Problem with capitalism ?

[ZeroAX]

then why are you against the goverment taxing the rich people, for more than they tax most people

[Ack]

I don't like socialism because while the government provides many services for you, if you're wealthy you're paying for other people's life insurance.

so what? poor people should just roll over and die?

perhaps we should bring slavery back, and take back the right of women working, that way unemployment rates would go down



this is where the american movie, russian catch phrase "fucking capitalistic pig" comes from (not targeted at you Dylan.)

yeah you have worked hard for it, you have every right to enjoy a rich life, but you have to pay the appropriate taxes, to help society.

we are not born equal in this world. heck just because you are black, you get less chances at a job. if you are a woman in a good position, chances are everyone will say you slept with someone to get the job (anyone remember Jade Raymond, of assasin's creed fame?).

Why should the rich people NOT help society? Is that money better spend on a 4th boat? Does buying expensive stuff, really make you feel nice?

Heck Michael's Jackson life story is so tragic, cause he had everything (riches fame and glory) yet had really nothing.

A) Life is not fair.

We may be equal at birth, but luck does not favor us all in the same way, and neither do genetics. I may be born blind or deaf, with a heart condition, with cancer, addicted to a drug, with only one arm, or with a myriad of other defects. I may develop cancer by the time I'm five.

If I make it, I may not give a flying fuck about my future, and may not attempt to educate myself in anything. I may be immoral, steal from my job, take way too many drugs, and abuse my relationships. I may blame everyone else for my problems.

You may make it as well, growing up in a household where your father beats you repeatedly every fucking day while in a drunken rage, and the only way you ever make it out is to study your ass off so you can get to college. You may join the military, pay through loans, or make a scholarship, but you end up married and with a degree. You have kids. But things don't turn out so well, you end up divorced and remarried, unsure of how to continue but continuing to work because it's all you can do. And you make it, you slowly work through your relationships with those kids you left behind in the divorce, and you learn something about being a parent and end up becoming successful in the meantime.

Now why in the hell should you pay for me when I get into trouble or get sick? After all the shit you've gone through, why should you give a damn, since if I really tried, I could pull myself up and take control of my life?

Truth is, the "you" in this situation is actually my father, and the "I" in this situation is a former friend I went to high school with. My father's working his way up the executive positions at Accenture, while my friend has a tendency to get fired from any job after three weeks, in one case going so far as to steal several hundred dollars from a gas station before walking out and never showing back up.

Why should any of us have to pay for that fuck up? And before you attempt to give me any shit about race, both of these examples are white guys.

You know what? We're all going to die. It doesn't matter how advanced society gets, we'll never see it. We likely won't be alive a hundred years from now, and a hundred years after that, only a handful of us will be remembered or cared about. In a thousand, it'll be even fewer. If I work my god damn ass off to help myself, why should I give a shit about anybody else, when a good chunk of them are fuck ups or quitters? Race doesn't even begin to factor into this, it's a problem with people in general.

But if you really want to talk race in America, we can, though considering what goes on in Cyprus, I think you ought to think long and hard before you accuse us of racial bullshit. But let me lay it out: Here in the Americas, white folks(specifically your colonizing Europeans, so your British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese) dominated for a long time, abused Natives, African Americans, Asian Americans, and everyone else I can think of. However, things thankfully changed in what would become the United States, though unfortunately it took a long time. First, slavery was abolished in the northern states, then finally forcibly put down in the South in the bloodiest war that our young nation has ever seen.

Over 600,000 men died in this country in that war. Large sections of the South(and a handful of places in the North) were razed to the ground, infrastructure was destroyed, a backbone of the economy was crushed overnight, and a new chapter in race relations in the states began. During Reconstruction, African Americans actually did quite well in local and state governments, running on Republican tickets and making it to state legislatures and senates, though this would all soon be oppressed by Jim Crow laws. The next major change in race relations started in the 1950s, with Brown v. Board of Education, followed by the steadily growing civil rights movement. While African Americans are chiefly mentioned, these victories were fought for by every ethnicity in this country in many places. The state I've grown up in, Alabama, is one of the most well known. Some of the hardest battles were fought here, and I'm glad I've been able to grow up in a place surrounded by some of what I consider to be the greatest moments in American history, and it is a triumph that all Americans should be proud we fought for.

