What should replace capitalism?

Great Debates
282

Another Doper who doesn’t take orders from me. No wonder I get in so many arguments!

We’re pretty much in agreement here, except you seem to be advancing the standard free market line that it’s all just a matter of temporary shifts in the job market with adjustments, though at least you are reasonable enough to advocate a strong social safety net to take care of displaced workers while they adjust, which is a LOT more than many free market fans are willing to do.

However, the point here is not just temporary shifts in the nature of the job market but an overwhelming trend for the ability to provide most of the necessities of life and most of the important goods, and well, most of the unimportant ones too, by machines owned by a wealthy few who also own most of the mining, agriculture, land, etc. You don’t seem to be grasping this. And part of it is speculative, but not all THAT speculative.

The business about singers and so forth is silly. Entertainment is a tiny niche market in relation to the market for power, housing, food and transportation, and it’s not at all labor-intensive. I don’t listen to some local rock band when I work out, I listen to recordings of rock bands from all over the world, and from a variety of decades. Recording technology has made most musician redundant.

I am quelled, annihilated, floored! I have no logical defense against vague accusations that verge on name-calling!

Literally not possible at present. Politicians need money to buy media to win campaigns. Both parties are now in the pockets of the big money players. Look at the way they fucked up the economy and walked free, even after the Repubicans were thrown out wholesale. Doesn’t matter who I vote for, big money will get its way.

OPEC does not want to kill the goose that keeps laying those petrodollar eggs. They created a huge recession when they first started in 1973, remember? So they don’t want to drive the world economy into the ground because that stops the flow of petrodollars into their bank accounts and shortly after that happens, SOMEBODY is gonna take the oil or the petrodollars away from them. Probably both. So they let prices drop when they need to, but keep them as high as they can when they can get away with it. Plus of course, many economies are shifting to alternative energy sources as fast as they can while keeping energy prices as low as possible. America and most Western economies would dearly LOVE to thel the Arabs to take a fucking hike. It’s a delicate balance. But believe me, prices for oil are headed nowhere but up, long term.

Rich brown people have more in common with rich white people than either group has with poor people of any color. It’s the great equalizer!

283

That is certainly an option and one that are fore fathers would approve of against which is essentially tyranny by the minority against the majority.

This potential outcome is one that the ones at the top of the food chain are already quite well aware of and have contingency plans in place to publicly demonize and deal with those secretly that are a threat to their hold on control.

If they can charge you with terrorism, they need not even make it public and you won’t get an open trial for others to be part of either.

This war on terrorism is a preventive action for one such scenario and as Dick Cheney said, he did not see it ending in his lifetime. They have the data much moreso than the public can have and already know what direction were and the world is headed.
Here is a an article by a law enforcement person that has attended many training sessions.

Beware of Homeland Security Training for Local Law Enforcement, by An Insider
http://www.survivalblog.com/2011/03/beware_of_homeland_security_tr.html

Look at the definitions in the article on how they describe potential terrorists at the article.

One part of the article I though quite humorous was this:

So if your harping on constitutional rights and discussing potential outcomes, and having material in your possession that they deem a danger, well…
Here is a video of just one of those DHS / FEMA trainees refereeing to our founding fathers as terrorists in order to condition training officers. Fortunately, one of the officers was filming it.

284

It was also unheard of 200 years ago to have a hand-held device that could communicate via man-made satellite with another hand-held device on the other side of the planet.

Not at all. Just like you said the nature of a “skilled” job changes over time. 30 years ago there were a handful of computer programmers most of which were a select group of geniuses. Now Jr High students can make a webpage. It shouldn’t be surprising that what was once a highly skilled and highly sought after job soon became menial.

Great! There are two reasons to have computers/robots do this: one is to make it more precise, the other is to make it cheaper. Either way we’re better off. Sure it sucks for Joe the Widget Maker for the first 6 months. But when he gets a new (albeit at a lower paying job) widgets will be better and cheaper.

