this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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People like being alive, no?
Like it or not, most scientific advances we have today are because of capitalism. It's because we have the resources available to research more. In the old Sovjet Union it was done with force and well, if you fail you die (Stalin was fun!) and I'm sorry, I don't think that is good.
Every communist country so far has failed. Want a definition? They were poverty ridden shitholes where you had no rights. If you didn't like the system, you could rot and be tortured in jail. I call that a failure. All communist countries were dictatorships because you can only run communism by force. Watch the Russian movie "the chekist (1992)" I dare you.
Communism is fun!
Pure capitalism is pretty bad too, few will deny that. However, in basic it's successful. Measure success? The USA. Why is the USA so powerful? Because of its economy.
The problem is that the USA has been, als lately is getting more extreme in its capitalism. Companies get more power, politicians less, rich get Richter, poor get poorer.
If you want to solve that, limit captialism. Take the Strength of capitalism (the freedom for people to buy and earn how they like)and limit the rest. Companies cannot buy other companies. Companies cannot grow beyond, say, 1000 persons. Income tax goes up and up and once 1 person earns toward (for example) 10 times the lawful minimum wage, the rest over that gets taxed at 100%.
This would create a society that does have Capitalism to make a strong economy, it has freedom, but it also has a huge capital available to make a social system on top of that. Use that money for free schooling, free healthcare, universal basic income, etc.
A system like that is much more doable and just a little more than currently being done in many European countries.
While at it, redesign your cites to no longer be car centric. 15 minute cities are awesome look at the Netherlands. Great public transportation and you can pretty much bike anywhere. Electrical bikes made this tenfold better even, there is no reason for car centric cities that keep people in poverty.
you attribute a lot to capitalism without any real evidence its actually the cause. the rest of your post is an uninformed rant about communism which I'm not even going to bother addressing because its your straw man; I've made no argument in favor of communism.
you're entire argument seems to be 'US is capitalism; everything they do is a result of capitalism' which is fundamentally not the case our schools where the majority of research happens are publicly funded. most companies engaged in research receive public funding. that's not capitalism mate.
you want to change capitalism yourself because its a fucking horrible system and you know it deep down; you just can't articulate why.
All I said is pretty public knowledge and it isn't that hard. Where do you thing western capital for their research, schools, medical system, and war machine comes from? Why do you think the western world is by far the biggest and most dominant player in the entire world ever since WWII?
Capitalism and democracy
And I'm not saying it's great, I'm not saying capitalism doesn't have parts that need major improvement but if you look at why the west is so extremely powerful, that is the answer. Capitalism makes for enormous economies which then are used for a large lost of things. Where do you think the money for public funding comes from? Even poor people in the US have it multitudes of times better than the average person in Africa.
All I said about communism is spot on as well. If you don't like it then I guess you Don't like communism.
If you have nothing to say about any of it then I guess you simply don't have an answer to give
again you cite something without any evidence to back it up. its not capitalism that granted the west dominance. its geography. post world war 2 every country not in the americas was absolutely gutted economically, culturally. the 'west' (i.e. capitalism) came to true prominence during this era when literally every other country was in tatter the USs economic engine was basically pumping on full cyclinders. it just happens that the US was also practicing capitalism at the same time; china which is not a capitalist country rivals the US in economic power today.
the US protected from most of the devastation of the war due to the oceans protecting it borders was the only country able to support rebuilding and retooling the rest of the world. its pure dumb geography that lead to this situation not any intrinsic merits of capitalism. not to mention during the war the US had more characteristics of a centrally planned economy than a capitalist one. go figure.
Of all political systems, democracy is the best because it gives people freedoms. Democracy still sucks, but the rest is way way worse.
Of all economical systems, capitalism is the best in the way of generating resources because it gives people freedoms to trade directly and find ways themselves to find the most efficient ways of producing goods. Yeah, it sucks too and has lots of failures that CAN be addressed but nothing comes even close to it.
Evidence? Look at all capitalist countries, look at non capitalist countries. Look at Russia for a nice communist example. Communism was implemented and promptly they had a famine. That is on too of all the torture and killing requires to keep its citizens in line. The why you can look ip yourself. Watch the movie "the chekist 1992, always a fun demo. It stayed a shit hole that kept torturing it's citizens in golulags to keep them in line intil it fell apart in the 90's, and went to a capitalistic economy and promptly Russia started growing. That is until mobster boss Putin got his greedy little claws on it but that is a different story
When Europe was in shambles it rose back up within a decade thanks to the Marshall plan which pushed capitalist economy back in running. Because of capitalism Europe is the second most powerful block in the world.
Look, capitalism on itself sucks. I fully agree. But you can't deny it's power. So you do what Europe does, use the power, limit it, and use the output to give a nice socialist society.