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What your argument mentions in the form of emotional appeal, it lacks in cold, hard facts. You seem to believe that capitalism is limited to the USA, and yes, if we leave the scope to only include the USA, Canada, and Europe, capitalism appears very appealing (although, thanks to unregulated capitalism, inequality rises in some of the richer countries as I'll touch on later).
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Well, it is a pleasant surprise to know that capitalism is not all bad.
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Let us now look at one of the most recent developments of capitalism-globalisation. Capitalism is a system which has a unique flaw. Unlike Feudalism, capitalism consistently overproduces goods. It has, indeed, tremendous productive power, too much. This constant surplus demands a bigger and bigger market. In the latter half of the 20th century, we began to see that capitalism could not be sustained in a single nation, it had to be expanded. Now, that market includes all the world. We see Coke machines in Africa and Latin America, Nike and Gap factories in China, and many American car companies manufacturing their cars in Mexico (this is to show that globalisation creates not only a larger market, but a larger workforce, and more production options. It icludes not only consumers, but producers). Globalisation need not include production in these poorer countries, yet it does. Why is this? Why are American factories, which like most, consistently create surpluses of goods, shipped overseas?
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When I condense all of is, it comes out this way. The spillover of capitalism to the poorer countries of the world has produced jobs that never before existed for people who had lived in abject poverty and raised them to the level of consumer of goods that, heretofore, they could only dream about, if indeed, they were aware of its existence. This bodes well for all concerned. Goods are produced. Jobs are created. Markets are developed. Living standards are raised. Investors are compensated. Growth proliferates.
If there is a downside in your analysis, I have not detected it.
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We here must realize the harsh fact that capitalism is driven by greed, the goal of capitalism is to gain money, and when one gains money, someone else must lose money.
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This is the fallacy of the argument presented by socialists. Wealth is not finite; it is limitless.
Adam Smith was the first to realize that the ‘Wealth of a Nation’ was not in the accumulation of commodities nor in the resource reserves that a nation may happen to possess. But rather wealth exists in the productive knowledge of its people. The ability to efficiently transform resources into desired goods and services represents the true source of a nation's wealth.
Physical and human capital represents the true embodiment of wealth.
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The loser, in recent years, has been the American worker.
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The only American workers who ever lose are those who eschew education and are forced to accept menial jobs which enables them to go through life complaining about the unfairness of it all.
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Foreign workers, desperate for work and food, as their old farmland has, in many places, been replaced by factories, will work extremely cheaply. They work for less than 50 cents an hour, in many places, for 14 hours a day. Child labor is seen in many foreign factories. It takes a family of 4 to bring in enough money to live on.
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That sounds like conditions in the US during the early days of industrialization. However, Living standards vary, country to country, as does the cost of living. Irrespective of how dark you paint the picture, The bright spot is that just as the US passed through it, so will any other country where government impediments are not severe.
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This child labor means children have not the time for education, creating a whole new generation of poor workers, dependent upon a company. Considered by most throughout the world as slave labor, as many undoubtedly work not for personal gain or pleasure, as many Americans do, but rather to survive, right-wing Americans continue to support the companies rather than the workers.
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The alternative would be far worse, would it not?[quote If, Fant, you still believe that workers have been 'saved' by capitalism, that they could not survive without it, you need only to read the Communist Manifesto by Marx. In it, he tells a brief history of pre-capitalist society, showing that most people actually lived better before capitalism. We can plainly see , partly through facts, partly through the fact that most cheap laborers throughout the world consistently are Marxist, that foreign workers suffer under capitalism.[/quote]Whether that was true when he wrote it midway through the nineteenth century, it is certainly not true in the twenty-first.
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But what about the rich ones?
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Most ‘rich ones’ used to be the poor ones. This is the beauty of the capitalist system. Those on the bottom have the opportunity to move up the ladder, even all the way to the top. Those opportunities do not exist under socialism where the goal is not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome. Everyone is limited to the same rung on the ladder. A low rung. Everyone, that is, except those at the top who pull the strings.
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The American unemployment rate is low, incredibly low. Many like to credit this to the great power and success of capitalism. Unfortuntely, this compliment isn't entirely warranted.
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Damn, I thought we had finally done something right.
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In the USA, we have the one of the hgihest prison populations of any industrialised country, even proportionally it is extremely large. This of course will bring down the unemployment rate.
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Instead of permitting the inmates to languish in laziness, I think we should put the time to good use where they would earn an education, learn a work ethic, produce value, and return to society with a cash stake that would help them to comfortably assimilate.
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But, unlike the unemployment rate, the poverty rate is relatively large-12%. This cannot be totally attributed to the jobless-5% of working Americans or higher work in poverty. But how can this be? We are the richest country in the world, yet we can't keep our workers out of poverty? Perhaps some numbers will clear this up.
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Poverty is a fuzzy concept. A few years ago, a visiting dignitary from an African nation was taken on a tour of several US ghetto neighborhoods in order that he may see how bad conditions were. Upon his departure for his homeland, he was asked to comment on what he had seen. His remark was along the lines of, “I’ve been to many places around the world. However, it is only in the US that I’ve ever seen poor people who are fat.”
Nevertheless, the poverty thresholds shown below shouldn’t be difficult to overcome if more than one family member does nothing more than flip hamburgers at the local fast food emporium. Imagine what can be accomplished with a ‘real’ job.
There's a problem with the formatting of the chart, but I'm sure you can figure it out.
U.S. Census Bureau
Poverty Thresholds 2004
.......................................Annual..... ........ Weekly........... Hourly
Three persons.......................... 14,776 284 7
Four persons........................... 19,484 375 9
Five persons........................... 23,497 452 11
Six persons............................ 27,025 520 13
Seven persons.......................... 31,096 598 15
Eight persons.......................... 34,778 669 17
Nine persons or more................... 41,836 805 20
Continued on next post.