Sure, and their rewards will be even larger. Which is fine, because they’ll want to buy stuff with that increased wealth.

No one, that’s why it costs less, which is why I can afford the things I have like this computer and my really cool gps watch. It’s also why I can buy the exact same pair of sneakers every year without wasting time asking if someone wasted inventory.

OMG are you suggesting that computers are acquiring capital? All this time I’ve been working to prevent them from getting AI and nuclear weapons, but this is way worse. What exactly are these computers buying? And I hope you’re not talking about high frequency trades. Do you suppose that there’s money to be made selling stuff to computers?

First off, that has always been the case since a monkey found a cave to live in that another monkey wanted. Second, you’re wrong about it being replaced, it’s not, it’s just going to get more skilled, while the things made get cheaper and better. Lastly, to generate wealth from capital, something has to happen. It’s not enough to just buy a computer that buys stuff from other computers; but even then it’s going to take someone to design the two computers. Hell, even in the Matrix we’re all employed as a power source.

Which is exactly what they said in the 1950’s, 1850’s, 1750’s… see the pattern. The sky is always falling.

So open a school. Where there is need their is wealth generated. Even online schools need someone to send out those ridiculous fliers, and act in their lame commercials.

Kick back, put our feet up, and ask the replicator for more synthohol.

No, you are overreacting to a downturn. A blip in an otherwise larger trend.

I said “without skill.” You don’t need wealth for those you need skill, and a rudimentary knowledge of magnets.

In what bizarre universe? Will they form some sort of isolated colony? Completely self sufficient living off variations of cash?

So screw’m. Come up with a way to make money off those left over. Nothing changes if you wiped out the top 1%. Those still here will want food, water, shelter, and electricity. And those the skill/desire to provide it will become rich.

Which brings us back to the original problem, what are we supposed to do with useless people? If all you could do was make buggy whips are we now required to support you forever? Set up a little shop where we pay you to make buggy whips all day so you won’t revolt? I guess we could also hire someone to undo their work so they have something for the next day.

285

One has to wonder what their response was when the police in Wisconsin would not do Walker’s bidding. When your beak and claw simply will not help you wage war on your citizens… well, the best-laid contingency plans, and all that.

Of course the demonization has already begun. The unions are teh great evil[tm] and anyone else who sides with the workers are, too. How far are we away from calling them terrorists? A step, or two, or two hundred? Who knows.

The problem is there are 100K people marching around in Wisconsin alone. How many jails would it take to contain that?

If you are 100,000 Union marchers who somehow swell to 1 million (see their allies in the US Uncut rallies)… well again, how many can you imprison at all, much less secretly? You can find a bad actor and demonize them all based on this one person but will those hundreds of thousands of people just up and quit protesting? That’s a critical question.

The next logical question is, if you arrest 1 or 2 top agitators, on a terrorism charge or otherwise, will that silence the rest? The answer to this, in the Middle East, has been a resounding fracking hell no. The answer in America? Again, who knows.

In China, of course, what you had were Jasmine-copycat protests where there were more onlookers than participants. If this is what you come to see in America, then the rich have won. Iran is another example, with its Republican Guard-equivalent. (Revolutionary Guard?) They seem to have no problem shooting at civvies.

In a flat-out rebellion, American troops will have problems doing that. There will invariably be a lot of troops with family members who are at risk of being arrested or killed. Blood runs thicker than esprit de corps, especially when some other army unit is taking aim at your next of kin for standing up against the power elite. If you are a Marine you will desert your unit to protect your daughter if she’s out taking a stand. This time it won’t be a North vs South split like in 1860.

Next I will endeavor to define “standing up against the power elite”.

Materials? All you need is your feet and your voice in public. In large numbers. Here is where I define “standing up against the power elite”: in America you can do epic damage simply by making your opinion felt collectively in large enough numbers.

