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Does Capitalism force a percentage of the population to live in poverty?

Does capitalism force a percentage of a countries population into poverty?>

  • Yes

    Votes: 13 52.0%
  • No

    Votes: 11 44.0%
  • Not Sure

    Votes: 1 4.0%

  • Total voters
    25
It sure is capitalism. It does not matter where the multinational corperations make their money.

No, it's essentially slave labor. That's about as far from capitalism as you can get.
 
If you don't like being poor, get an education and get out of your condition by working hard.

The problem with this idea is that the market will always price some jobs cheaply, thereby forcing someone to be poor (even if we all had MIT quality educations and were highly motivated, someone has to take out the trash). While your statement works fairly well when talking to individuals, it does not work when you look at the system as a whole.
 
Capitalism does not force people into poverty. It does not cause poverty. The absence of an economic system results in practically all people being in poverty. The various economic systems raise people out of poverty. So the question is how many people are in poverty and how can you minimize it?

Feudalism left most people in poverty and only nobles and merchants rose out of poverty.

Mercantilism did better.

Communism and socialism tries to spread wealth to all members of society, by dictating equality of outcome, and since there was little growth and innovation, practically all people are in poverty.

Capitalism raises all people. Our people in poverty have TVs, cars, food, apartments. They do this on minimum wage. Our poor are orders of magnitude richer than the poor in third world countries. The fact that there is a growing gap between rich and poor, means that the rich grow more than the poor, but the poor still grow. As noted above, systems which try for equality of outcome are detrimental to society as a whole. If you don't like being poor, get an education and get out of your condition by working hard.

I would disagree with the bolded part. It doesn't necessarily mean that. In a capitalist society everyone's wealth will tend to grow, but in the messed up version we have now it's no guarantee.
 
No, it's essentially slave labor. That's about as far from capitalism as you can get.

lol.. so your corperations arn't profiting from paid "slave" labor in third world countries? The absence of democracy does not matter to capitalism. Capitalism and democracy arn't the same thing.
 
The problem with this idea is that the market will always price some jobs cheaply, thereby forcing someone to be poor (even if we all had MIT quality educations and were highly motivated, someone has to take out the trash). While your statement works fairly well when talking to individuals, it does not work when you look at the system as a whole.

But sanitation workers are paid rather well to take out the trash, aren't they?
 
Which is why you need governemnt to temper capitalism.

I agree with reservations. Using minimum wage and forcing adoption of insurance and use of regulation can be done in varying degrees. The absence of these is one extreme where you find abuse. The imposition of these in excess also hurts the system. A balanced approach must be used. One non government example is unions. Detroit has lost its position of dominance because it is too expensive to build cars with union labor. And so the union members end up losing their jobs, which seems worse than holding jobs for less pay and benefits.

Regulation tends to make entry into markets for new companies to difficult. Its side effect is that it protects existing companies from competition, forcing prices to remain inflated.
 
The problem with this idea is that the market will always price some jobs cheaply, thereby forcing someone to be poor (even if we all had MIT quality educations and were highly motivated, someone has to take out the trash). While your statement works fairly well when talking to individuals, it does not work when you look at the system as a whole.

I disagree with the sentiment that it forces one to be poor. But there will clearly be some who are poor, looking at the system as a whole. It does not eliminate the poor. It does change the definition of what poor is. As I said, most poor have tvs, computers, cars, apartments, educational opportunities.
 
lol.. so your corperations arn't profiting from paid "slave" labor in third world countries? The absence of democracy does not matter to capitalism. Capitalism and democracy arn't the same thing.

Nor are capitalism and profiteering the same thing, as I mentioned. Yes, our corporations are essentially profiting from slave labor. That doesn't make slavery a form of capitalism.
 
Nor are capitalism and profiteering the same thing, as I mentioned. Yes, our corporations are essentially profiting from slave labor. That doesn't make slavery a form of capitalism.

Slavery is a form of capitalism, it treats humans as a resource. As a form of capital.
 
Nor are capitalism and profiteering the same thing, as I mentioned. Yes, our corporations are essentially profiting from slave labor. That doesn't make slavery a form of capitalism.

No they are not but it's pretty close to slave labour.. slaves don't make money at all. Certainly the profit motive.. buy low sell high is associated with capitalism. I mean what company does not have a profit motive? Supply and demand is directly motivated by the profit motive in capitalism. The companies in China are also capitalist.
 
I was thinking more about the office cleaning staff.

Yeah, good point. I agree that it's not a perfect system and we do need government or something to protect people on the margins.
 
I disagree with the sentiment that it forces one to be poor. But there will clearly be some who are poor, looking at the system as a whole. It does not eliminate the poor. It does change the definition of what poor is. As I said, most poor have tvs, computers, cars, apartments, educational opportunities.

The way I see it, you contradicted your own statement there with the acknowledgement that the system will end up making a certain percentage of the population poor.
 
reefedjib said:
The fact that there is a growing gap between rich and poor, means that the rich grow more than the poor, but the poor still grow.
I would disagree with the bolded part. It doesn't necessarily mean that. In a capitalist society everyone's wealth will tend to grow, but in the messed up version we have now it's no guarantee.

You are kidding right? You don't see that the real wages earned by our poor has grown over the past 200 years? I wish I had the data to demonstrate it. Ok, I found a graph. The bottom 20th percentile has doubled it's income over the past 60 years.

500px-United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg.png
 
The way I see it, you contradicted your own statement there with the acknowledgement that the system will end up making a certain percentage of the population poor.

No, my point is that the system is not making them poor.
 
You are kidding right? You don't see that the real wages earned by our poor has grown over the past 200 years? I wish I had the data to demonstrate it. Ok, I found a graph. The bottom 20th percentile has doubled it's income over the past 60 years.

500px-United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg.png

I don't like that graph as it does not scale in a way that I think is honest.
 
Have y'all heard that Obama forced fisheries in Guam to pay minimum wage? The result is that one of the two big companies fishing there, I think it is Sunkist, closed up shop. The loss of jobs has been devastating to the island. The other company is expected to do the same. The Law of Unintended Consequences.
 
I don't like that graph as it does not scale in a way that I think is honest.

It just doesn't support your opinion, is why you don't like it, mega. Notice it is in 2007 $ so it is in real dollars and adjusted for inflation.
 
No they are not but it's pretty close to slave labour.. slaves don't make money at all. Certainly the profit motive.. buy low sell high is associated with capitalism. I mean what company does not have a profit motive? Supply and demand is directly motivated by the profit motive in capitalism. The companies in China are also capitalist.

No, because again, the profit motive is a pre-capitalist idea and does not alone constitute capitalism. There's nothing wrong with it, but a capitalist system has other elements as well. The capitalist revolution was about creating institutions that favored innovation and economic activism among the masses.
 
It just doesn't support your opinion, is why you don't like it, mega. Notice it is in 2007 $ so it is in real dollars and adjusted for inflation.

It dishonestly shows all groups raising at the same rate because of compounding increases on the scale. If we were to look at the data as it actually it is, we would be looking at steeper slopes for higher percentiles. I didn't weigh in on this specific debate (as I was going on about poverty, not stratification of income, which seems that was something you were chatting with Winston Smith about).

I believe poverty is something best measured relative to the rest of society and not absolutely though since that is how people generally seem to measure themselves.
 
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