Quote:
Originally Posted by davinxtk
But it's not healthy, Preechr. In what way is it healthy that someone's starving in the cold streets when Oprah is giving away 276 brand new cars? How is it healthy that the lady I handed my shiny new insurance card to, smiling and happy that for once in my life I have coverage, works at the hospital and just got hers cut off? Single mother with three kids. Why do CEOs own three houses on Cape Cod and two in Connecticut when some of the hardest working people I know live in run-down apartments in shitty neighborhoods? What's healthy about this economy?
I said right in my post that it's not evil, it's ignorance. It's a workable system but it's gone way out of control. There needs to be some sort of shakedown here. Are you playing a game with me or do you really believe this monstrosity is in working order?
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First off, I'm throwing a lot of complex stuff out on the table, much of which has been alluded to so far though left untyped.
Let it be said I totally get where you're coming from. This post was really well made as well, though possibly moreso than most for you. I've honestly been laboring under the impression that you really weren't ever gonna see eye to eye with me enough to phrase your comments with such determined civility.
I honestly thought you'd be kicking my ass by now.
Thanks for not doing that.
Anyhoo...
You riffed on the concept of "healthy." I said: "I like human nature, when it's healthy." Prior to that, I had indicated that I feel that capitalism is a concept based in the roots of human nature. I also believe communism to be so, just in a separate part of it. Not that your ideas as expressed are necessarily communistic in nature, but you're basically saying that consideration for the weakest of the community is primary over consideration for the individual needs of the strongest producers within that community, right?
I'm fine with that, at least in one half of my life. That's exactly how I feel about dealings with my family. Most families run on communist principles. I have a complex life, however. When I get out of bed in the morning, and decide what I want to do on any given day, most days I go to work. See, some of my family obligations require money to fulfill. For that, as well as the ever present requirement to feed, shelter and clothe my own self, I need to sell some of my free time in the form of a job well done in exchange for cash.
When I leave the house in my work clothes, I am sacrificing part of my life to fund another. Since work, though rewarding for some (very much so for me,) is generally less fun and fulfilling than hanging out at the house with friends and family, I cannot very well take the for-home attitude about life with me outside now, can I? I need to adopt a less giving, more taking attitude, one of a very competitive point of view. I owe this to my first priority: my private life: the reason I go to work. I need to become a capitalist pig. We all do.
A competitive, capitalistic economy, well maintained by all of us, will provide the most for all of us, right? If we are gonna spend time NOT doing what we love, then we owe it to ourselves to get the biggest economic bang for each of our incremental bucks... and such. So, while we're at home, we are free to live however makes us most happy, and that's typically in a more or less communistic fashion. When we leave our homes, however, we enter the cold, hard world of capitalism, and we are only hurting ourselves if we fail to make that transition gracefully and readily.
The USSR, the single most aggressive experiment in Communism, capitalized, was attempting to prove that extending one half of human nature to cover the more uglier, competitive side... treating the world as if it were one big family so to say; and it failed miserably.
The USA, Communism's sister experiment, is in the process of failing now. It's inevitable. We have attempted to do exactly the opposite of what started with the Bolshevik Revolution. We wish to eliminate the communal spirit of the family from the human experience. This plan is just as doomed.
I'm not really talking much about economics. This is gonna have to be a long conversation, as it really only concerns the future. Economics is a branch of the science of life. If you don't understand how we live, you can never hope to understand how we might live better, right?
The big misunderstanding that I accused Kahl of making earlier is simply that of believing the big lie that capitalism is the same thing as Capitalism. Small-C "capitalism" is part of what we are, where Large-C "Capitalism" is the governmental interpretation of natural human activity, or an emulation of a kind. Please extrapolate the same correlation between the two forms of communism... it's the same, though inversed in practice.
Ultimately, I'm gonna try to convince you that libertarianism (notice, not capitalized) is the ultimate form of govenrment, and that my fundamentalist attitude toward our American Constitution stems not from some sort of loyalty to tradition, but to a concept that was only hinted at briefly in a long age of various experiments in human slavery.
We are in such an age now. Misunderstanding vital components of human nature any further won't be getting us to the place we need to be any quicker.