From what I’ve heard, there are something like a million people out at times protesting corporations that earn billions but pay no tax (US Uncut).

That’s a lot of terrorists to put in prison… the power elite has no strategy against this, except the Tea Party. And the Tea Party has never been tested against a force as big as itself. It’s used to bullying its way around America; and they did not show up much against the protestors in Wisconsin.

Why are protests of this size important? Because they generate sympathy and support. Public opinion has turned against outlawing public unions. Some polls already show a majority support higher taxes for the rich over cutting programs and banning unions. I would argue that this is the result of the protests… which the media has fought HARD to keep off of television.

Now for the part that the power elite is powerless to do anything about. If these figures are accurate and they are as persistent as the Tea Party, they’ll start putting up candidates that can’t be bought off or intimidated. In essence, fanatics. Think of a large number of Bernie Sanders running for Congress. Go back to California and recall the millions spent to beat Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer; and Linda McMahon out east. That was epic big Corporate money put up by the power elite to beat the Left. And they lost. During a Tea Party tsunami, no less. This comprises the part of the “terrorist” faction that the power elite cannot ever hope to defeat: the wave of voters that elect hard-nosed Bernie Sanders clones who will not take any orders from the power elite.
In short: this problem (for the power elite) is evolving into a highly distributed, amorphous opposition which will be difficult to stop by arresting terrorism suspects. On the flip side if the struggle against the power elite is sufficiently successful at this level there won’t ever be a single shot fired. Make no mistake, this is where I hope it ends.

If things get ugly from here, though, it is my opinion that everything hinges on one thing: which side crosses the moral event horizon first. Will it start because an angry Union mob stormed a Tea Partier’s house and burned it down, or because a mob of Tea Party thugs struck first?

286

To be honest, I don’t know many people like that, even free market types, but maybe they’re more common in the USA. The people who advocate a law of the jungle type society are usually economic ignoramouses who think an “externality” is something on the outside of your house.

I grasp it just fine. It simply strikes me as being unmitigated nonsense.

Countries can and do become plutocracies and I am not about to say that that isn’t a danger. Believe me, I do see the poverty in the USA. My position is that machines and offshoring are not the source of that. Plutocracy is a danger presented by political forces, not (primarily) economic ones. The solutions to avoiding terrible poverty and economic stratification are not to be found in abandoning free markets, they’re to be found in preventing excess and abuses of free markets.

Advocating abandonment of capitalism is just absolutely insane. It is the height of insanity. Capitalism is the greatest system ever devised for producing and distributing wealth; we are so wealthy that people are apparently becoming blind to the source of it. We absolutely do need good politics and good government to ensure that people do not fall through the cracks (this is true of any economic system, really) but to abandon the fundamental engine of the free market, or interfere with it in ways that are politically popular but economically silly, is the most clear-cut example of heaving the baby out with the bathwater you can possibly create.

I don’t like playing my country’s better than your country, but Canada came through the economic crisis in far, far better shape than the USA and far better shape than most of the Western world, with universal health care and less social stratification than you’re seeing in the USA, because of better politics and better regulation. But Canada is a dedicated capitalist nation with a huge commitment to international trade. So apparently it’s doable. Let’s not let a bad three years drive us completely fucking insane.

Hey, I’m not saying it’s easy, but if you have shit politicians you need to get new ones. Sorry, I have no easy way of fixing it, but there it is. You aren’t going to accomplish ANYTHING without changing up the dudes in Washington.

287

So you believe that for every skilled job lost, there is a new one to take it’s place? Can you please clarify?

The point of my comment was to indicate that commission-based jobs are being reduced. You included commission as 1 of the 4 ways to acquire wealth.

The future of humanity looks bright!

The pattern isn’t that the sky is falling, it’s that people need to spend more time training new skills. Before you were fully employable at 15, now it’s 25, later it might be 40. This is not insignificant.

I think this is missing the point.

What downturn are you talking about?

I’m talking about the larger trend that people are being replaced by machines and computers.

