The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
It is almost dangerous to say this in public today (unless you’re ranting against the government) because people think this is some kind of communist manifesto against capitalism. They actually don’t realize that this is not philosophical or political it is simply math.
If it takes five things to survive and there are twenty and someone takes nineteen … that someone is the only one who will survive even though at least one other could have made it sans the greed factor. Oh and besides one of those that actually made the things is one of the ones that did not survive.
A friend of mine repelled strongly when I mentioned that capitalism rewards greed and that the greedy will rise to the top. She accused me of being a communist. I did point out that it was indeed the enormous greed of Europe and the USA that spawned communism. Communism arose from a deep aversion to the way that capitalism and any form of the free market caused 90% of the world to live in abject poverty in order to support the rich. Communism of course proved in more than one occasion to be a far worse abuser of its people than its devils. Some horridly sadistic and murderous people took over these fledgling utopias and turned them to killing fields equal to and even worse than any fascism could aspire to.
We don’t need to restate that the main problem with capitalism is greed and that the great cure (communism) didn’t cure anything at all. In fact we have had to move from claiming that communism would be the great destroyer of capitalism (because it was so incompetent at it) to finding a new greatest threat. That threat being of course socialism.
This is fascinating to me because socialism is really hard to find now days. These many European examples of socialism are really not very socialist at all and haven’t been in a long time. They are mostly capitalistic in every respect. In fact socialism itself is a flawed if nice idea that remains unsuccessfully applied. People who think that it is a threat are really not in full grasp of what socialism is. Socialism in its pure state is nothing more than the concept that the people of a nation own its resources. Which of course, like it or not, means that whatever government they choose, or comes to power, owns the distribution and control of those resources. Thus the responsibility of distributing the revenue garnered from such.
This is why it does not work and why it should be feared as a pure concept. People in general do not have the capability of refining their portion of the countries natural gas or the capability to collect the revenue from its sale. Socialism does not redistribute wealth; it claims that it is already distributed by fact of distributed ownership. In fact distributing the fruits of this ownership is obtuse and very easy to abuse.
Countries like Sweden, Denmark and the rest have actually privatized nearly all control over their resources. They maintain a happy populous by providing readily available services and response to their people. The revenue for this comes from taxes not from any assumption of equal ownership. This too is becoming unsustainable as they too have had to deregulate private companies in order to make them competitive in the global economy. They will in fact become just like us if they wish to compete with us.
Socialism is of course in direct opposition to capitalism. Both can theoretically thrive in democracies but both are unsustainable.
Yes I did say it … neither can be sustainable.
Capitalism has won the battle as far as the only good way to solve the resource to wealth conversion. Resources are found purchased and converted to wealth very efficiently in terms of the conversion itself. Many other efficiencies fall to the wayside in the process but that is not the concern of capital accumulation itself.
So what are people afraid of?
In all cases people are afraid of governments. Because committees are unmanageable in sizes exceeding a dozen or so members (never mind 300,000,000) representation at some level needs to be enacted thus … government. Once it has passed from me to “them” distrust is almost unavoidable.
However you look at it though redistribution of wealth simply does not happen in this country and never will. What people are talking about is that they give money to the government and it uses it for doing stuff. Regardless of the fact that we voted for this nefarious “government” and that we use the stuff the money pays for. This is not the redistribution of wealth its called taxation. I’m afraid that’s been around for thousands of years.
What should we be afraid of?
The simple fact is that every kind of economic system is unsustainable.
In our case we need to be afraid that capitalism is unsustainable. Capitalism has three main components:
1) Resources and the means to extract and distribute these are privately owned.
2) Profits are distributed to those who have invested in these private entities (OMG redistribution of wealth!!).
3) The accumulation of capital.
Number three is the prize and it and number two are the part that cannot be sustained. It is impossible to “profit” forever because everything is finite. The more you have the less someone else has. Eventually there will be not enough people with money to provide each other with enough money to make a profit. This is because it has all risen to the top and there are not enough people there to buy each other’s stuff at the level needed for profits to exist.
I keep telling people I don’t want any more millionaires because I cannot support the ones we already have. All of us together cannot support them. When they have it all (and they will try to get it all because capitalism rewards greed) it will all come crashing down … Oh yeah that already almost happened more than once …
The great philosophers and religious leaders have been saying it forever … Material possessiveness is bad!
They are right … we have been wrong all along.