Quote Originally Posted by seven-deuce View Post
I think the problem here is you're trying to fit my idea into the current system which won't work. I'm talking about scrap the current system completely, start fresh on a new sheet of paper and think of an alternative system that ensures resources are distributed equally..
This has already been tried. Seriously, it was one of the grandest social experiments of all time. It didn't work. Not only did it not work, it ushered in a dystopia.

Revert back to my posts about what capitalism is on a fundamental level. I guess I can try to clarify now. "Capital" is resources. Any resource you can think of, like your ability to labor is a resource. Capitalism is the theory of using resources to create more resources based on independent desire. This is the only known way to increase resources.

The other option, which as been tried and failed abysmally, is socialism. Socialist theory isn't about creation of resources, but distribution of assumed resources. Instead of people laboring based on desire to create resources, they labor based on the need for those resources. What is the need? It's the communal need, designated by a cooperative or centralized government. This sounds fine and dandy until you get into the details. This "communal need" is applied to the resources after they have already been created, and it doesn't address how to create those resources in the first place. However, arbitrary desire to create resources does address the issue of resource creation

I feel like I'm not explaining this well at all. The point is that socialism has been tried and it failed. It failed in precisely the ways that it was predicted to fail, which are the ways in which it doesn't address resource creation. It is with things like Russian factories making shoes at greater cost than value because there was a "communal need". The country did this for decades, and instead of becoming the second most powerful nation on the planet, they have reverted to a quasi-third world status. Russians are emigrating in droves because the economy is utter shit. When we think of communism, we think only of something negative, something that was doomed to fail. But people don't realize that all this egalitarian, socialist, OWS talk is exactly communism


Capitalism addresses most issues about what we think of as communal needs. It doesn't address them all, but in the areas it doesn't, welfare is appropriate, not socialism. The concerns about capitalism you raise aren't actually about capitalism, but about lack of appropriate welfarism. Socialism is not an answer. It's actually the worst answer

The only socialist nations that have succeeded are foraging ones, like Inuits. They have tiny populations that do not grow, no stratification, and not technological development. They're basically subsistence societies. Capitalism is what got us out of subsistence societies and has given us every little technological thing we have. It is also what has given the masses rights, because inherent to capitalism is ownership of your creation. Criticisms of totalitarianism of capitalism have more to do with a form of mercantilism, corporatism, and fascism than capitalism. Basically, paradigms where those who create resources don't really own them