If You Hate Poverty, You Should Love Capitalism

[Gozie51]

Basically many modern societies are capitalist where we have the bourgeois (known as the employers) and the proletariats(known as the employees )- as postulated by Karl Marx.
In my view,  the point then is, it is poverty that has made more capitalist to emerge both individuals or country because of the struggle to survive as also opined by Herbert Spencer (survival of the fittest ). Poverty is in the land & people are trying their hands in different fields and daring new grounds and eventually emerging as new employer, you can name them even globally ranging from those who have made there mark in social media, comedy, arts & culture science & technology, health, hospitality industry etc.

[1715227250]

1715227250

[bouren]

This is a decent youtube clip emphasizing positive aspects of capitalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n6ivGgb9RY

More fuel for the discussion on capitalism fire.

The main point alleged here is: "world poverty has fallen by 80% since 1970".

They claim capitalism is the main driving force behind reduced levels of poverty over the past 5 or so decades, which in turn implies capitalism creates elevated living standards.

First of all Increase in GDP doesn't implies increase in Welfare.
No doubt Capitalism is fuel for the economy and make it productive. But may not give desired results due to following points -
1. Inflation - Even if capitalism raises national income, it always contribute to increasing prices and therefore worse the situation if inflation rate is more than growth rate.
2. Per Capita Income - However, we cannot stick to one measure if we have more contradictory measures like population. When population increase is more than growth than capitalism becomes irrelevant as poors lose.

[twicezeroiszero]

I think it's an exaggeration. We know the capitalist countries in which many poor people. For Example India. And we know that a socialist country like Sweden where there is poor. The number of poor in the country depend on the fairness of the distribution of monetary resources.

This line that you have mentioned. It is really indeed true that this would really be a great thing but having a fair distributions is nearly impossible on most countries which we would really able to see there are still poor on the place.As long there are people who dont really care on that equality.

Actually, if you work hard everyday and never give up your job, you can get rich in someday.
Believe me, because our life never have bad treat poorly with those who are diligent, humble and not waste money.

[Fortify]

There is one very key word that is missing from the thread title: "Regulated" Capitalism. It is the nature of a capitalist business to seek a monopoly as the most efficient means to keep it's profits flowing. Not only does it seek the monopoly, but it seeks to continue the monopoly and this means putting up barriers to competitors. This all leads to a bad end result for most consumers. That is why you need sensible market regulators, who contain the greedy while sharing the funds necessary for government.

[Dart18]

It is just the same for every kind of rule.
It will always be the richest that is up there.
Why not give the poor a chance to be the capitalist. Maybe we will see how they are all better than those who have been rich since birth.
The thing is there will always be slavery in this world for any kind of government system.

[Tyrantt]

Just as true communism has never existed, nor has true capitalism. If you took a proper look at how US defence companies are funded it's veering towards socialistic paternalism. Each one is funded to keep them all ticking along happily enough even when there are clearly superior and cheaper alternatives.

Truly unfettered capitalism would be just as corrosive as all the other failed systems.

So are you saying that true communism would actually work?   Well yes and that's pretty much capitalism, each one needs a sponsor a donator to fund them in order to start things or keep them going for a cut of a profit. just like how first pc was made and distributed and even how Tesla had things going, he was given funds by a wealthy person. in this case, government is that wealthy person. There is no perfect system, there are just ones that work better.

[malboroman]

Just as true communism has never existed, nor has true capitalism. If you took a proper look at how US defence companies are funded it's veering towards socialistic paternalism. Each one is funded to keep them all ticking along happily enough even when there are clearly superior and cheaper alternatives.

Truly unfettered capitalism would be just as corrosive as all the other failed systems.

So are you saying that true communism would actually work?   Well yes and that's pretty much capitalism, each one needs a sponsor a donator to fund them in order to start things or keep them going for a cut of a profit. just like how first pc was made and distributed and even how Tesla had things going, he was given funds by a wealthy person. in this case, government is that wealthy person. There is no perfect system, there are just ones that work better.

Communism can work in ideal world. But in place where each human has his or her owen incentives, it will never work. That is the problem.

[Xavofat]

Just as true communism has never existed, nor has true capitalism. If you took a proper look at how US defence companies are funded it's veering towards socialistic paternalism. Each one is funded to keep them all ticking along happily enough even when there are clearly superior and cheaper alternatives.

Truly unfettered capitalism would be just as corrosive as all the other failed systems.

So are you saying that true communism would actually work?   Well yes and that's pretty much capitalism, each one needs a sponsor a donator to fund them in order to start things or keep them going for a cut of a profit. just like how first pc was made and distributed and even how Tesla had things going, he was given funds by a wealthy person. in this case, government is that wealthy person. There is no perfect system, there are just ones that work better.

