Slashdot Mirror
Fewer Than Half of Young Americans Are Positive About Capitalism (cnbc.com)
gollum123 writes: According to a new poll from Gallup, young Americans are souring on capitalism. Less than half, 45 percent, view capitalism positively. "This represents a 12-point decline in young adults' positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68 percent viewed it positively," notes Gallup, which defines young Americans as those aged 18 to 29. Meanwhile, 51 percent of young people are positive about socialism. This age group's "views of socialism have fluctuated somewhat from year to year," reports Gallup, "but the 51 percent with a positive view today is the same as in 2010."
The boomers pulled the ladder up on them.
As long there is strong regulation behind it keep things honest and upfront.
No-small-print capitalism.
... seeing as how fewer than half of them will ever be able to pay off their college loans. Maybe if we want to prove capitalism can work for everyone we should stop letting rich people write all the laws?
The young always think there is a better way. As they grow up, they realize that the current way works, while most "good ideas" don't. But, enough new ideas do work to keep the system changing.
When you got millionaires and billionaires putthing themselves ahead at the expense of the public, people are not going to have a positive opinion of capitalism.
The people who came before them are rigging the system against them so only they and their kids who made it can benefit. The ladder has been pulled up and these young folks are starting to realize this more and more.
If you're not a liberal at 20... https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
In other words, 65% of Americans are so dumb, they actually think we have capitalism...
And only fifty million Chinese had to die miserably for that communist utopia!
Lets not mention that the average standard of living in China only began to improve once they began adopting capitalism or that the communist regime risks being overthrown if they hint at turning back the clock to that utopia.
The system we have now is really corporatism. Very large, essentially immortal, companies that are able to achieve regulatory capture and get laws written for themselves.
Look at the way that the coal companies were able to get an exemption to clean water laws to blow the tops off of mountains and destroy streams and creeks. All so they could reduce labor costs. That's one hell of an externality they got out of.
small "c" capitalism is something a free society has to have, i.e. the ability to buy and sell goods in a relatively unfettered market. No you don't get to sell nuclear weapons, so there has to be some manner of regulation.
corporatism is all about shifting costs to the public and creating a bullshit concept that companies are somehow outside of morality and ethics. They want to be outside of morality and ethics but that doesn't mean we have to let them.
Absolute statements are never true
this again. Socialism =/= Communism.
We started by breeding the compettion out of them all....that "everyone is a winner" bullshit, with you get a trophy just for processing oxygen.
And apparently we didn't teach them history, like how many in the past died due to socialism, nor did we teach them civics on how govt should work and their part in it...etc.
Well, its been a good run till now....just hope this crap doesn't come to pass till I'm well dead and underground, so that it doesn't affect my quality of life I and my peers worked hard for....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
they haven't lived in a (real) socialist country.
Norway and Sweden have both been pretty successful at what they are doing, maybe they are better examples than China or Russia.
It makes sense younger people would be susceptible to bad ideas and in particular people that say everything should be free. Hell I'd take everything free if I believed someone it was possible. Still these people have no experience, things that are too good to be true often are. And hell at that young age people are voting democrat solely because America is a democracy and democrat sounds similar.
I think actually it's because they are envisioning Europe; they don't want socialism as in a real socialist country, but things like socialized medicine, etc. I've heard often from conservatives that Europe is socialism and it's failing, meaning while things couldn't be more different in that living in a european country is quite different than many people think and really they don't have socialism from that strict sense of the term.
Let's see, the economic system that has raised more people out of poverty than any other, young people aren't sure about. The education system in every country on earth is just..wow.
It's not an A or B choice, though. There's a 2-dimensional spectrum with one dimension being capitalism --- socialism, the other being authoritarianism --- libertarianism. Most younger people want less authoritarianism and more socialism, but it's not a bilateral choice between "Mao" and "the US."
In your version of history did you fail to include all the people that died due to capitalism as well? Also what is your definition of socialism?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's almost like capitalism hasn't done shit to help 2+ generations of people in a row.
Surely, blaming them for the problem while selling them down the road will serve the generations that didn't get totally fucked over.
