Bad Omen For The Pope

Ok. Communism has been a spectacular failure. Capitalistic societies are made up of poor people and marked by widespread poverty too. If that is your criteria for judging economic theories, capitalism is an economic failure too. Hegal and Marxism are a framework to understand economic conflict.

I once attended an event in which an immigrant from India was one of the keynote speakers. He said when he arrived in the United States he had $10 to his name. He had become a successful businessman and multi-millionaire through hard work. His said someone from his homeland asked him what it was like to be a second class citizen. His reply was that he didn’t see himself as a second class citizen, but if that were the case he would rather be a second class citizen in America than the king of any other country. He also said, in his exact words, “if you can’t make it in America you may as well give up.” There is no better country in the world for someone to be successful that America. To have anything in a communist country you have to be in government. Last I heard people weren’t building rafts to go to Cuba. Fuck communism, socialism, and any other from of government that takes the power from the individual and gives it to the government. And it’s sad that many people in our own country won’t step up to the plate and take personal responsibility for their own lives.

Communism has been a failure as has laissez-faire Capitalism. Capitalism has not brought people out of poverty. In fact unbridled Capitalism has enslaved and oppressed more people than any other force in history, and “Feudal Societies” are Capitalist Societies in their near purest form.

Democracy and education have brought more people out of poverty than any other forces in history.

As with every so called American “conservative” I know you commingle and confuse our political system and our economic system. In the process you attribute to our economic system benefits derived from our political system. .

So from my comment all you saw was an after thought about feudalism you obviously did not understand. Typical Republican response. Rather than address the difficult issues attack the speaker. Call them dumb or partisan or whatever name you want to call them today. But for god sakes don’t address the issue. People might figure out you either don’t know what you are talking about or they really don’t agree with you. i.e. the Karl Rove strategy to protect Bush.

By the way despite, all of its Renaissance and post Renaissance pomp and glory, feudalism, arose from war lords selling protection services and mercenaries to the highest bidder.

I am not sure what difficult issue you think I am avoiding. If you are talking about your attempt to attribute all of the economic prosperity of capitalist countries to their political systems, then I think you are the one who is confused. I don’t know how else to describe the argument that economic prosperity has no connection to a country’s economic system.
There is an interesting interplay between politics and economics, but it does not really help your attempts to downplay the causal role capitalism has had in our prosperity. Capitalism does require a political system that protects individual property rights. So I would agree that democracy is a NECESSARY condition for the type of widespread reduction of poverty in modern capitalist countries, but it is not a SUFFICIENT one. We certainly can and have had democratic societies without economic freedom or widespread prosperity (see ancient Athens).

“I never made the argument that economic prosperity had no connection to the economic system.”

Actually you did. You said “Capitalism has not brought people out of poverty.” You then attributed prosperity to political forces.

I guess it is progress of a sort that you now give some grudging credit to the economic system. But you still are making dime store communist critiques of capitalism. Capitalism made the US, a country founded by the outcasts and peasants of other nations, the largest economy in the world by the end of the 19th century. Capitalism is in conflict with slavery, and is the driving force that led to the elimination of slavery in the world, and certainly in this country. http://triblive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/boudreaux/s_304437.html

And there is a serious threat of big business getting in bed with government to tilt the scales in its favor, but it should be fairly obvious that is a subversion of capitalism rather than a realization of it. Capitalism requires free competition. The proper role of government is to prevent anti-competitive behavior like this (rent seeking, writing regulations to impose daunting compliance costs on smaller competitors, etc.), not to facilitate it. When politicians and big business work together to fix the game, it is no different than competitors forming a cartel. It is all anti-competitive and hostile to a capitalist system.

Not only are you wrong that this type of behavior is in any sense fundamental to capitalism, it is an ironic criticism from the left given that this type of corporatism is central to progressive economic thought these days. As this HuffPo blogger puts it, Obama is the “most fully realized” corporatist candidate of recent political history. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-corporatist-explanati_b_434286.html

No one bitches about Capitalism. People bitch about what some capitalist do to other people with their wealth. Or when they try to buy Government with their wealth. Americans are the hardest working people in the world they are not afraid of work.
And who exactly is bitching about being held back? Give me a specific example. All I hear is the right bitching about people not wanting to work, but then can’t really find that many people who do not work. Most of the people who receive government assistance are working poor. Most of the people who do not work are either too old to work, too sick to work or they are Republican politicians, like Mark Sanford and Mick Mulvaney.