Communism can work in ideal world. But in place where each human has his or her owen incentives, it will never work. That is the problem.

By your logic, unregulated capitalism (or "anarcho-capitalism") would not work.  Let me explain:

-In a society with no government, anyone could steal property because there is no significant body protecting the existence of it.
-Because of this, private firms would develop which help to protect people's homes
-The private firms are incentivised by profit, so the best security is for rich people

Therefore, rich people can protect their property while poor people cannot.  Because you claim that people act based on their incentives, that would mean that rich people would become oppressive and control poor people's homes, thus making the transition to "anarcho-capitalism" utterly pointless.

[Mahanton]

I think it's an exaggeration. We know the capitalist countries in which many poor people. For Example India. And we know that a socialist country like Sweden where there is poor. The number of poor in the country depend on the fairness of the distribution of monetary resources.

This line that you have mentioned. It is really indeed true that this would really be a great thing but having a fair distributions is nearly impossible on most countries which we would really able to see there are still poor on the place.As long there are people who dont really care on that equality.

Actually, if you work hard everyday and never give up your job, you can get rich in someday.
Believe me, because our life never have bad treat poorly with those who are diligent, humble and not waste money.

It would really depend on your hard work and possibilities of getting rich is really possible and as you said we should not really waste off money and be wise on how to spend it and invest at the same time.This is some way on which you would really taking your road into that state.Getting rich wont really be an easy thing and you would really still need to face lots of challenges or failures.

[Sir Cross]

I hate poverty in the sense that it brings about bad conditions for people and that it makes them live a difficult life, but I also don't agree with capitalism. I have accepted the fact that in a society, there will always be a class system and that poverty cannot be 100% alleviated, especially if the rich prevails. I still continue to pity the poor and wish I could do something more for them. I've been active in public service and try to help in my capactity but this is simply how society works. I don't think everyone can ever be 100% equal.

[Vikingr]

This is a pure sophism since capitalism will always define the concepts of poverty or wealth according to its own consumerist and destructive parameters, so that the individuals who consume the most are usually considered the richest, and not those who live happily despite their austere habits.

Well you cannot call those parameters as consumerist and destructive. Capitalism is no doubt helping the people who cannot fulfill their daily needs. It is very unique concept. A concept which must be appreciated by all of us. It removes the difference between rich and poor in a way that everyone can enjoy their rights.

[Hydrogen]

Just as true communism has never existed, nor has true capitalism. If you took a proper look at how US defence companies are funded it's veering towards socialistic paternalism. Each one is funded to keep them all ticking along happily enough even when there are clearly superior and cheaper alternatives.

Truly unfettered capitalism would be just as corrosive as all the other failed systems.

One observation that may be made of true capitalism, true socialism and similar "true" based systems. All might be defined in terms of being very centralized. True socialism is defined by a structure where power is centralized within a state or government. True capitalism is defined by a structure where power is centralized primarily within the private sector.

The most successful systems of socialism & capitalism may be defined in terms of being decentralized. Power being decentralized between government socialism and private sector capitalism. A decentralized balance rather than monolithic centralization.

[Webetcoins]

Just as true communism has never existed, nor has true capitalism. If you took a proper look at how US defence companies are funded it's veering towards socialistic paternalism. Each one is funded to keep them all ticking along happily enough even when there are clearly superior and cheaper alternatives.

Truly unfettered capitalism would be just as corrosive as all the other failed systems.

One observation that may be made of true capitalism, true socialism and similar "true" based systems. All might be defined in terms of being very centralized. True socialism is defined by a structure where power is centralized within a state or government. True capitalism is defined by a structure where power is centralized primarily within the private sector.

The most successful systems of socialism & capitalism may be defined in terms of being decentralized. Power being decentralized between government socialism and private sector capitalism. A decentralized balance rather than monolithic centralization.

Well your elaboration and concept clarification is nice and easy to understand. No doubt capitalism has worked very wisely and very positively for the betterment of the people who are not having another source and who are not able to serve their families, it has increased the income and it has raised the standard of the living and giving the sources of the income so for me it is the best step all the time.

[Jannatul Shefa]

If i hate poverty i don't think i have to love capitalism. In many capitalism country here are a huge amount of poor people.  So how can i love capitalism?
I think i should chooe socialism.

