You are right…it’s actually 10’s of millions that died in the various experiments. And every one of them ended in miserable failure or, ironically, a switch to at least bolt on some aspects of capitalism to prop up their failing economies.
A death trap where basically no one dies is certainly a horrible thing to be avoided at all costs. We should certainly reject the economic system that has brought about the greatest lowering of poverty and greatest influx of standard of living in human history because it’s not perfect while either experimenting with some half baked economic plan that’s never been tried or, better yet, one’s that have been tried in various ways and have resulted in ACTUAL massive death and economic failure! What could go wrong??
I’m afraid this ‘while’ goes on indefinitely for any system that is not capitalist to begin with. If it goes on indefinitely, then nations like Mexico should reject capitalism as an inapplicable solution and seek for something else. I take it you have an argument that the ‘while’ you refer to has a limit. Could you please offer an argument that there is a time limit?
(I will add, though, I still go with the experts that regard Mexico as a capitalist state despite its local peculiarities. Such peculiarities can be identified in Mexican people’s beliefs and practices, but they can’t be dismissed as non-catholics, for example.)
I can only assume that you took your education at VBoard Anonymous. There is no such thing as anarcho-communism, outside of message board opinions. The two systems of government are not just irreconcilable in practice or principle, they are irrevocably and diametrically opposed.
In order from moderate to the more extreme in current American politics:
The Right
Conservative
Libertarian
Anarchist
The Left
Democrat
Socialist
Communist
I leave it to you to explain to me and the board how you could possibly confuse the two concepts.
Unicorns don’t exist, and they will never exist no matter how buttery some people’s nipples get when they dream of these wondrous beasts.
Communism could be a unicorn.
The explicit purpose of the Soviet Union was to create a communist society. Millions upon millions of people died in the Soviet Union. The explicit purpose of Maoist China was to create a communist society. Millions upon millions of people died in Maoist China. The explicit purpose of the Khmer Rouge was to create a communist society. Millions of people died in Khmer Cambodia. The explicit purpose of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea used to be the creation of a communist society. God knows how many people have died there.
This is the historical record. I didn’t make any of it up.
No one else cares about this distinction. Their “actual intentions” don’t matter because there are only two cases: (1) If they were sincere communists, then sincere communists were sincerely trying to create a communist society. And the result was millions upon millions of deaths. (2) If they were not sincere communists, then the vast majority of influential communists in history were not sincere communists. They used the goal of communism as an excuse to take power. And the result was millions upon millions of deaths.
In both cases, there is no reason for any of us to trust this stated goal. Either we’re talking to people who are sincere, who will kill millions upon millions of people, or we’re talking to people who are historically established as not sincere, who will kill millions upon millions of people. It doesn’t matter which is which. The very label, self-applied, is a warning sign: that way lies death on epic scale. People who have screamed loudly about pushing toward their glorious communist future have brought about unprecedentedly murderous results. It makes utterly no difference whether they were sincere or not as millions perished.
The stated goal has been poison. Now you repeat that goal. Regardless of your personal level of sincerity, it’s not an attractive option.
What we have right now is the biggest anti-poverty campaign in the history of the world.
Never in all of human history have so many people been leaving wretched subsistence conditions so fast. Maoist China impoverished and murdered its people, and now proto-capitalist China is undoing that poverty at near miraculous speed. Their politics isn’t good, but the few basic reforms of their economic system have reduced human misery on a heretofore unseen scale. And you’re arguing against it like it’s a bad thing when nothing else in all of history has ever worked better.
Sure, I’ll take a shot at it…right after you give some examples of countries in which the transition to capitalism goes on indefinitely and explain why it’s capitalism that’s at fault.
As for how much of a ‘while’ it takes, that’s easy…it takes as long as it takes for a given country to become stable and for the rule of law in said country to become strongly embedded. Capitalism isn’t magic…it’s simply the best economic system that’s been used to date in human history. But it’s an ECONOMIC system…you have to have a certain amount of political stability if it’s going to do anything for you. It’s not going to magically give you that, it’s merely an engine that, if you are stable, is going to generate wealth for your county.
Which experts think that Mexico is a capitalist state, and for how long do they consider it to have been so? Feel free to provide some cites. Why do you think that it’s religion that has held back Mexico…assuming the last part of this means, er, something.
That’s a term that’s meant different things to different people over the years. If you wish to debate the merits of your particular Communist system, can you articulate it in detail, or link to someone to has?
Anarchism is left-wing. It has some overlap with the most radical forms of Libertarianism, but there are key distinctions, such as Libertarianism’s emphasis on property rights, and anarchism’s abolition of property rights.
You have got to be kidding. I made no mention at all of a decrease in unemployment, and a decrease in unemployment is the same thing as an increase in employment, which I didn’t mention.