This is what happens when post-modernists take over the school systems and Western Values are treated as bad instead of good.
Or young people see the generation before them loaded with debt and unable to afford to purchase a house, see a political ruling class that does not care about them, and see companies making record profits and all the money going to an increasingly smaller percentage of the population and are realizing "yep, the system's broken".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. It doesn't exist. Socialism has been tried many times on many levels and it simply doesn't work.
Capitalism has a successful record. It has raised more people up from poverty than any other system in history. But you have to work for it.
As far as the U.S. college debt situation: look at who is running it: Government. Is adding more government to the problem going to solve it? Probably not. Be smart about it. Use community college (or high school) to get GE requirements done cheaply. Get a job to help offset some of the cost, don't just use the college loans to pay for 100% the cost. Use credit cards wisely and don't spend money you don't have. Don't eat out. Ramen noodles and PB&J are your friends.
Before entering college for that 4 year degree, be absolutely certain that's what you want to do. Most of my friends that graduated college aren't using their degree in their current field. Hell, some didn't need a 4 year degree at all.
Trade schools. Seriously. Use them. These careers can be very rewarding and pay very good salaries. Less student debt, start a career earlier and start saving for retirement earlier.
Many 4 year college grads have the equivalent of a home mortgage when they leave school. That's bad for many reasons and a drain on the economy.
Obviously I'm posting generalities. But they are truths. In the U.S. you are responsible for your education after high school. Choose wisely.
Government run education is extremely costly. In my home state they decided to offer free preschool to everyone. In my blue-collar town of 25,000 where up to 40% of the population is receiving some type of government assistance our preschool participation rate was 96%. After "free" preschool was announced by the state the cost per pupil per year went from $1,200 to $3,700 in one year. The new participation rate was still 96%. Why did the state government run program cost 3 times more to run than the private and community based system? Nobody seems to know. How do you suppose that would translate at the college level if college were determined to be "free"?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
You do realize that socialism is mainstream in Europe, right? I'm looking around and I don't see any gulags here.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Once upon a time, most of the value of the American economy was from actual goods and services, and not so intrinsically tied to the stock market. Since about the late 1970s, the American economy has been tied to the stock market, which has engendered dangerous short term thinking.
This, combined with the hollowing out of organized labor and the ever widening wealth disparity in the US has led to inevitable situation.
What would anyone expect? A heart warming embrace of a system geared to enrich and empower those who are already rich and powerful?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
We raised a generation of idiots.
If you raised them and screwed it up then YOU are the idiot, not them.
And apparently we didn't teach them history, like how many in the past died due to socialism
You seriously think capitalism hasn't resulted in anyone dying? Evidently you didn't learn much history yourself.
they haven't lived in a (real) socialist country.
I neighther have you, apparently.
Because if you did you'd know about a number of social-democrat countries, particularly in Europe, that have been doing spectacularly well for a number of decades.
But your post clearly shows that you're ignorant, but it also shows, and that is worse, that you don't even know that you're ignorant.
And that is to be expected for such a closed, culturally isolationist country like the US, where the vast majority of the population, especially in the red states, speak only one language and have never been more than fifty miles away from the place where they were born, let alone travelled the world.
More accurately stated, young people are not positive about how Capitalism is practiced in America.
You are quick to blame people without closely examining how corrupt and rotten the system become. From debtor's prison of student loans, to bank bailouts, to suppression of tech wages by no-poaching agreements and H1Bs, there is plenty reasons to be skeptical.
As to idealized version of Capitalism, that would be great, but what country has it implemented?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also what is your definition of socialism?
That's one part of a two-part problem. The first part is that there is a concerted marketing effort by a large chunk of progressives to redefine "social democrat" to simply "socialist". I think this may be some kind of political Darwinism as people try to emulate the stadium-filling success of Bernie Sanders by cargo-culting his misuse of the word "socialism".
Then on the other side you have people who know that their ideological opponents are misusing the term, but pretend that they are in fact referring to centralized control over production. So the resulting criticism is not about Denmark, but rather Venezuela. I suspect they are doing this because it makes their opponents an easy target.