But also during the 1960s came another movement, that of the African American Nation of Islam and the black supremacist movement. For every battle we fought for equality, new lines of social segregation were being put up, in some cases by the same people that were fighting for said equality. Now there are places as a white man that I am forbidden to go in America. I have been threatened in inner cities because of my race. I have seen one "ethnic minority" swell up and attack another, simply for being different.

Here's a quote for you, something to reflect on when you think about how oppressed a minority is in America. It's taken from a play, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a play made up of interviews conducted in the wake of the Rodney King riots. The actual section is about the shooting of Latasha Harlins, the result of a bizarre case which no one is sure of what happened, which was believed to have been the reason why the Korean community was specifically targeted so heavily during the Rodney King riots. It comes from an interview with a "Community Activist" named Gina Rae, AKA Queen Malkah:

"We found it very unusual, that Charles-Lloyd,
The-top-black-attorney
In-this-city,
a millionaire,
would-take-this-case.
But for Charles Lloyd
To-defend-a-Korean-woman-
in the death of a black child...
I guess he just
Sold-his-card.
He's not a card-carrying member
of our community or of us
as-a-nation-of-people-any-longer.
He was a sellout.
I guess that's the best way to put it.
Because we all know, as we sit here
as black people,
if any of us had killt [sic] a Korean
child,
shot-them-in-the-back-of-the-head,
and it was recorded on videotape,
we-would-not-be-sitting-here-today.

Charles Lloyd was labeled an "Uncle Tom," an individual who goes against the African-American race, sells out, becomes too "white" you could say. An African-American who votes Republican, for instance, is an Uncle Tom. I believe that homosexual African-Americans were labeled Uncle Toms as well(it's well documented that minorities in America are fiercely anti-homosexual). I would highly suggest you find a copy of the play and read it. There are some incredibly poignant things written in it. Here's another interview for you to read, just a taste of what this work contains. It's a bit long, so I won't include the first sections of it, just a bit of the ending of one of the interviews(and fair use has its limits, after all), but I think it's important to add this section. It's from Paul Parker, the Chairperson of the Free the L.A. Four Plus Defense Committee(the L.A. Four were the first four black men tried in the assault of a man named Reginald Denny, a semi-truck driver, during the riots. Two other men were also involved in the assault).

We didn't get to Beverly Hills but
that doesn't mean we won't get there
You keep it up!
um
They're talkin' about "You burned down your own neighbor-
hoods."
And I say, "First of all,
we burned down these Koreans in this neighborhood."
About ninety-eight percent of the stores that got burned down
were
Korean.
The Koreans was like the Jews in the day.
And we put them in check.

Don't bring up race in America. It is not a subject you want to get into.

[ZeroAX]

ok nvm i'm not posting on this thread again.


2 last things before i go


1) history will prove who's right

and

2) history has proven again and again that refusal to change leads to bad things. there is no perfect system, but right now you can't refuse that capitalism, in it's current form, has failed


and last but not least, say what you want about europeans and slavery (besides the fact that most of you are european's yourself) but greece at the time, was a slave country as well (though of course in no way did we have it as bad as the african's had it. we just didn't have our own country)


and what about cyprus?


and also if you don't care about the future, you might as well kill yourself. If humans only cared about what they would see in their lifetime, there would be no reason to stick a stone to a piece of wood, to hunt down animals.

and it's this mentality that's killing the planet. WTF do I care about the greenhouse effect huh? it's my grandchildrens' problem

[Erik_Twice]

*Americans are free to buy whatever they want, but don't you think if they pass laws to sell in America they destroy capitalism and change to merchantilism?

Fixed.

*America is based on capitalism which means making maximum profit and FREE market, exactly what corporations are doing. Now people are upset they are jobless. Flaw in the system?