Get back to us when you want to debate things that have actually been said.
The $20,000 figure was just a round number to demonstrate the concept, I don’t advocate it as the ideal figure. I’d leave that to experts.
Welfare/TANF would need to end. Section 8 wouldn’t be needed if the NIT scaled to local cost of living. SNAP might still have value if it were limited to healthy foods, one of the many problems facing the poor is unhealthy diets, and the subsequent obesity, diabetes, heart problems, and so forth. SS/SSI/SSDI could end too.
Health care is separate from income as a consideration, so Medicare/Medicaid could stay, or better still, be replaced by a universal system, perhaps on the Swiss model.
[QUOTE=Model Citizen]
I don’t really want to get bogged down in exact numbers and excruciating detail, but I will say that I would be okay with the NIT if could match or exceed the current net amount of aid to the poor.
[/quote]
That’s the idea, without the problem (not as bad as it once was, admittedly) that getting a job or a better-paying job can cause a loss of benefits greater than the gain in wage income.
The NIT is great for that. If you can’t work, you earn $0, and thus qualify for the full subsidy payment. It wouldn’t be a lavish lifestyle, but neither is SSDI.
The problem is incrementalism: a dozen or so federal programs, plus various state and local ones, put in place by different administrations with different goals, and administered by different agencies. A single program is not only less wasteful, it’s more sensitive to the needs of the electorate. If SNAP is too low, only people on SNAP complain. If SSI is too low, only people on SSI complain. If there’s one program that replaces all of this, then there’s great political pressure available to make it work, and make it livable.
I think it’d work quite well once implemented, but the odds of it being implemented are low. Perhaps if Switzerland gets their somewhat similar basic-income program off the ground and it goes well, it could happen here. The Swiss are rather conservative by European standards, and thought to be sensible and frugal bankers. Their positive experience might have more impact on American than a Swedish or Danish one would, because as we all know, they are hedonistic Marxists.
It had an impact in the '70s, with the Earned Income Tax Credit. It was a sort of Republican alternative to the War on Poverty programs. Nixon endorsed it as the “family assistance plan”, but it died in the Senate, where it had the support of many Republicans, but not enough Democrats.
As for right now?
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) supports it, but not many others. If you read that article, you can see the problem: it’s hundreds of words about Alexander’s scandalous and evil desire to remove the minimum wage, two mentions that he wants to replace it with an NIT, and zero words explaining what that is. The intended effect is to shake one’s head at the wicked Republican who hates the poor, instead of considering his ideas.
The modern Republicans are too radical and obstructionist to support an NIT, and the Democrats are too invested in the current system, almost defining themselves by it. I might live to see an NIT or a similiar program, but then again I might not.
I knew your answer regarding the time limit was going to stay vague because the issue under discussion has barely anything to do with time.
Mexico is a capitalist state and a free market. It may not be a perfect one, but the USA isn’t either because perfection only exists in Plato’s heaven.
Mexico’s capitalism shows market failure due to its difficulty in tackling the endemic poverty that overrides large portions of the population.
As for the names and quotes you ask for, I think they can be easily found through an Internet browsing. But I don’t think it is necessary for us to hear a scientist’s name and see his words on a wall to believe the liquid in the ocean is really water.
I asked you why this was the case. You replied that:
So, again: You have asserted that capitalism cannot offer a future for millions of poor people. Given that capitalism has removed millions of people from poverty, and is still doing so as we speak, on what basis can we conclude that capitalism cannot cure absolute poverty for millions of other people?
The fact that capitalism inexorably leads to wealth concentration is high poverty levels. What prevents this from happening in certain countries is democracy, not capitalism itself, which does its best to circumvent democratic mechanism even in these states. Democracy and capitalism are two different things. Wealth concentration caused by capitalism is happing as we speak. As businesses deplete any source globally (giving the temporary feeling that local populations have a chance to thrive and be better off), people are left with fewer and fewer chances to escape endemic poverty in the long run.
Ah, but capitalism leads to the creation of wealth. Without having wealth, the concentration or distribution of it is meaningless. Observe Afghanistan’s low GINI coefficient of .28…almost everyone is poor. Yay?
Then how do you explain the recent easing of poverty in China, which is not a democracy?
This sounds like you believe that if one person is becoming richer, then someone else is becoming poorer. That is a fixed pie scenario which is not true under capitalism.
This last sentence does not follow. Now, it sounds like you believe that as people create things (i.e. use natural resources to create things of value and wealth) that those resources are (eventually) destroyed, leaving everyone poorer (or at least those who were more poor to begin with). (Which I guess is at least consistent with the earlier quoted statement). While that is true in an absolute sense, that is so far removed from anyone’s lifetime that it is not really factored into any discussion or rational thinking.