Huh? You need wealth for food. Where do you plant seeds if not on land? How do you harvest wheat? By hand? Where do you build a shelter, if you have no property? How do you get electricity if you can’t pay for it and have nothing to offer the people selling you the electricity? I think you’re missing the bigger picture in regards to my comments.

The rich will take all the capital, and leave none for the rest of us. The rich will not need us for anything either, since they will be able to provide for themselves. We’ll be left to take care of ourselves, with the scraps left behind. It may not be enough (it maybe, but it may not).

I agree with this to an extent. We don’t need the rich, and we can run our own isolated economy that doesn’t include them. This does require capital, however (land, for example). Hopefully there will be enough left.

Right now, today, people are growing up without property or capital of any sort (in the USA). They work for scraps, and it’s just enough to buy food and pay rent… But not enough to save up, or develop skills.

288

Well said.

While the economic system we have right now isn’t perfect - and a better one may eventually come around - it’s the best thing we have at the moment. I think most of the problems that are occurring are due to political factors, and not economic ones. I agree with others that it’s worrisome that the rich are getting filthy rich to the point where their powers are extraordinary! But the problem with their powers is more political than economic.

289

That is insanity. You think that market forces cannot be a source of problems but political, aka Government forces, are.

In reality both market forces and political forces are at fault for causing plutocracies. Both are breeding grounds for human greed. It’s absolute madness to ignore either factor’s role in the fact that we have 200 million people out of work worldwide and many more earning mere peanuts.

So in essence you’re saying capitalism is our new God and it is inviolate, immune to innovation and change. Really?

How dare we talk about replacing capitalism with… oh, say, for example… a social democracy? Heathens! Where are the pitch forks and torches!

How about a social democracy?

Countries like China, India and countries in South America interfere with the free market all the time. As a result their economies skyrocketed. America interfered a lot, too; and during those years our economy skyrocketed.

History does not back you on this. It never has.

Dedicated capitalist nation? If I recall correctly, Canada is a social democracy.

Also, what are Canada’s trade deficits like?

Ah, this again. First of all your numbers are off. It’s been a bad TEN years, masked entirely by consumers spending money based on a monumental run-up of debt. Actually it’s more like a bad 30 years, except that we’ve had other compensating factors masking the damage. Those days of being able to compensate are now behind us. Count on that.

Second of all, trade deficits matter. Trade deficits cause our debt to rise. It is an anchor weighing us down. America runs a hundreds of billions of dollar trade deficit that is adding to our national debt.

You keep saying, over and over again, that tariffs are bad for international trade and for workers.

What you keep avoiding is the fact that trade deficits and offshoring add to our national debt and they devalue our currency. Eventually if we continue this “free trade” the dollar will collapse.

What will happen to your precious free trade then? Where will Canada export its goods then?

Perhaps we need a good collapse to shake the free trade monkey off our backs. That way you can say “hey, at least they didn’t raise tariffs”.

290

BTW the reason certain people from Canada are such big fans of Free Trade is because their Balance of Trade is in the POSITIVE: $116 Million CAD as of January 2011.

It’s easy to be for free trade when you occasionally export more than you are import - especially when you run surpluses with your biggest trading partner, the United States.

Try running a hundreds of billions of dollar deficit and see how long your people support that.

291

No.

Their economies have largely skyrocketed at those points when they liberalized their economies. It also helps to impose rule of law and allow political freedom.

In any event, they’re still really fucking poor. The average Chinese is substantially poorer than what you’d get on social assistance in the USA. I’m firmly middle class, and I made more by Valentine’s Day than the average Chinese will make all year. So the Chinese are poor, and on top of that have little freedom. I’m not in a rush to move there. China’s explosive growth has moved the average Chinese from dirt poor to slightly less dirt poor. Wheeee.

