthy people are all the real world equivalent of Emperor Palpatine, but that doesn’t make it any less a fiction.
Work any retail job and you’ll find that every manager assumes that at least one or two of his employees are swiping money and/or products from the store. He does that because it’s generally true. It’s unfortunate when he suspects someone who is innocent, but that’s beside the point. 30% of people in entry level jobs are thieves, and yet no one says, “Oh well, yeah poor drugheads are evil greedy bastards who should be strung up!”
Some percentage of people at every level are evil bastards who steal from the cookie jar, and fuck up everything for everyone around them. It’s unfortunate when that person is in a particularly high level of power in our society, but that’s beside the point because it’s some percentage of everybody who’s a crook. And it’s also some percentage of everyone who’s a nice and decent person. Thinking anything else, just doesn’t match any sort of observable reality unless you stick entirely to Hollywood and “the Liberal Media” and entirely ignore the real humans and basic common sense.
Except that I and Bill Gates are not comparable at all in absolute terms.
Even assuming that’s true ( which I have no reason to believe ), that’s just a small minority. As opposed to the predatory behavior that’s the norm among the elite.
But it’s worse the higher up you go, because our society is designed to reward that kind of behavior.
Ah, Hollywood and the ( nonexistent ) liberal media; the classic right wing line whenever someone deigns to point out reality. Well, reality is notorious for having a liberal bias.
I don’t know if it’s a “liberal” thing for real, but all I can say for certain is that reports about wealthy people in the news is about as reliable as science news.
It’s like gay people where homophobic people go all, “Ah well they’re destroying society and morality and blah blah blah.” But the reality is, you go into a gay household and you’ve got two people who go to work every day, get back and bitch about work and their boss, are too tired to have sex, yell at the kids for not cleaning their rooms, etc. At work, they sit there and do their job as best can they can, think all their coworkers are idiots, especially the people above them. It’s all the same.
Hell, I’ll be that you can go sit in a maximum security prison, hang out, and 90% of the time think that there’s little difference between there and any other frat house.
Wealthy people aren’t happier, madder, greedier, or anything. They’re just good at knowing what sells and/or how to hire good people. That’s what the job needs, and that’s what the job selects for.
It’s like politics, it’s a popularity contest. The person who can sound the best while saying the least gets to be the Senator. The job selects for what qualities are needed. But those qualities are entirely unrelated to the person’s personality and, often, general intelligence.
No job selects for greed, because you can’t make money off of it. The desire for money isn’t a skill, it’s an emotional need. While as being a good engineer is something you can market; being able to read who’s lying or telling the truth is a skill you can market; being able to tell whether the average American will prefer product A or product B that’s a skill you can market. Any one of these people could be an asshole or a saint, because your talents have little to nothing to do with your personality. This is just common sense.
Now newspapers sell based on a fixed price. They’re not like wine where you get charged more for a premium brand. So a newspaper makes money by appealing to the masses. The masses hate their boss. The newspaper market selects for editors and journalists who are most appreciated by your average, low-income worker. They’re going to try and make him look like a hero, and his boss look like an evil tyrant. Why? Because it sells newspapers. You want to stay in business, that’s what you’ve got to give them. Even if you’re a wealthy newspaper mogul, you have a boss, and his name is The Customer.
No, it selects for being buddies or relatives with other wealthy people. You don’t get to be CEO or a board member by being good; you get it because you are voted there by the Board of Directors who are your golfing buddies, or your Dad’s friend, or who went to the same private school. And for being ruthless and a con artist. We had our present economic meltdown for a reason; because the system is designed to benefit the in-crowd at the expense of everyone and everything else.
Corporate America is NOT a meritocracy; not even close. It’s an plutocratic aristocracy with good propaganda.
No, it’s a moral lack. It’s not desire; it’s the willingness to trample others. And THAT plenty of jobs select for.
Nonsense. The media is not liberal, and in general goes out of it’s way to suck up to the wealthy and powerful. The opinions of the editors and reporters are irrelevant, because they are employees; they will report what they are ordered to report, regardless of their opinion or whether or not it’s true. And the Right have no problem with the media they control making less money than it might if they can push their agenda in the process. Like many free market apologists, you operate under the faith based assumption that anyone not actually in government has no political agenda ( unless it’s a liberal one ).
It’s bizarre how you’ve come to have such a warped sense of reality.
I grew up poor in the projects and worked at hard manual labor jobs alongside other hourly blue collar workers. As I moved up in the world of white collar professions, I found my office colleagues MORE trustworthy and charitable.
The sainthood of the poor is a myth but I guess only people who’ve lived both worlds would truly understand that.
“Who would have guessed that the problem with Communism is that there’s no money in it?” - Dennis Miller
The Ideal of Communism is to make everyone equal. The unfortunate downside is that it makes them equally poor and has very few avenues for making them equally better off (unless you were below the mean at the start of the thing). The reality of Communism is that no society or organization works properly unless there are people who are not equal to others. There must be a hierarchy of leadership.
Our world is becomming a form of Bizzaro Capitalism.
The “ideology” of real capitalism is freedom and competition. Freedom to buy and sell your products and services for the best price you can get for them. Competition that rewards efficiency, ingenuity and high production and punished inefficiency, corruption, laziness and obsolesence with creative destruction. And all this would operate within a system of laws designed to prevent fraud, corruption, and predatory business practices.
See, the reason is that Der Trihs is right. The world is full of greedy, stupid and corrupt idiots. They will make stupid, shortsighted decisions. Collectively the market is smarter than any of us. The market forces us into making decisions and if we make the wrong one it punishes us. Run your bank stupidly, you go the way of Lehman Brothers. Build cars no one wants, go bankrupt like General Motors. Don’t modernize, go out of business like the American steel industry. Who gives a shit how long you’ve been in business or how prestigeous your name is. The market doesn’t care.
Except people don’t want to compete. Especially those who can’t because they lack the skills, drive or ambition. When you get passed over for promotion at work, do you REALLY believe you are the best employee in your group? Or are you just jealous because you want the ego boost?
What you will see is a greater push towards socialism. People wanting the government to step in and prop up companies and industries because they are “too big to fail” or are “an American institution”. To protect them from the ups and downs of the economic cycle. I’m not talking about welfare or social safety nets. I’m talking about taking companies or industries that should disappear and putting them on life support so they become a huge financial drain.
And ultimately where does the money come from to pay for all these subsidies? When the taxes on revenues generated from unprofitable businesses are no longer enough, I suppose the government can just print money.
Dennis Miller can be funny. I recall a show before the 2004 election where he hosted a not too bright Democratic politician and a “representative” of Muslims For Bush who tore the Dem a new one. Hated it but loved it. Dennis imo is on a par with Ann Coulter. But to the point, there was a small group in the USSR who lived quite well with their Black Sea dachas and big limos. Many of them drifted into the Russian mafia after the break up.
The Ideal of Communism is to recognize our basic equality. That it (in the so-called communist USSR) resulted in poverty for most was quite simply the same failing we find in this country with our Ideal of Free Markets: Large centralized governments are controlled and thus always more responsive to the “needs” of the wealthy.
It is also true, imo, that in any population, some are much more talented than most. If this talent were culturally directed into improving the lot all rather than enshrining greed as a virtue, we and the rest of the world would be a lot better off. I’m thinking something like an annual “Taxpayer of the Year” awards dinner.
It is true that the denizens of lower regions can be as predatory as those at the heights. There are many exceptions.
Let me ask you, in your rise in the world, did you ever work on a commission basis?