| godisdead |
08-03-2006 11:16 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by jayeff
Capitalism is frequently supported becase many people equate it with free enterprise. But they are not synonymous. Free enterprise offers all that supposedly good stuff like competition, business efficiency, low prices, etc., etc. Capitalism is a perversion in that corporations and government frequently work hand in hand to ensure that the entry barriers for competition are such that they are near impossible to surmount. This while ensuring that most workers will earn at best enough for a reasonable lifestyle, but not enough to become a competitor. What remains is an illusion of free enterprise but only a shadow of it in reality.
Privately owned property, the rallying cry of capitalism is also largely an illusion and results primarily in people investing a large part of their labor into making a profit for banks. Banks in turn are allowed to function as they do courtesy of government, that same supposedly democratic government which supposedly represents the citizens, but at the same time as using corporations to enforce many of its laws, protects those corporations against liability suits, limits worker and consumer rights, etc.
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Don't mistake our current system for ideal capitalism. What we have today is -as you have pointed out- a sick perverted version that only pays lip service to the ideal.
A system that offers you to buy your way out of the rule of the law, where your property rights are not really protected, where free enterprise is crippled by the government can hardly be called capitalism.
Full-blown communism has been tried. Full blown capitalism hasn't. I wonder why?
Quote:
Originally Posted by jayeff
Is there an alternative? Not really, because any system run by humans will take on human character. Thus however admirable the starting point, greed and self-interest will always dominate in the end. That, rather than fundmental flaws in the theory of either communism or capitalism are why both ended up with little to offer the average citizen.
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A starting point working against human self-interest would be a rather sick one. I mean, it's a quite perverted to tell people to work against their own good. If everybody's good is actually evil, for whose good am I then supposed to work?
All these attacks on self-interest are wrong anyway. Nothing but enslavement. It's like telling people: Jesus is watching you masturbate.
After all, you have to work for your self-interest just to survive. And you have to work for someone's interest, otherwise all the work would be pointless. Why is something valuable only because you don't want it? Why is something without value because you value it? All this "cry against selfishness" is nothing but punishing people for wanting to be alive.
It's sick.
(Please note that I'm against: "The good is everything I say it is.", too. That would be Nietzsche's point and I disagree with him there. :thumbsup ) |