Since you haven’t defined “Social democracy” I have no idea what you’re talking about. If by “social democracy” you mean “a capitalist nation that has some good social programs” then yes, I suppose Canada is precisely that. This is a free market country with good social programs, which is what I advocated in the very post you replied to, and always have.

Positive for a long time, then dropped to negative during the recession, but recovering again. We’ve long enjoyed a large trade surplus with our largest trading partner, a much larger economy that has lower standards of labour laws, lower wages, and fewer social programs. You might be familiar with it.

292

“Advocating abandonment of capitalism is just absolutely insane.”

The thing is, how can we abandon capitalism when we have never truly adopted it, except partially? No one is talking about switching to a totally Government-owned means of production command economy. So I’ll condense all this talk about social democracy vs capitalism, etc., into a few questions: Who were you even talking about when you mentioned someone advocating abandonment of capitalism? Who here is advocating a total Government takeover of the economy?

The funny part is, all systems are inevitably abandoned. If you accept evolution this is the only rule that never changes, capitalism, communism, socialism, etc., are all doomed to be replaced at some point in the future. It’s evolution, baby.

Actually China’s growth was much higher when they had higher tariffs.

This has been repeated a million times. What has not been repeated is that their middle class is exploding in size. What is America’s middle class doing?

So, my hunch was right. You guys have a positive trade balance. Funny how this seems to coincide with Canadian majority support for free trade - that is, if that support is in the majority. I am assuming it is.

You won’t be singing that tune when America’s currency collapses under the combined weight of its trade deficits and budget deficits, and your exports to us implode into a monster trade deficit.

293

Advocating abandonment of laws against robbery would also be insane, but I’m not suggesting the law against robbery is my “God.”

How has capitalism been “partially” adopted? Captalism has been pretty widely adopted. It’s a tool, an economic approach to production and distribution and rpice determination. It doesn’t do everything, which is why we also have governments and courts and stuff. It works really well.

Jesus Christ. Do you know what the thread is entitled? Read Diogenes’ posts, there’s one.

I’m not sure you understand what evolution is, either. Evolution doesn’t abandon things. Evolution is a biological process, not a sociopolitical process.

And my growth was much higher when I was in kindergarten, which does not mean that I would become taller if I went back to kindergarten. What works for a country at one stage of economic development doesn’t necessarily work for a country at another.

Not right now, no.

Actually, when it was first proposed most Canadians opposed it. They were convinced it would make Canada poorer. They were wrong.

But you’re missing the point; if Canada can do it, why can’t the USA? The problem isn’t with free trade, the problem’s with the USA’s particular political issues.

I was going to explain why that would enormously benefit Canada’s trade balance with all other nations and hugely improve our trade with Asia and Europe, but it’s too complicated for you to understand so forget it.

294

Tell that to the hominids who no longer exist because they’ve evolved into homo sapiens sapiens.

Maybe we should take steps to ensure our trade balance is at or near positive levels. Canada’s trade balance is never as bad as ours is. You’re not shipping jobs overseas like we are.

Soon as you start having persistent trade deficits your country’s tune will change, much like ours has.

Uh, no you weren’t. You would have failed to make a credible case if you had tried. The collapse of the US economy would eliminate the world’s largest export market for just about every major country on Earth. Our collapse will devastate trade around the world.

History says I am right on this. When we had our recession in 2008, 20 million Chinese jobs were lost. If our currency collapses they’ll lose 2 to 3 times as many jobs. Out of work Asians can’t buy Canadian goods. Your trade will not improve with them. Or Europe, most likely.

Look, economics is too complicated for you to understand beyond what you’ve memorized. You’re too rooted in what you’ve read in books. You don’t even realize that Canadians are only happy with free trade because they’re not the ones losing jobs and having their debt increased by chronic year-after-year trade deficits of monstrous proportions. Most here don’t even realize that trade deficits add to a nation’s foreign-held debt.

295

[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
Tell that to the hominids who no longer exist because they’ve evolved into homo sapiens sapiens.

