05-22-2013, 02:58 PM
(05-22-2013, 01:23 PM)shoju Wrote:(05-22-2013, 07:08 AM)eppie Wrote: Well Kandrathe, you are looking at things very much form your local perspective.
The capitalist world (yes also China, Russia, India behave capitalist) contains a billion people who are at risk of starving and even a few billion below the poverty line.
We can't conclude that capitalism 'works'. Maybe we will in the future, maybe it is the best system possible, but there is absolutely no reason to be smug and satisfied about it. Well unless you live in the US and have a nice laptop with a 100MB internet connection of course.
And on the contrary, we can't say that capitalism doesn't work, because a select group of countries have starving people.
To do so, would be to isolate capitalism as the reason for the problem, and ignore anything else that could possibly be the problem.
I would argue that capitalism isn't the problem, or at least isn't the sole problem with hunger in capitalist based countries. If it was the problem, then how is it that with the distribution of wealth that the US has, we don't have an "africa-esque" starvation problem, with people dying in the streets en masse?
Could Capitalism be a contributing factor? Absolutely.
Is Capitalism the sole factor? Not even close.
You have national solutions or arguments for a global issue.
The lack of wealth, and the poverty in Africa is for a large part caused by their international relations. We take their resources using capitalist systems (also china and russia do this) and they are left with nothing.
Of course this is caused by the lack of rules and regulatory affairs, but this is the reason why we live in so much wealth. Why we can have people on the other side of the world make our cloths for costs that make it possible for us, to wear things ones and then throw it away.
That you don't find the distribution of wealth in the US a problem is a whole other discussion.
Capitalism works for us because people are not free to play the game (such as the Bangladesh workers) and we up till now have never included sustainability in the price of goods.
So just like a real communist state has never had the chance of evolving, a real capitalist free society has also never been reality.