rumitoid wrote:
What you will read below comes from this link and is, I feel, crucial for both sides and the middle to read. There is also a nice little clip of Reagan telling Soviet jokes. Good reading.
http://www.rationaldevelopment.net/the-flaws-of-capitalism"I recently read a brilliant comment that sums up the essential flaw of capitalism vs communism (I edited out mistakes and clarified the meaning):
The flaw of capitalism is greed & narcissism (capitalism rewards greed, as long as you are not caught). The fatal flaw of communism is exactly the same (greedy people are still greedy but now they just play under different rules). For as long as humans fail to address their own inherent personality disorders, any system will be vulnerable to the machinations of clever / unscrupulous folks trying to get more for themselves at the expense of others. That is why we see the exact same types of inequalities & elites ruin both.
"Its true that capitalism is risky and unfair (isnt life supposed to be risky and unfair?), but the problem with trying to fix these issues is that when people try, they more often than not end up making society even more insecure and unfair. That doesnt mean that every public venture is doomed to do more harm than good (for example roads and defense work great).
"The current failures of capitalism: monopolies, debt, and grossly uneven distribution of income result from the same people who take advantage of the current system as they would under any system. While no system is foolproof, the best is no doubt a philosophical medley of left and right ideas (which is what we already have).
"Some believe that capitalism is doomed to destroy itself out of principle but look how quickly other systems destroy themselves (communism implodes rather quickly under bad leadership). As far as social policies go, better to side with those that prioritize freedom than put faith in the good of bureaucrats (not that they are bad people, but theres a reason we say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions).
p.s. for your enjoyment: ronald regan telling some funny jokes on ideology
What you will read below comes from this link and ... (
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Rumitold: Freedom and Control
Is Obama right? Is there something wrong with one person making a lot more than another? Is redistributing wealth from the person who earned it to the person who didn't the "defining challenge of our time?"
If so, can you control the outcome of a free market... and still have a free market?
But who cares? The trouble with free markets is they don't necessarily deliver the results you want. As far as material success is concerned, nothing can beat the free enterprise system (the freer the better). No economist has ever put forward a serious proposal for making it more productive. No improvement has ever been forced upon it. No rival system has ever raced ahead of it.
But the improvers talk about "fairness," "social consequences" and the "political environment" in which an economy operates. They say there's a "trade-off" between the ideal of free markets... and a fair, democratic society.
That's what seems to stick in President Obama's craw: that the trade-off has gotten out of balance. Markets are too free, he believes; they deliver outcomes that voters don't like.
"It's either money or control," says a friend of ours.
"You get money by giving up control... and letting markets work.
"But you, personally, don't necessarily get what you want. And if you try to control an outcome, it's gonna cost you."
A Matter of Envy
Rich people want to control things because they want to protect what they have. Poor people want to control things because they want more of what other people have.
Nobody save a few philosophers and wing-nut economists is willing to let the chips fall where they may.
"It's all a matter of envy," continues our friend. "And greed. Everybody wants what he can't get honestly. He turns to the government to get it."
And then he changes his tune... Instead of talking about what he wants, he refers to what he says would be "best for the society"... or what would "help the economy."
What we all want is an economy that delivers our own version of "fairness," which almost always involves more for us and less for everybody else.
It's an economy that is so finely controlled that what we do no longer determines what we get. We can step on all the rakes we want; never will the handle come up and hit us in the face.
Instead, everything is under control. We get outcomes that are the result neither of choice nor chance, but of crony connections and the master plan. In short, we all want to live in North Korea until we actually see the place.
Chris Hunter