Does Extreme Capitalism Give Birth to Socialism?

reply to post by Tusks


In "Free Market Capitalism" banks and corporations are NOT limited in power, and DO give rise to Socialism.

Illegal immigration used to undermine the U.S. labor market is heavily subsidized by welfare, in a very discriminating manner towards U.S. citizens.

America has failed because under the con of "Free Market Capitalism", the private Federal Reserve, and corporate ownership/methods of the means of production, has been allowed to do what ever they want, and so they have taken control of the country.

Long after the Fed Res Act was approve, 100 years ago, and the Fed Res was born, the U.S. economy succeeded fabulously in the 50ies, 60ties, 70ties, and the 90ties, by enforcing laws that keep corporations, including the Fed Res in check. Eliminating the laws and the agencies that kept these entities in check under the con of the free market is what created the mess that we are now in.

People have been conned into believing all kinds of propaganda nonsense, and blaming everything on the Fed Res act from a 100 years ago is one of those cons.

reply to post by SubTruth

The political spectrum is often put forward as a progressive lie with fascism being far right. The far right is actually anarchy and the far left if fascism. The political spectrum is based on control.......Laws,regulations.

No, the propaganda lie is what you have just stated.

Conservatism is, and always was, control of the masses by the elites. Monarchies, communism, socialism, fascism, and religion based governments are all conservative controlled styles of government.

Just because the NAZIs and the Fascists called themselves liberals, doesn't mean that they were liberal.

Liberalism is, and always was, about the rights of the individual to determine their own course of action. Democracies, republics, and constitutional democratic republics such as the U.S. are liberal forms of government.

At their extremes, conservatism is fascism, and liberalism is anarchy.

Keep this in mind, as Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury said, "You say freedom, but I think you mean the other thing."

Okay firstly, capitalism is an imperfect system, always has been. But we do not care about the underlying system. We want people to work, products to be invented, services to be provided. Do you think anybody will worry about what the first moonlanding did to the budget 40+ years ago?

With that being said, the success of a company and individual and the economy as a whole are always at odds with each other. The more profit a company or an individuum does, the more money he can stash away, which is being kept from the system, the economy. Think as money on the bank as water that is taken out of a circular pump system and stored away.

The mega rich do their best to spend their money on yachts and private jets, but they probably are able to store away a multitude of what they spend and the money they manage to store away, by paying pennies for manpower abroad for example, is money that is taken out of the system. So what happens is that the economy is gradually bled try and more and more intervention is necessary to nurse it back to health.

However the good side is that work going abroad could potentially grow and improve the standard of living abroad. Time will tell if the Indians and Chinese, I dare say more complacent in nature than the rather combative Europeans and their descendants across the world, will bargain a better deal for themselves, make themselves avaiable as a consumer, more pricey and less attractive as cheap labor.

reply to post by Merinda


Nice post, except for this statement.

Time will tell if the Indians and Chinese, I dare say more complacent in nature than the rather combative Europeans and their descendants across the world

This is the propaganda lie put out by liberal elites, who aren't liberals, but the worst bunch of bigots and control freaks I have ever dealt with.

If you knew anything about the history of the Indians and the Chinese, you would know this is completely untrue. China was ruled by brutal war lords up until the communist revolution, and look at where that has gotten them. People who talk about Indian culture and its virtues always ignore the caste system, and the existence in their culture of the untouchables, and how brutally they still are treated.

Where ever humanity exists, they are rather combative.

reply to post by Merinda


That was an interesting analogy. Thanks for adding to the discussion and I will have to look into the Chinese/India topic.

"Does extreme capitalism give birth to socialism?"

Short answer, No. But perhaps your terms are a just bit vague. What do you mean by "extreme" capitalism? Were we the only capitalist country then, perhaps were the least fettered capitalist country, or did we take it a step beyond that still? Did we do something else that no other nation was doing that made us the "extreme" example?

Socialization is the means through which we provide public services. Schools, roads, and other infra-structure are examples of that. It is generally necessary and beneficial to a society. I believe you are asking if capitalism ultimately puts the people on the public dole, and I believe the answer remains, No. But again we are not considering your "extreme" modifier in that equation.