[/QUOTE]

Not really a discussion on Evolution (and you won’t see this anyway), but this shows a lack of even a basic understanding of how Evolution works. Species don’t evolve from one species into another in some sort of lockstep towards the future. All of the Homo erectus didn’t just evolve into Homo heidelbergensis (or an intermediate species who’s name escapes me atm) en masse.

-XT

296

Prove it.

You made the statement, now prove China’s growth was much higher when they had higher tariffs.

297

No, it will take about 5 years before we’re back to normal. Donald Trump (and his company) have declared bankruptcy several times, he effectively hits the reset switch. After the dusts settles he goes to a bank and negotiates a loan for a new venture. A year later he’s back to being rich.

If you hit the reset switch, took all the money in the world and divided it equally, it would take about a year for the poor to piss it away and the rich to be back on top. It’s not that different than a game of poker. People often back after an hour that one person has so much they can bully everyone around. But start again and they’ll be back there after a few hands.

I used to work with a charity that tried to break the poverty cycle, a remarkably cool project that could never get enough funding. The director would often complain, “kids, cancer and disaster are the only things people give money to.” Long story short, when people would apply for various social programs it often took months before they got their first check, and that check was often backdated to include payment for those three months. Handing a low income family $3000 was the worst thing anyone could ever do. I don’t mean to generalize all low income families, but this guy spent his career dealing with that very problem. A low income family could live for years on $500 a month, and when suddenly handed $3000 they’d go broke.

The director spent a lot of time lobbying to change how social assistance was paid out, trying to keep it from being monthly because the people he worked with couldn’t manage a month of finances. Essentially, what ever you gave them lasted a week. So the best thing you could do was give them 1 weeks worth at a time.

Long story short, it wasn’t capitalism that kept people down. Even when provided with dozens of social programs it’s possible for people to keep themselves down.

298

That isn’t how evolution works. One species does not change wholesale into another.

[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
Maybe we should take steps to ensure our trade balance is at or near positive levels. Canada’s trade balance is never as bad as ours is. You’re not shipping jobs overseas like we are.
[/QUOTE]

**And yet Canada has international trade every bit as free as that of the United States. ** If free trade and a reduction of tariffs is what causes trade deficits, as you have repeatedly claimed, why is Canada’s trade deficit not as bad as that of the USA? Why is our unemployment level lower?

299

You have it backwards. It used to take everyone working at full capacity to produce enough food to survive. You couldn’t have skilled jobs because people spent all their time working in the fields. Technology freed up labour to become skilled.

Compare and contrast: I just spent a few weeks in Tanzania and then a few weeks in Costa Rica, and it was amazing how similar the landscape was, both being so close to the equator. The biggest difference was that when looking at a corn field you’d either see dozens of children pushing a plow, or one guy driving a tractor. The other different you don’t see is that CR made a huge push to provide free education.

There are people in this (and the other) thread complaining that technology stole jobs without replacing them. But the reality is that in Tanzania kids don’t get the chance to be skilled labourers because they’re stuck pushing a plow.

Americans have the opportunity to go to school until age 30 because our economy doesn’t need them until they are fully trained.

Kids in Tanzania spent a significant portion of their time carrying water, then boiling it. That’s time lost to training for skilled labour. CR made a huge push to get clean drinking water, allowing kids an extra hour a day to study towards becoming skilled labour.

When jobs were first offshored, it was the lowest ends of production. Most of the time it meant that small components were mass produced cheaply then shipped back to the US for final (skilled) assembly. The big complaint now is that Chinese labourers are getting more skilled and taking more jobs.

Software engineering used to be a highly skilled job, but eventually it was split into high and low level coding. The low level stuff was offshored to the Ukraine freeing up skilled labour to spend more time on the high level stuff. And it’s the high level stuff that generates wealth, not the low end coding.

There will always be sources of commissions. Always. As long as money is changing hands there will be commissions.