Regardless whether my analysis of your post is true or not, please provide an instance or a country where this is happening. Where is capitalism depleting resources that fewer and fewer people cannot escape edemic proverty? Here, in the US? In the US, where the living standard of the poor far outstrips the living conditions of non-capitalistic, non-free market countries or even recently made capitalistic or infancy capitalistic countries like Mexico (and I’ll throw in two others, China and India)?
Every time we have these discussions of wealth and proverty, I’m amazed at the discussions that capitalism should be ended, especially when provided with ample evidence that free markets/capitalism has done more to end poverty world wide than any government action (democratic, despotic, dictatorship, etc.) – more than any formally communistic, failed or tried or what have you style economy or government.
Seriously, the sheer simplicity of allowing free transactions backed by rule of law should the standard economic form for any country, particularly those that are the most impoverished. To summarize an earlier post, any attempt at communistic style or state-owned enterprise (and I mean truly state owned, like when anti-capitalists claim that there is no truly capitalistic/free market country) will lead to disaster, because in order to make such a system work will mean to change human nature. Since we don’t have magic wands or mind control devices, this will never happen. Systemic poverty can only be broken through education of both developing skill sets that is in market demand and knowing how to deal with and manage money.
Right…so, you figure you scored some sort of point because I can’t give a precise answer to such a vague and ridiculous question as ‘I take it you have an argument that the ‘while’ you refer to has a limit. Could you please offer an argument that there is a time limit?’? It hasn’t got anything to do with time limits because time isn’t the key factor, as I noted.
Continuing to assert this doesn’t make it so. How are you doing on getting that cite from the ‘experts’ who claim Mexico is a ‘capitalist state’? Nearly got that ready?
So…because Mexico had endemic poverty before it even had the little bit of bolt on capitalism it has today, it’s a market failure due to that poverty because it hasn’t turned around instantly? Um…ok. Gotcha chief.
So, IOW you gots nuffin…or you can’t be bothered to back up your assertions. Is that about the size of it? I’m not going to do your research for you, so if you can’t be bothered we’ll just go with the default, that your assertions aren’t supported.
I was asked to provide the name of a capitalist country with poverty problems, which did.
You dismissed my example as an invalid one. And you asked I should name the authority stating that the country named by me is really a capitalist one. Faced with this attitude, I refused to continue the game. Evidence for Mexico being capitalist is widely available on the Internet. This is not a real debate, but a war of attrition in my opinion.
Then you said you never claimed Mexico isn’t capitalist. Okay, I quit.
sigh You claimed that experts say that Mexico is a capitalist country. Do you retract that part or do you plan on providing a cite? It’s really a simple question.
As to what I said, the gist of it is that Mexico is a formerly socialist oriented country that has fairly recently bolted on some aspects of capitalism. That doesn’t make it a ‘capitalist country’ except by the loosest of definitions. Let me go over that again slowly, since I’ve already said all of this…Mexico is a former socialist country that has some aspects of capitalism bolted onto it. Seems simple enough to me. If you have an issue with what I actually said without cutting and pasting from several posts, then feel free to trot out those cites by experts who claim that Mexico is a ‘capitalist country’, because I’d be very interested in seeing how they justify that assertion and what their definition of ‘capitalist country’ is, and for how long they feel it’s been a capitalist country.
Or, feel free to quit if that’s what you want to do.
Ancient Greece was not a capitalist state. Relative poverty in ancient Greece was not as serious as it is in the USA.
Afghanistan is poor due to its political issues, not because of the lack of capitalism. Capitalism is not the automatic choice of a free public. Free elections in Egypt, for instance, may bring to power a religious party that may institute a theocratic regime absolutely democratically.
But as long as the relationships between nations in a globalist society are of capitalist nature, a non-capitalist state is forced to participate in the capitalist game willy-nilly. Which will maintain its levels of poverty because capitalism, to a great extent, is an economic war between all players, the big of which often create alliances to stifle the smaller ones, and especially their ideological enemies.
Yugoslavia was not a democracy either, and there was no poverty. But indeed, dictatorship made things bad in China, and its incompetent management in times of trouble of various sorts (economic decline, social tensions, natural disasters, etc.) made things go from bad to worse. China seems to accept capitalism, but it is only an impression. It has adopted capitalist measures under the pressure of the global market. If it becomes a more successful economy than that of the USA, its example may one day constitute the platform for an alternative economic model.
Right…so, you figure you scored some sort of point because I can’t give a precise answer to such a vague and ridiculous question as ‘I take it you have an argument that the ‘while’ you refer to has a limit. Could you please offer an argument that there is a time limit?’?