So here we are with a discussion overwhelmingly dominated by people making dishonest arguments, and apparently we've done such a poor job educating our young people that many of them are oblivious to the total sham of a discussion going on.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Also what is your definition of socialism?
Socialism: Government ownership of the means of production.
That is what "socialism" means. That is the only thing it means. It has been tried many times, and has never worked well.
But when "young people" say they like socialism, that is NOT what they mean. They mean we should be like Denmark.
The problem is that Denmark is a capitalist country. In many ways they are more capitalist than America. Even their post office is privatized. They rate higher than America on the ease of doing business index.
They have fairly generous tax payer funded social benefits, but so does Greece. Nobody talks about the "Greek Model", but it is basically the same as the "Danish Model" except Greece is populated by Greeks instead of Danes. The "Danish Model" doesn't transplant well. It didn't work in Greece, and it didn't work in Detroit either.
When young people say they want socialism, they really mean they want someone else to pay off their student loans.
I don't want to do the Denmark model either...I don't wanna pay well over half my income to the govt, for them to redistribute.
I pay at least about 33% as it is, I don't feel like I should be forced to give even more.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Exactly. It's more a question of redistribution. I don't think many progressives (however that is defined) want a state-run economy, which really is what socialism, at least as it is traditionally defined, is about. It's been useful for conservatives and libertarians to define progressive economic ideas which are fundamentally redistributive as somehow Marxian, but they're really not.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'd argue that a purely socialist state has never really existed at all. Marx's fundamental theory was that agrarian societies were not at a level of social or economic development where his economic and political theories would even work. Both the Soviet Union and China had to literally ramp up their fundamentally agrarian economies through rapid industrialization just to get them to a point where the whole notion of collectivism, in the Marxist sense, would even be possible. And really, since most of the Communist economies ended up being labeled some variant of "Marxist-Leninist", these economies still retained a limited space for private enterprise, at least until the Cultural Revolution in China, which even most Chinese Communists now view as a horrible aberration that had more to do with Mao reasserting control of China after he'd been effectively sidelined when the full extent of the catastrophe that the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s had created.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The system we have isn't Capitalism, it's Cronyism. Brought on because people think that Keynesian economics is somehow a good thing. Sadly this line of thinking is so prevalent on both sides of the isle, that it will never get fixed until the system collapses. Young people today have never seen Capitalism, they have only seen Cronyism and yet everybody calls it Capitalism. It isn't.
You do still see Capitalism at lower levels of society. The farmers markets, the used/antique markets etc. But those in government don't make money on these, they would rather make the big bucks working with large corporations. As a result, the large corporations get the laws passed that they want, usually at the expense of the little guy. Hence Cronyism wins the day.
Now, if we can just get young people to understand the difference...
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
this again. Socialism =/= Communism.
As Karl Marx himself said, Socialism is just the step in between Capitalism and Communism.
All forms of Marxist Collectivism (Socialism, Communism, Fascism) are authoritarian They are authoritarian by their by their very nature and share many principles in common as they are all based on Marxism.
This includes "Democratic Socialism" which is an oxymoron in itself as it tries to put lipstick on that same old, tired, Marxist pig. Socialism and Communism are responsible for killing far, far more of their own people in peacetime than the Nazis did altogether in WW2.
"Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!".
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Yeah, now they want another trial at what failed in the Eastern Europe
What failed in Eastern Europe was communism. I'm not a huge fan of socialism but it is far less extreme than communism. Europe and Canada are now somewhere on the spectrum between socialism and capitalism, trying to find a balance between allowing people the freedom to generate wealth while also ensuring that some of that wealth provides a social safety net for those less fortunate.
... 3 hours in.
You need a safety net.
The US spends about $10000 per person (about $27000 per taxpayer) on our safety nets. That's a pretty big net. (That includes $1.1T on Medicare, $980B on Social Security, $300B on income security programs ("welfare" etc), and $550B on Medicaid. )
Young people are perhaps overreacting to the negative realities of capitalism.