[funkenstein]

I'm just gonna paste Orlov's recent blog entry here in case anyone is interested: 

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Poverty is a major problem around the world, but it is not evenly distributed. Some countries, such as China and Russia, have in recent decades succeeded in raising many of their citizens out of poverty. For example, the real incomes of a majority of Russians have doubled more than once since the beginning of the century, while in China the explosive growth of cities and of manufacturing has improved the fortunes of many millions of former peasants. The result, readily observable, is enviable political stability and widespread optimism and confidence (if not satisfaction) with the overall direction.
In the meantime, in the formerly wealthy but now virtually bankrupt countries of the West, and in the United States especially, homelessness has been steadily increasing, the number of people on public assistance has been setting new records, the opioid epidemic is claiming more victims every day and major cities, such as Chicago and Baltimore, have turned into shooting galleries to such an extent that some obscure local official (not, mind you, Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel, as has been widely reported) has recently asked the UN to send in peacekeepers to stop what he has called “a genocide.” The result, again readily observable, is political instability and widespread dissatisfaction with the overall direction, as evidenced by such phenomena as Trump, Brexit, the electoral failure of major political parties in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere, separatist rumblings in Spain and Italy and the manifest fecklessness of both elected national officials and the unlected EU ones in Brussels.

Just going by the numbers, it is now possible to speak of the manifest failure of capitalism, as has been proclaimed loudly by Thomas Piketty et alia. As reported by World Inequality Lab, since 1980 income inequality has increased in practically all countries in the world. Over the intervening period the top 1% has received more income than the bottom 50% and now controls more than half of all the wealth on the planet. The largest increases in income inequality were seen in North America, China, India and Russia, although the effects differed in each case because income inequality had already been very high in North America and India while it had previously been among the lowest in the world in China and Russia.

The function of a society is to improve the well-being of its members. It is not the function of a society to make it easy for a tiny minority to prey upon the vast majority and drive it into destitution. Capitalism fails this basic test. When societies fail this basic test, they fall apart and the tiny minority get subjected to experiments such as the guillotine. How far away any given society is from such an event, and whether it is heading away from it or toward it, can be observed by watching the politics. Observe that Putin, during his recent national Q&A, announced that the prime objective of his next term as president will be to raise the incomes of the general population. Observe that Trump, with his tax reform package, is seeking to cut corporate taxes, eliminate estate taxes, increase federal budget deficits and generally shift the burden for all the previous economic policy failures from the very rich and onto the general population.

But the numbers churned out by economists, amusing though they may be, are, to my mind, borderline meaningless. To me, it makes sense to measure physical quantities—flows of matter and energy, information flows—but to measure the flows of money is to engage in group hallucination. The problem is that money doesn’t feel like anything—it’s just digits, as sexy and fulfilling as a train schedule. (Yes, there are a few nerds who love train schedules, but leaving them aside…) To make money feel like something, it has to be used, and there are two main ways to use it: to give pleasure through its surplus and to cause pain through its deficit.

Look at what the rich do: they are constantly jostling for the best way to make themselves look as rich as possible while remaining within the bounds of what they consider “good taste.” Just floundering about with naked women in a bathtub full of gems and gold bullion is not considered in “good taste.” The manifestations of massive wealth have to be understated and fashionable yet unmistakably signal that money is no object. Those new to money signal their wealth through multimillion-dollar weddings for their daughters or by buying megayachts, while those a bit further along the aristocratic continuum from nouveaux-riches to guillotinés achieve the same good feeling through sponsorship or through public shows of charity and largess. But the amount they spend on wealth signaling is tiny in proportion to their overall net worth. Most of it is bound up in what will in due course become stranded assets. We’ll return to that point in a moment.

Meanwhile look at what the poor do. Most of them languish in misery. A few of them attempt to beat the long odds by working hard, self-educating, educating and tightly disciplining and controlling their children. But even fewer succeed at this because there is a structural feature in their way: a wide moat that separates the rich from the poor. In that moat, tax donkeys are drowned in red ink—be they the poor struggling to rise out of poverty or the former middle class that has lapsed into poverty. One of the best ways to make it past this moat is to break the law, and that is hard to do alone. Thus, the best, and traditional, way to do it is to form a mafia, and become a law unto yourselves—very rough and violent at first, and progressively more legalized and legitimized. This is the basic methodology of aristocratic succession, and it has been practiced for millennia now. Scratch through the aristocratic veneer and you will find a former gangster, or a descendant of one.

But virtually all of them, both rich and poor, are seduced—not by wealth, for wealth itself is ephemeral and cannot be directly experienced—but by the displays of wealth employed by the rich, who are forever looking for new ways to flaunt their wealth. And virtually all of them are made miserable by this experience, because all of them, with the possible exception of Jeff Bezos, are not rich “enough.” Since wealth is just a number, and numbers only function in comparison with other numbers, “enough” can only mean one thing: richer than anyone else, and that leaves us with just Jeff Bezos, the happiest bozo on this bus to nowhere.

