It seems that the general idea is to prop up banks and large
corporations and bugger everybody else. The ordinary taxpayer has to
pay their debts. The majority of the world is still poor and lives on
less than 2 US dollars a day.
The rich are getting richer and the poorer getting poorer. The
experiment has failed. So many people are in credit it should be
called Creditism.
Hardy
I think we're retaking Pas de Calais, bit by bit...
It won't last, and they are not exactly capitalist, more a sort of
hybrid system. As they get richer the cost of the workers will rise.
This will mean that it is cheaper
to manufacture goods elsewhere - eg Africa. Their turn next.
Hardy
Absolutely.
Some of us (no names, no pack-drill) had no debt of any sort other than a
small mortgage when the UK economy went belly-up under Brown, Balls and the
hapless Darling.
IOW, we'd lived and continued to love within our means and were uninvolved in
causing Brown's Bust.
> Greed is where we all fall down. We (ok - most of us) want the most
> expensive and up to date items of the consumer society and we want
> them now, but that attitude comes at a very high price down the line,
> and we are paying it now.
Even the minority who don't fit that description are paying for it by seeing
savings inflated away with insulting levels of interest. It's almost as
though the government thought the over-heated economy was our fault.
So is fucking everything you can get your hands on and an inbuilt
proclivity for sugar fat and salt. The problem humans have is that their
brains have provided the capacity to alter their circumstances quicker
than they can evolve. Consequently giving free reign to characteristics
like the food ones above designed for a world where these food groups
were scarce is destructive. Since these limitations are no longer
provided by our environment, it is necessary to create the balance
ourselves.
> All other systems (and let's face it, they're all variants of socialism),
> seek to excessively curb competition (and therefore "incentive") to "aid"
> the weak.
Humans developed language and many other traits that have allowed them
to become so sophisticated because they found co-operating and altruism
to be a good survival technique. Designing a system that focuses one a
trait that is designed to be in balance with its opposite is foolish.
Consequently a system that is based on eliminating competition is just
as idiotic as one that focuses on competition and amounts to a diet of
Big Macs.
This ignores the fact that those who are the most competitive, are
> the ones who have driven up the living standards of *all* the people in
> capitalist countries, over the last 150 years.
Not necessarily. It is the balance between the go-getters and risk
takers and those who are steady and reliable that makes for successful
societies.
Try mowing your lawn,
> cleaning your house, washing and drying your clothes, all in a Saturday
> morning, to leave the rest of the weekend free for leisure, with the tools
> available to a Soviet household of 1990.
Time to maintain your house which of course the state will not do for
you, and time to fit in overtime if interest rates go up and your
mortgage becomes unaffordable.
>
> The current opportunistic hysteria, amongst some claiming "capitalism is
> dead", can be compared to having a car's brakes disabled and concluding,
> upon the inevitable crash, that cars are not viable and it's time to walk
> everywhere again.
Indeed so, time in fact to design a car with brakes as well as an
accelerator. Communism is a car with only brakes, Capitalism is a car
with only an accelerator.
It also exposes the myopia of those who regard capitalism
> as banking and banking as capitalism. Capitalism is the means of production
> and the provision of service in the hands of competing entities.
> Notwithstanding a certain case for natural monopolies, putting this
> provision in the hands of dis-incentivised, uncompetive State monoliths is a
> recipe for disaster.
So apparently is the reverse.
>
> Banking is merely a component of capitalism. In 1993, when I applied for a
> mortgage that was 3.7 times more than my income, I was refused on the
> grounds that the bank would have to break BoE rules in order to lend me the
> money. When, in 1997, we elected pyramid scheme salesmen to run the country,
> the banking system had its brakes disconnected.
Because it was the received wisdom of the chief proponents of unfettered
capitalism, which is why George Bush's America and Britain did much the
same thing and ended up in much the same mess.
Capitalism as envisaged over the last 30 years is indeed dead, as is its
communist alter ego. The critiques of each by the other have merit, its
the one sided solutions that are the problem. Human life is a
compromise, a balance and a fudge and anyone who has a reductive formula
that provides the answer is too stupid to even understand the question.
--
Osric
THE BORDERS OF MY COUNTRY
RUN AROUND THE SOLES OF MY FEET
>
> Also, ignore the Chinese living in the countryside and concentrate on urban
> incomes. (Peasants aren't in the capitalist system).
>
Now you see it's just that attitude that will see the fall of the
system. People are people. They should all have a decent living. These
peasants make the food for the cities.
Hardy
I agree, the object of economics shouldn't be for a segment of the
population to gather more wealth to themselves than everyone else has;
it should be for productivity to be maximized and shared by everyone
alike.
Determinist, materialist Rostovian vulgar-Marxist inspired twaddle.
Capitalism is not a law of nature, it is regulated and has rules or it
does not function, and it is a product of human engineered systems. How
you engineer the system goes a long way in determining who ends up with
the pie.
>
> You barbarous lot are so brainwashed
You're the one with the ludicrous algorithm. Its no accident you sound
like a proselytising socialist worker activist with the same glib
answers trotted out according to the mantra because its an approach
firmly rooted in Marxist dialectical materialism.
into thinking that every activity must
> be a project, when it's the opposite of a project. And that's its beauty: it
> doesn't demand that you participate if you don't want to. Go away and barter
> with the baker (if your socialist government will let you opt out of *its*
> scheme).
Whatever you say, comrade.
Socialism (as presently defined) collapsed because it's not sustainable.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six,
result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty
pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is
withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short,
you are for ever floored.
Mr Macawber rulez....
Socialism is communism before it's bought a machine gun.
You've got me wrong.
The reality I observe is a chaotic cosmos, not a road to somewhere.
I see no engine of history. I'm with Heraclitus: "This world did none of
gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever living
fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures"
But I did enjoy your 1920s rhetoric.