Young people are not "overreacting", they've simply been brainwashed. They aren't idiots, at least not moreso than young people in any age, they're forming reasonable opinion based on what the schools teach these days (which is pure propaganda).
China manipulates all of the isms masterfully
Did I mention pure propaganda? China's economy is quite bad, despite building endless seas of condos that no one lives in. They have a burgeoning tech sector, to be sure, but rural poverty remains the norm and manufacturing is shrinking as US manufacturing returns (to robots) in the US. You do know the trains didn't actually run on time under fascism, right?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The thing I find so disheartening is how many younger Americans reject Capitalism, in favor of a form of Socialism -- without realizing that this isn't as simple as an A or B pair of options. If you want Socialism, fine .... There are many places in the world actively practicing it, and you're welcome to move there. America was created as a unique experiment in the world, creating a Democratic Republic. IMO, it's proven itself not only viable but arguably superior to many other forms of rule by central governments. I wholeheartedly believe that as a U.S. citizen, I should do everything in my power to preserve this framework.
Obviously, we have a lot of flaws, corruption and other negatives. But show me ANY government that's perfect, except on paper.
IMO, what we need to be focusing on in America is how to move forward, to PRESERVE the Democratic Republic that our Founders created and made into a reality. Corporatism is really what most people are complaining about when they say they're anti-Capitalist. Corporatism is simply a situation where big business managed to collude with government to avoid being governed fairly by it. This can be addressed and mitigated without resorting to Socialism!
America has already done too much dabbing in Socialist practices to appease various groups. Even when it creates a "workable" solution to a specific problem? It weakens our whole system of government, because it means we took an "easy way out" or shortcut, copy-catting what other countries did, rather than finding an answer that doesn't go against the principles that built what we've got here.
Perhaps the place this "battle" is most evident, today, is the healthcare debate. Single-payer or Socialized medicine is something I just can't accept, even though I accept that it's ONE solution that basically works for other countries. If we stick to our core values and principles that defined America, I think we have to conclude it's unfair to demand medical professionals all get paid a fixed salary, as dictated by Federal government. I think we have to conclude that no, healthcare is NOT a right in America. You have every right to pursue better health for yourself, obviously. But as soon as you need medical care, you're demanding the services of another person or group of people who invested many years into education and training to be good enough to perform those services. They aren't your slaves, nor do you have a right to force other American citizens to pay their fees to treat you. We DO need to stop the collusion/ Corporatism that allows big pharma to get protectionist treatment by government for exclusive rights to sell medications, and to prevent competitors in other countries from importing their offerings here as legal alternatives.
Take the US for example where capital accumulation continues indefinitely leading to higher and higher concentrations of wealth. One obvious issue here is this then shifts social power to the wealthy through governmental manipulation.
Shifts? This presupposes that social power was ever out of the hands of the wealthy. I'm not entirely sure it was.
From ancient times to medieval times, people in power were rich and rich people were in power. They were practically inextricably linked.
In the Age of Mercantilism, rich people were so powerful they owned private armies. The Dutch West India Company managed to capture the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, stealing their entire cargo. (Among many other similar things of that era.)
In the Gilded Age in North America, a dozen men controlled the industry of the entire continent.
In the 1940s and 50s, television was such a fantastically powerful propaganda tool that Boomers were effectively controlled by a few dozen people.
Today, a handful of major websites are so influential that Congress holds hearings about it.
Control has been getting less overt and somewhat more diffuse, but it still rests with rich people. They're having to work harder to maintain it, but they are maintaining it. Tax law benefits them, not me. The courts benefit them, not me. Congress represents them, not me, except by accident.
When was this mythical time when society was controlled by anything other than rich people?
It's quite obvious people aren't happy with the current social contract because most citizens are falling further and further into losing their half, so to speak. As such, they're rightfully upset.
Rich people back through the Gilded Age knew to allow more than mere crumbs to fall from their table. Modern rich people seem to have forgotten that. They have far more medieval attitudes than we've been accustomed to for the past century and a half.
