I agree with you that government involvement / regulation is necessary in providing optimal results for society. As for China, we are seeing that since the onset of capitalism, Chinese people have received more and more freedoms, and the complete totalitarianism of China is slowly eroding. So I would say that capitalism by itself is able to bring about more freedom, but certainly is not the only ingredient in the recipe.
Oh man...long-term survival? Come on. Whatever the hell we were doing for the pre-Industrial period? Jesus, people look like they "suffered". But they lived. Am I being a hypocrite? Kinda. But seriously, I feel the only thing captalistic concepts have done is speed up the highway to hell, by letting us guzzle all the ressources. It's like credit; someone will evantually have to pay HELL for all this, but as long as it's not us, then it's cool. Simplistic? Yes. But it's one of my stronger convictions.
To say that "capitalism" began with the industrial revolution is incorrect. Societies had free markets, property rights, rule of law, economic institutions, etc for centuries, even millenia before the industrial revolution. So to blame capitalism on "guzzling up all the resources" is incorrect. Even if we were to revert to a truly socialist or communist system we would still probably consume the same number of resources, and if we did not it would be at the expense of human well-being NOW. Increased productivity has led to an increase in population size, and by extension, resource use. Of course, eventually eventually, some resources will be exhausted. But today's productive and capitalistic society is such that human innovation has proven, and in my opinion will prove to be, capable of overcoming such problems. You discount the ability of humans to adapt. It's been one of our defining characteristics since our genesis.
Fine, point conceded on pre-historic free trade, although I think that's just semantics. Point is though, no matter how you look at it, the very few are having VERY fourtunate lives on the backs of the VERY MANY right now and of the VERY MANY to come. Human adaptation can only go so far. No matter how you slice it, a system that promotes gross overexploitation of ressources cannot sustain itself over the long haul unless you can somehow carve out infinete ressources. That's my theory anyways.
Actually in all developed economies and many developing economies everyone is living fortunate lives by historical standards. Living standards for the "poor" since the industrial revolution are far far far higher than those of the "rich" in preindustrial society. The industrial revolution's greatest benefits were received by the least wealthy.
It will be interesting to see what happens in China. Are they really moving towards democracy or are they just modernising their form of totalitarianism? We’re probably mostly splitting hairs now, but my point with the sharecroppers was that they lived in a capitalist country but in reality were not free to change their social status except in rare cases. Another example would be the Jim Crow laws. They also existed in a capitalist country and yet they denied many basic freedoms to a whole race of people for the better part of a century. Going back farther slavery itself was legal in a capitalist country and lasted for hundreds of years. South Africa was a capitalist country during its apartheid era too. You can also look at women’s right to vote. So I wouldn’t say that capitalism necessarily leads to freedom. It is an economic tool that plays a part in how we structure our societies. It’s a good tool for certain purposes, one that helps greatly in producing certain good and services, and in doing that it gives certain classes of people the wealth and power to push for more freedom, but I think that capitalism itself is just a economic tool.
Great post. It is good to have someone who actually knows what they are talking about when it comes to the word "socialism". As far as the Socialist International, they are "socialist" according to the original movement and meaning of the word and movement. As we see many of the parties are not that left wing or radical. The Communists who took over Russia and other countries by military, non-democratic means (contrary to socialist ideology) wanted to call themselves "socialist" as it was a good popular word. Sort of like everyone virtually wants to call themselves "democratic"-- even Bush and the neocoans as their cynical policies make it a bad word in the Middle East. Conservatives wanted to equate "communist", "socialist" and in the US "liberal" and even more recently "Democrat" as all being the same thing. Thus the word "socialist" got trashed from both the left and right and it has to be carefully defined as Grizzled said.
I would argue that present day China shows that you can have capitalism, without democracy. Do they have any elections in China? I assume they don't, but perhaps at the local level?
You cannot deny that since the onset of capitalism in China individual rights and freedom have increased.
It still doesn't look like democracy to me in that people don't control the government. Still having more individual rights and freedoms is good.
I'm not saying that capitalism alone will immediately lead to democracy, I'm saying that capitalism has proven to be effective in improving individual rights and liberties. Are you denying that?
you can't attribute all of these things to capitalism....ultimately I think capitalism along with greed will be the downfall of this nation.............
I'm sorry, this is where should agree to disagree. It's something I always get brought out for, since it's a bit outside the box, but how the hell do you define a fortunate life? ...you still haven't responded how a system based on overexploitation can sustain itself without infinete ressources...even if we accept that it's doing more for us now (which it should, considering the consumption we're putting in), how can we ever possibly sustain this rate? And please don't just give generic responses like "innovation".
So you can make unfounded claims about how we're going to "survive" and I'm not allowed to give "generic" answers like innovation? How does that work? The burden of proof is on you, not me. How the hell do you think you have the right to say that people who are brought out of poverty are not fortunate? Are you kidding me? I don't think you have any grasp on economic history at all. Let me lay it out for you: before the industrial revolution the majority of the world's population lived in squalor. Any increase in technology or efficiency led to population growth, which lowered living standards and led people to DIE due to squalor, starvation, etc. Does this seem familiar? It should, because it's exactly what's happening in much of Africa at the moment. Are you saying that we should allow ourselves to descend to the living standards of sub-saharan Africa in order to protect ourselves against an irrational fear of our resources being exploited? You were right when you said it earlier, it's easy for you to say that sitting in your leather chair in front of your computer. It's too easy, and you should know what you're talking about before you make these claims.
Except that command economies have also terribly exploited resources, caused huge environmental damage and have proven to be unsustainable. Take a look at the vast environmental damage wrought in the Soviet Era or what happened in the PRC during the Great Leap Forward. Look at North Korea or Albania. Almost all of the command economies have willingly exploited the environment. Ironically it is only when market forces come into play that you see the PRC starting to rehabilitate their environment when they realize that it hurts their bottom line. While fuel efficient vehicles gained market share in response to high energy prices. One thing that capitalism has going for it is that while even under an undemocratic government consumers will always have a vote in terms of how they spend their money so social movements even absent regulation can be directly translated into action. For instance the gaining popularity of things like organic foods and farmers markets. Those things have little to do with regulation but with market driven decisions. You can't get that with a command economy because you are dependent on who ever is commanding the economy to make the right decisions. If you don't agree with them then you have little recourse. So yes capitalism has its problems and I don't think anyone is advocating pure capitalism but the beauty of it is that the solutions to capitalism's problems are in capitalism by encouraging people to spend their money in better ways.