Maximun profit for those who deserve it. Free market means everyone can compete in an even field with competition. Those two things have nothing to do with having a job.

In some places like EU, you can go in the EU section of the airport which I assume is faster.

The European Union has free trade and free mobility between it's citizens like if it were a single country.

So why segregation based on nationality is accepted but not based on anything else!?

I don't think creating a visa is "segregation". The only ssegregation caused by nationality is in war-time for practical reasons.

And Sweden is a mixed system like every world economy so they are no different than the US or France.

[Dylan]

then why are you against the goverment taxing the rich people, for more than they tax most people

Be fair, nobody has stated that they think it's wrong for the government to tax the rich.

1) In a world of imperfect systems, everyone's wrong. All that matters are preferences.

2) Failed? Everything has its ups and downs, it's not like capitalism didn't recover after the great depression, which was a lot worse than what's going on now.

[Ack]

ok nvm i'm not posting on this thread again.


2 last things before i go


1) history will prove who's right

and

2) history has proven again and again that refusal to change leads to bad things. there is no perfect system, but right now you can't refuse that capitalism, in it's current form, has failed


and last but not least, say what you want about europeans and slavery (besides the fact that most of you are european's yourself) but greece at the time, was a slave country as well (though of course in no way did we have it as bad as the african's had it. we just didn't have our own country)


and what about cyprus?


and also if you don't care about the future, you might as well kill yourself. If humans only cared about what they would see in their lifetime, there would be no reason to stick a stone to a piece of wood, to hunt down animals.

and it's this mentality that's killing the planet. WTF do I care about the greenhouse effect huh? it's my grandchildrens' problem

1. You're right, it will.

2. Capitalism helped a nation that was fewer than two centuries old become one of the most powerful super powers in the world. I'd say it worked pretty well. China is slowly making the transition to a capitalistic society, and it is now growing in dominance.

As for your future comments, I continue to live because I like living, not because I'm worried about where mankind will go. When we figure out all of these problems, we likely won't be men anymore anyway.

And frankly, I think the whole freakout-over-greenhouse-fad is full of shit.

I brought up Cyprus, a small island where Greek and Turkish have been continuously duking it out for dominance, as an example that every nation has dirty laundry we can point out and bitch about, even though it may prove to hold some similarities with our own nation's problems.

Also, look up the history of Ireland, and then look up the history of Irish immigrants in America to get an understand of what my family's been through in the last 500 years.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Refusal of change won't kill society, too much does. Change can be good AND bad. I still don't see what Bush did wrong. I have yet to see what Obama has done right. Capitalism has problems we know that. Most of this shit is based off opinions. Part of the reason I don't watch the news anymore is they feel the need to put their spin on things. The worst being Fox who blatantly show there conservitive views on even little things like community events for the homeless. O'Reilly can suck it.

I'm not really sure where i'm going with this and I know most of what I've said (saying) is irrelevant but main point is... politics are bullshit, no system is perfect, and for the love of all thats human THIS IS A RETRO GAMING FORUM! Sure we all enjoy the occational non-gaming thread but of all things WHY POLITICS???

[PGchris]

Arguing over what is the right economic structure for America is a crazy twisted web where you may think your supporting what seems right but you have no idea whose toes your stepping on.

My economic views are basically based around one personal belief and that is that no man deserves to live like a god. No matter how talented you are or how hard you work I cannot understand how someone can go out and buy a solid gold toilet(and this isn't even the worst example) while people, in America mind you, are struggling to feed there families everyday. There is a class of super rich that once they have made a ton of money all they have to do is sit on it and watch it grow. I have aspirations just like anyone else of some day getting lucky and hitting it big, but there is a difference between living a life of leisure once your rich and living a life of gross excess.

[Erik_Twice]

^Because if you can't get your your golden toilet you don't have any reasons for working more and thus we are back to the same spot except that the gold company goes bankrupt.

The same applies at all levels.

[Medical Dust]

I think a Communistic Democracy is the way to go.