It's gotten so bad that we're no longer better off than our parents. That's when we really noticed things not going well. I personally am, but my brother isn't. Going down the list of my cousins, only one of them is doing better than his parents, because he married well. The rest are either hanging on, or doing markedly worse than their parents. Looking around my neighborhood, the number of houses with 3 and 4 and 5 cars parked at them is higher than it ever was when I was young, as Millennials either fail to launch and boomerang home, or launch much much later than was previously the norm, because they simply can't afford the real estate to move out. What I see jives with the statistics I hear about.
The Libertarian Lunatic fringe of Slashdot will be quick to point out that young Americans are being heavily propagandized at their universities about socialism and communism, so it's all their fault. I contend that universities have been propagandizing since the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. It's gaining traction again now because capitalism is failing to make young people's lives better, for the first time in quite a while. If capitalism was working better for the masses, they would go on ignoring university propaganda just as they did for most of the last 170 years.
I'm not so sure that there's a generation of people who don't blindly accept what they're told and question, or apply logic and reason. Reading Youtube comments for an hour is enough to disabuse you of that notion. What I am sure of is there's a generation of people looking up from their empty plates and saying, "I was promised cake. Where's the cake?"
You could have made the same argument about Slavery in 1830.
Just because a system hasnâ(TM)t been tried yet isnâ(TM)t an argument for not trying that system.
The Soviet Union failed at that. Yes it was Communism but they aren't too different. Even in socialist countries today you still have the haves and the have nots. People fail to believe that society stratifies on its own and not by the will of some uber ultra elite. There are those that will work to the bone to secure their lives and there are those that will complain that the man holds them down, even when the man is the only thing propping them up.
I've got a buddy with Type-I diabetes. The kind your born with and that you die of without insulin. He can't work because the illness kicks the crap out of him for about 2 months every year, and it's a random 2 months. He barely made it through high school. Smart guy, but not Einstein grade smarts so no employer is going to put up with him.
He's pretty right wing. Has a got family who worked in defense. So he gets his political views from there.
When asked about healthcare he understands that he needs socialized medicine or he dies. Again, he's smart. He's figured out that in a pure capitalist economy he couldn't possibly earn the money to pay for his care. You should hear the convoluted mess of a healthcare system he came up with that preserves his ideological system while ensuring he gets care. It was like Obamacare but with much bigger subsidies and more guarantees of care. To his credit when I pointed out that he agreed that he'd basically created a socialized medicine but with a 30% surcharge for private insurance profits.
I'm not saying we can't have a mixed system. I'm in favor of single _payer_, e.g. the gov't pays but otherwise stays out of things. But that's still socialism. At some point I think we have to admit that capitalism as we idolize it just plain doesn't work.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah like those hellhole of danemark , sweden, etc... You can mark everything as a failure if you ignore the success the only gather the failure. The truth is, socialism and capitalism together , the one to build a social net to avoid people falling down, the other to enhance society as a whole is MUCH better than either one pushed to 11. At the moment the US is doing capitalism pushed to 11, and the younger generation can recognize they are getting fucked in the ass without vaseline. You know people are young, not dumb.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The problem is the conservatives are operating on bad science and bad economics ...
Or, at the very least, in bad faith.
Sure, if taxes are so important and you prefer to pay premiums for healthcare, pension and the school education of your kids, and need a gun to feel save, and several cars for your family to go around over the course of the week, then Denmark is nothing for you.
If I earn a million per year, or for funk sake only 100,000 ... I don't care if the tax is 33%, 50% or in case of fhe million, even 90%
For what would I need more than 50,000 - 100,000 disposable income?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
small "c" capitalism is something a free society has to have, i.e. the ability to buy and sell goods in a relatively unfettered market.
You're confusing a free market with capitalism, which is not the same thing. It's also a very common mistake to make given the propaganda in the US that intentionally wants us to associate "freedom" with capitalism.