Why is the bus going nowhere, and why does it make sense to measure the flows of matter and energy (and perhaps information) but not of money? Because money is denominated in future ability perform work. Most of that work is, by now, not physical labor but machine labor. And the vast majority of that machine labor (silly windmills and solar panels aside) comes from fossil fuels. Now go look at the balance sheets of all the major Western energy companies. Are they still profitable. No. Are they vastly indebted. Yes. Once it becomes impossible to run the machines whose output underpins the net worth of the high-net-worth individuals, they become stranded assets: they still cost money to maintain but they are no longer useful. The obvious next step is to forgo their maintenance. But shortly thereafter it turns out that they are no longer worth much beyond their value as salvage and scrap.

Thus, the final condemnation of capitalism is not that it is unjust or wasteful; it is that it is downright stupid. It is an insipid, misguided struggle over wealth signaling that ends in poverty, or worse, for all those involved. In the meantime, the rich are on an endless quest for more endorphins, to be gained, temporarily, from displaying the latest gadget or fashionable rag, or from occupying a swank bit of real estate, while the poor feel pain from being unable to heat their homes or feed their children properly and suffer endless indignities in trying to scrape by. But in the end they will be the same, for there is a great equalizer at work, called Nonrenewable Natural Resource Depletion (NNRD). And in most parts of the world it is very far along already.

How can you escape from this ridiculous cycle of stupidity that ends in poverty? I have plenty of direct experience with both wealth and poverty, and I believe I have found an answer. You see, being poor feels very different in different places. There is too much to explain in terms of what goes into creating that feeling, and each place is a little bit different. But one bold conjecture I would dare to make is that while all the rich are the same everywhere, all the poor are different. Since a lot of places will cease to be viable once wealth turns to stranded assets, it makes sense to look for ones that won’t be. And my theory, though it is entirely unsupported by any economic analysis, is that the best places will be those where the poor people feel the best and the rich people, relatively speaking, feel the worst.

[Murloc]

First of all Increase in GDP doesn't implies increase in Welfare.
No doubt Capitalism is fuel for the economy and make it productive. But may not give desired results due to following points -
1. Inflation - Even if capitalism raises national income, it always contribute to increasing prices and therefore worse the situation if inflation rate is more than growth rate.
2. Per Capita Income - However, we cannot stick to one measure if we have more contradictory measures like population. When population increase is more than growth than capitalism becomes irrelevant as poors lose.

You and some other people in this thread are making the same simple mistake. In countries that usualy called "capitalistic" not everything is a capitalism. State monopolies on money (they exist in most countries) are printing new money and they have nothing close to free market. Capitalism is more relevant than sotialism in like 99% cases.

[erichall]

Definitely agree.

The probably is that people's hatred of what they perceive as capitalism is actually collusion between large corporations and the state.

Free markets are a good thing. Just look at crypto as a perfect example.

[Real14Hero]

People who agrees with old fashioned ideologies like capitalism or socialism are fools.These concepts are pegs from old civilization.The world has changes a lot since then.
There is an increase in production thus low poverty.You can't credit a concept for something.
We should look for the best solution to counter poverty.

Maybe the answer lies in a red book.It could be anything, but not just capitalism.

[slyfox]

This is a decent youtube clip emphasizing positive aspects of capitalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n6ivGgb9RY

More fuel for the discussion on capitalism fire.

The main point alleged here is: "world poverty has fallen by 80% since 1970".

They claim capitalism is the main driving force behind reduced levels of poverty over the past 5 or so decades, which in turn implies capitalism creates elevated living standards.

You should promote this video to anti-capitalist "social justice" activists who hate capitalism ,but use computers and smartphones.
I don`t hate capitalism,i hate the bankster cartel of all central bankers,that are trying to ruin the markets and steal peoples savings with the negative interests policy.
The demographic growth of the third world population keeps the poverty levels high.This is the main issue to focus on.

Those that are in favor of socialism have never really lived in a real socialist country with all the death and poverty that implies capitalism is the only system that works is not perfect but it is everything we have and as such it needs to be defended from those that are too ignorant to recognize the truth.

[ivrynx]

It is true, capitalism is not a bad idea, it will help you improve your finances, if you really want to be out of poverty it is for you, but make sure that you know what you are doing. In the past, they are saying that capitalism is bad, that is because there are a lot of huge companies that had started to monopolize their market and tried to take over the small businesses, but in reality, capitalism is a good idea, but there are just people who are greedy ans wanted all for themselves.