In effect that’s what American has become. Instead of making then selling a cheap piece of crap, Americans switched to importing then selling cheap pieces of crap. You’ll notice that we don’t yet have a system for buying directly from the factories in China. We still pay commissions each time money changes hands.

Right, which is why we’ve used technology to replace the work people were doing between age 12 and 25. Look at the jobs people were doing 100 years ago. Kids stopped going to school because they were needed. Technology freed them up to go to school.

I grew up in an area where kids were routinely taken out of school in the spring and fall to help with the farms.

No, that’s the mistake, you don’t need wealth. Land in the US is still practically free. No you can’t have an acre of farm land in downtown Manhatten take a look at this

The current problem in the US is that people aren’t willing to live a subsistence life. All over the world people live off a few dollars per day, and that’s in areas where food costs considerably more.

The rich can’t take all the capital. They aren’t horders. Eventually they’ll want or need something, since it’s unlikely they’re growing their own food or making their own Ferraris. Like I said, there will always be commissions.

There’s plenty.

Who’s fault is that? How long can you possibly blame the rich? Take a moment to remove them from the equation and see what’s left over. What sort of problems are there, and who is causing them?

300

Trump doesn’t go broke, only his company does. And his company is publicly owned, so it’s the shareholders who go broke. He builds companies and gets out before anything bad can happen. He always has a pretty substantial amount of money at his disposal.

Second, poor people handle money badly because they have on experience with it. The problem is that, under the current system, one mistake can knock you out, and nobody teaches you how to handle money. It’s not because they are inherently bad with money. I would bet that those who are bad with money are overrepresented among the poor, but the idea that every poor person can not learn to handle money is silly. It’s their poorness that makes them overvalue money and thus not think rationally about it.

Plus, a large number rich people only really know what to do with a lot of money, not what to do with little. There still is the old wealth vs. new wealth dichotomy, and, in a reset, those who had old wealth would not rise back up to the top. Only those with new wealth would go back on top, with maybe a few extra people who already have the skill but lacked the funds before. I do have my doubts on whether this would be better: Didn’t early economics have an even larger disparity between the haves and have-nots?

301

Trump was pushed to the point of personal bankruptcy during that process (Taj Hotel). In other cases he had to give up control and forgo salary. He’s hardly a heart break story, the point is show to how quickly he can lose everything, and how quickly he can get it all back. He was famous for saying, “the key is to owe so much people have a financial steak in your success.” And you’ll notice that even after massive failures, people are willing to invest in/with him.

Mostly true. Like I said, I was part of a program that taught people how to handle money. But that required them making a personal investment of 1 Thursday night per week. Do you know how many people couldn’t be bothered to show up? In exchange they were given the opportunity to get subsidized rent. The goal was to teach them enough to save for the downpayment on a house. The house payments were meant to cost less than their rent.

The only requirement for getting into the program was having 6 months of continuous employment. You’d be amazed how many people don’t have that. And the only requirement for staying in the program was showing up on time Thursday night. Again, you’d be amazed how many people couldn’t be bothered.

Possible. America was advertised as land of the free, and it’s unfortunate it didn’t turn out that way. But even with all the shit going on, the opportunity is there for people that want it. The US is still massively socialized despite what many believe.

Also very true. It takes a generation to earn it, a generation to hold it, and a generation to lose it.

Exactly, the lesson here should be that wealth is in many ways independent of where you start. People with capital can and do lose it all. Look at lottery winners as proof of concept. Poor people, when given capital, stay poor.

Right. So after a few years those with new wealth would be back on top, with a few new people. Old wealth on the bottom with the old poor. A generation later we’re back where we started. The new wealth becomes Old wealth with a few new people. Meanwhile the poor stay poor.

How many people rob banks then become financially self sufficient? This thread (and the other) are advocating we all rob banks to make things seem fair. Robert Mugabe blamed white farmers for all the ills of the world, so he took their land and gave it away. Didn’t work out so well.