Capitalism simply means private ownership and control of resources -- land, natural resources, and modern industrial means of production. Private ownership means generally speaking a person (a dictator or monarch) or a small board of directors (an oligarchy) make all the decisions about the use of resources and production. On the surface, this seems like a very fair thing -- you own it, why shouldn't you get to decide? -- but the problem with this line of thought is the scale we're talking. When a capitalist decides to clear cut a forest, that forest is now gone and even if he sells the land later, no other person gets to use that forest ever again. What if someone else wanted to create a park? Too late, capitalist decided already. What if a majority of people in the area wanted a park instead of a clear cut field? What if that forest and all those tree roots helped soak up water and prevent flooding, but now without it, surrounding neighborhoods easily flood? What if that forest held a rare species of tree or animal that could have lead to a medical discovery? Even if we needed to cut the trees down for firewood or paper or whatever, maybe we would have preferred to the wood go to local community members and not sold in China or wherever? Too late, capitalist already decided.
That's the problem with private ownership of resources and production. Most if not all resource use decisions actually impact all of us, at least community-wide if not planet-wide (as climate change is producing). And yet we are allowing monarchs and oligarchs make those decisions for our communities and nations without any input. Is that fair and just for someone else to decide things that impact your family and community without you having any say in the process whatsoever? I understand you might not always get what you want, but right now you don't even have a vote. A CEO decides and that's it, can legally do what they want (within broad confines of regulation that politicians continually cut and weaken) and completely ignore you and your family and your community. If it makes your house flood more, they don't care. If it causes environmental damage that gives you and your family lung cancer, they don't care. You don't have any say.
Socialism is the idea that resources and production should be publicly-owned and democratically managed. That's really all it is. Because of certain historical events people confuse socialism with authoritarian takeovers of those countries, but again, like the free market and capitalism, they are not the same thing. All we're talking about it more democracy, that you and your family and your community should have a vote and decide how those resources are used and that it should not be left to private decision-making behind closed doors by people who don't necessarily live in your community or even country.
Note also, as a common misconception, that socialist theory typically distinguishes between "private property", which is private ownership of natural resources and industrial means of production, and "personal property" which is your family home. Socialists don't generally care about your family home or your toothbrush or your clothes or your car, do whatever you want at home when you're not bothering anyone. No one is going to take your house. It's about democratizing economic decisions for the big industrial questions that affect all of us, it's about making sure no one businessperson CEO can force their economic vision on you and the community, you have to all agree together democratically. You get more individual freedoms and more say-so under a democratic system -- both politic
The Great Famine that occurred when China prohibited farm ownership (big feature of Communism), replacing (killing) all of the skilled farmers and replacing them with "The People" who had no clue how to grow food and no one left alive to teach them. All part of that Great Leap Forward!
People could easily look past capitalism's iniquitous allocation of wealth when everyone's standard of living was going up and America was the freest country in the world.
Unfortunately most people's standard of living has been dropping for at least a generation. At the same time the American Gulag has become the largest in the world, filled almost entirely with persons who were coerced into "confessing".
No longer able or willing to provide freedom & prosperity, the capitalist/financialist oligarchy has lost the mandate of heaven. People are beginning to look at it more like criminal gang and less like a legitimate government.
whoa is me, I got a social liberal arts degree from a private school now I can't cash flow my student loan! Capitalism sucks, whine, whine, whine....
Hardly, true capitalism punishes bad choices and rewards hard work. Believing 20 somethings run the world is movie BS. Study hard, do a good job, pay your dues and when you hit 40 or 50, you get ahead and have enough experience to run the show.
One of the problems is you've all been babied by "everyone is a winner and gets a ribbon!", that's not reality. The real world is full of winners and losers. Some ideas a bad. Some people are bad. That's life.
What remains is a plutocratic corporate socialism sold to the masses as free market capitalism. No wonder they don't like it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I still don't see it. We live far better than our grandparents by any metric. Could it be better? Hell yes! Hopefully that's what gets you out of bed in the morning and contributing something positive to the world instead of sitting around bitching and repeating hyperbole. Nobody owes you anything, get out there and make it happen.
Unless everything is so entrenched in beauracracy like NASA that hardly anything gets done, there will always be mistakes.