Society can "capitalize" and "socialize" and gain a lot of benefit from doing so where they are appropiate, they just seem to work well together hand-in-hand,. But these methods can become burdensome as we turn those into "-ism's" and become overly reliant on one at the expense of the other and not apply them effectively. That becomes extreme.

sheepslayer247

Any American has the opportunity to climb the ladder of success through their hard work, ingenuity and know-how.

It was not so long ago, when America still had a manufacturing base, that this ideal was alive and well throughout America. People worked hard, provided for their families and the blue collar worker could live a good life. Half of the country did not have to rely on assistance programs from the government just to survive because capitalism was working as intended.... work hard and you would be rewarded.

So far, so good. I see nothing extreme in that example and it is perhaps ideally the way capitalism is supposed to work, no? Or did America just become too successful at it? Did we give the world something new, something it never had before in the way of Capitalism?

Something America did introduce was making the fruit of its labor affordable to the common man. One of the best examples of that could be Henry Ford and his Model T with his assembly line process. That brought good wages, affordable products, and the drudgery of repetitive labor.

Half of the country did not have to rely on assistance programs from the government just to survive because capitalism was working as intended.... work hard and you would be rewarded.

As the jobs leave the US and the pay slowly dwindles, we have seen the rise of assistance programs in America. More people are on food stamps and welfare than at any other time in our history. Needless to say, we are more dependent on our government than those that came before us.

Does extreme capitalism give birth to socialism?

America became successful and its wealth was spread around through its large and expanded "middle-class" bringing about another great American innovation of "consumerism." For a time we fed off each others labor and efforts bringing about new products and ideas to the broad majority of the nation's inhabitants. It was a party and we wanted everyone to share in these small fortunes and flights of fancy of fantasy. We have been having a grand time since we emerged from World War II. Americans became a nation of pampered citizens, and to share the wealth we needed to spread the wealth and make these luxuries and fancies available to all.

Unfortunately there are inequalities built into the system, every new dollar being created through a new debt, and "interest" on these debts were the small part not covered by the new dollars. That interest at first was hardly noticed and written-off as "spillage" and just trickled away until that loss mounted into something we could no longer overlook.

As a stop-gap measure, and it made good business sense as well, we could outsource our labor to cheaper markets and still produce sufficient goods to make sure all our "consumer society" was reaping the rewards. Those who were getting edged out of the labor market we could help out through the public dole. After all, America was valuable to those producing nations as their top consumer. We created a demand for them to fill and rewarded them with our notes of exchange. Everyone continued on happily with this arrangement for awhile longer. We capitalized on world trade and grew more wealth playing the world marketplace. Joy joy, happy happy.

It is not entirely fortunate for America that other nations also became very adept at consuming as well, not was it fortunate that our "spillage" was increasing noticeably, alarmingly.

Capitalism was allowed to thrive freely in America with very little regulation and if we take the examples..., outsourcing of jobs, lower pay, no manufacturing etc, could we not make the case that extreme capitalism can be and is the catalyst that brought state-mandated socialism to America...?

We lost out when we began placing a lot of undue regulations on our manufacturers, much of that in the form of "protectionist" regulations that would favor our "cronies" and old friends who had established industries, or the ones who could "buy" a little political influence for legislation that would help keep their competition at bay. Those are capitalistic practices that could be considered "extreme" when a governing body could actively interfere in the capitalistic processes. It was no longer "unfettered" so became doomed to fail at the hands of those who manipulated the system.

Does extreme capitalism give birth to socialism?

No. Capitalism and socialism should naturally exist side-by-side in harmony, but extremes beget extremes. Extreme capitalism can give rise to extreme socialism and there is an inherent danger living in the extremes.

There are other conditions that must be factored into the equations examining what went wrong in America. "Spillage" must be more nearly eliminated, for one. Maintaining an even playing field that doesn't discourage competition or new innovation is another assurance necessary to maintain long-term success in our experiment.

Are we doomed, or can we "reboot" and keep going? There may be too many yet unidentified "viruses" to ever get back up to speed again. Who knows for sure? We know we have to do something though. I'm sure someone will just try to install more new "firewalls" that will further restrict our operations before we get the idea we just got careless and allowed too many bugs to get into our old system. Should we reload our old operating system and try to be more careful where we take it, or should we just scrap it all and start again? The choice is still ours to make, for now.