Correct. There will be random accidents caused by human fuck-ups in either system. However, on top of this there is pressure to beat your competition leads people to take short cuts and cut costs in the capitalist system which will undoubtedly lead to most mistakes. This is a pressure that is almost completely absent from the socialist system where the tendency is to become NASA-like: completely safe but utterly boring. This is why socialism tends to be used for "boring" things like water, electricity and gas where there is little to no competition or innovation.
I'll bring this a step further: one ridiculous argument I heard for communism is that slavery would never have occured.
That really is ridiculous because in communism everyone is a slave to the state!
My grandparents had:
- much healthier food
- cleaner air
- more personal freedom
- larger living space
- greater economic opportunity
- less crime
- less mental illness
- much stronger families
- easier access to medical attention
Thanks we have:
- much better plumbing & HVAC
- far better medical technology... for those who can afford it
- wider access to long distance travel
- access to far more information, i.e. the internet
The progressive ideology that things just keep getting better in every way with the passage of time is ahistorical.
What a load of nonsense. You have bought into sensationalist news. Crime is lower than any time in last 50 years. Practically everything is safer - cars, planes, household items, medicines, food, etc. Creature comforts are so much better; you likely ride around in a car that is so far advanced over what the wealthiest person could afford. I am going to guess that home ownership rates are better thanal.ost anytime in history, and the houses are better built, too. If you honestly think the past was better then you are misguided and ignorant. Humans easily forget the bad and remember the good so are memories are distorted.
My comment has nothing to do with capitalism vice any other system. It is against blatant lies about history.
Charities don't give the money out equitably. For the most part they have an agenda and you either have to meet a criteria or do something for the charity. What happens to the people who don't meet the criteria or are incapable of what is asked? Gay youth make up something like 40% of the homeless children. I can guarantee you that most of the Christian charities would ask them to "renounce their wicked ways" before helping them. Since being gay isn't a choice, that would be a little difficult for the kids to do.
Charity isn't a guarantee. You say charity would be a more robust net and that may be true for some, but the net would definitely have larger holes in it than the one the government provides. A thin blanket is better than none at all.
I would also point out that terrible people always find a way. If we were to switch to social safety nets based on charity, there would immediately be people taking advantage of both sides of the system. The rich would use their promises of donations to distort the missions of charities to favor the rich and the scammers would set up shop finding ways of getting more than they should. That is inevitable.
In fact, while writing this, it occurred to me that shifting everything over to charity would allow for much less oversight. There would be more grift. What is the purpose of that? The charities that you know may be stellar, but you can't deny there are terrible people out there willing to use the word "charity" to make money. Heck, our president uses his "charity" to pay off his legal fees. It's like we are in a cave of scarcity and you anti-government people want the rest of us to throw away the flashlight. And it really sounds like you just don't want to pay taxes for the programs that you disagree with and to hell with other people.
Also, Medicare alone is 702 billion dollars per year. 402 billion isn't going to cover it.
Also, also, I realized that the system you are suggesting would resemble the scholarship system for colleges. Have you ever applied for scholarships? It is a PITA. It is always not enough, there are always conditions on the money, and you always find the great ones after it is too late to apply. Scholarships are what happen when you leave college tuition funding to charity.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
The system we have isn't Capitalism, it's Cronyism. Brought on because people think that Keynesian economics is somehow a good thing. Sadly this line of thinking is so prevalent on both sides of the isle, that it will never get fixed until the system collapses. Young people today have never seen Capitalism, they have only seen Cronyism and yet everybody calls it Capitalism. It isn't.
You do still see Capitalism at lower levels of society. The farmers markets, the used/antique markets etc. But those in government don't make money on these, they would rather make the big bucks working with large corporations. As a result, the large corporations get the laws passed that they want, usually at the expense of the little guy. Hence Cronyism wins the day.
Now, if we can just get young people to understand the difference...
Cronyism or crony capitalism is capitalism in a pure form... The farmers markets et al. are examples of small market economies which scale out to be mixed economies.
The problem isn't that young people don't understand the difference, it's that you have made up your own definitions.
Successful economies are always mixed economies, combining parts of capitalism, socialism, free market libertarianism and controlled markets. There's plenty of room to argue which mix is best but pure forms of these ideas are and have always been bound for failure.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.