How does capitalism have a happy ending?

The US taxpayers spend $80 billion per year on food stamps! We spend $200 billion per year on disability. Can't even guess how many billion$ are spent on extended unemployment. Government grants in the billion$ are given to every local city to hire people and buy equipment. The unpaid portion of Obamacare will be government welfare...

 

The US has severe income inequalities which of course increases the demand for welfare. However, it is just a matter of fact to note that the US- compared to other countries- has a stunted welfare state.

 

It shouldn't matter because that public policy engenders a positive multiplier effect on our economy and can be termed, an Investment in the general welfare.

 

We've managed to increase our national debt to $17 trillion due to wars, military, and welfare. And we continue $500+ billion deficits forecasted at least ten years out...that's a lot of government welfare...

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Makes no difference...it is still welfare...

 

This is a deliberate misrepresentation. The US welfare state, in relative terms, is pathetic. That is just factual, making your original comment terribly awkward

 

Full employment of resources is one function of government and a promotion of the general welfare.

 

Capitalism raises the living standards of everyone. The poor today are better off than the wealthy 400 years ago.

So...you are moving the goal posts.

 

Full employment of resources in any given market is no form of moving any goal posts; it is an assumption made by the theory of demand and supply.

 

I agree to disagree.

It shouldn't matter because that public policy engenders a positive multiplier effect on our economy and can be termed, an Investment in the general welfare.

 

The wealthy today are far better off than the wealthy of 400 years ago too.
The goalposts are always moving, always have been.
What is your point?

 

Full employment of resources can be analogous to a commodity, as a Standard.

 

It is an assertion of some thinkers that the full employment of resources can only be achieved through capitalist endeavour in the free market.

Unfortunately for those thinkers, extant evidence of free market capitalist enterprise does not support that assertion. In fact, the extant evidence of free market capitalist endeavour appears to indicate a regular syndrome of the profligate wasting of available resources in order to forward the singular pursuit of profit for those whose interest is strictly monetary.

This would make sense if the only resource is money and everything else, all tangible goods on the planet and all labour to produce them, are just means to the realization of resource but not resources in and of themselves.

To be blunt, money is the only resource so talking to a capitalist about the employment of resources has nothing to do with actual physical objects or the labour involved in their deployment. Capitalists easily divorce themselves from the human suffering that their decisions create by first, believing that their decision about the maximization of resource deployment to the best thing for the entirety of society, and second believing that money is the only resource.

The result is a world where the sloshing about of money from one place to another has become a random factor in the lives of a Billion people that wreaks serial havoc in the markets for all goods and the economies of all nations, destroying the stability that people depend on for their lively hoods and a future for their children. The end of the USSR was not a signal to return to the days before, where money was the only resource and nothing else had consequence. It was a signal that the people have all the power regardless of who thinks they control or own anything.

Capitalists are naive if they think this latest experiment in the power of money will end well. Their short term gains at the expense of so many who live in democratic republics have created resentments that will not be assuaged for long with cheaply purchased temporary expedients to deflect the anger on others, like those tea party idiots or the right wing nationalist revival movements. Those days are over, people now mock them and defy them rather than take them seriously or be afraid. The right wing gangsters of the past have become nothing but clowns and are no longer able to stifle public discussion about the role of wealth in society in many nations.

 

The definition of poverty is becoming very arbitrary. If poor is "lacking sufficient money to live at a standard considered comfortable or normal in a society." then it can be virtually anything because it is all relative.

If I lived in a hypothetical country where every person in the middle class was as wealthy as Warren Buffet would you consider me poor if I only had a 5,000 square foot house on 2 acres, owned several cars and had 3 full time staff?

 

You are confusing crony capitalism (where money does have power) with capitalism.

 

There is a difference between poor and official poverty whenever this should become an issue.

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What if we substitute influence for power?

 

If the right wants to call people together over a spot of tea in the harbor, it is like heritage. this appeals to people, and it did run it's course. now all they need is a new catchy slogan for the next election.

Capitalism as i understand it where someone owns something. this thing, or things, can be traded as if they were money, and vice versa. the more things you have in your country the more money there is. the answer is to loan money out to produce more. this will leave your country with more assets to be traded, and more debt to be paid. this creates money and assets. as long as the state owns all the assets, and distribute it to the really poor, then the world will flourish under 'capitalism.'

 

Poverty has always been relative. If one did not have the wherewithal to have those things commensurate with the contemporary idea of living a decent life one was considered to be in poverty.

You could live in a real neighbourhood and be considered poor because you only have 2 full time staff and no garage for your three cars right now. 400 years ago visitors from the Middle East were appalled at the abject poverty of their hosts, the wealthiest merchants and highest royalty in Europe.

Being relatively poor and living in poverty are different. People who are relatively poor cannot afford the luxuries that make their life better. People in poverty cannot afford the basic necessities of life, which means food, clothing, a place to live, a phone to get a job and a car to get to work. That is the absolute minimum wherewithal necessary for an individual to gain employment and survive on their own in the US these days. They could ditch the car if they live in one of the few urban areas with decent public transportation but without that, lacking any one of those puts a person in poverty.

 

Capitalism: gives free time for people to complain about it. LOL Capitalism is a great pusher of innovation and allows everyone to have the opportunity to prosper, so long as they are willing to work for it.

 

How does that work with any natural rate of unemployment?

 

What do you mean exactly?

 

I thought you understood the social dilemma involved. If you don't factor for any rate of unemployment in any given labor pool, everyone could have doctorates and still have some be unemployed,

 

Open markets, and capitalistic ventures are the default human system. All other experiments in social & economic engineering fail, & people go back to working, growing, building.. & trading.
The statist manipulators try to deceive us with fantasies of Utopian paradise, but they ALWAYS end up as oppressive nightmares.
So it is not the open markets that will end, but centralized planning. China taught us that in the last century.

The question should be, 'Are we so stupid to learn NOTHING from history?'

 

I guess not; even the right can't seem to muster enough morals to bear true witness to our own laws, even with the help of the clergy.

 

China taught that centralized planning can create a capitalist economy that destroys the air and water while concentrating benefits at the top, much like how the US accomplished the same in the century before by giving away vast public resources to private interests that allowed them to concentrate the nations wealth and gain control of the markets, which was broken by popular demand.

The default human system is mutual cooperation for overall benefit. Capitalism is mutual cooperation for personal benefit. Capitalism is not in perfect alignment with the default human system and has, over time been subject to adjustment. Capitalism is also not in perfect alignment with open markets since capitalist endeavour has often resulted in concentrations of market power that impede or entirely preclude the operation of open markets.

The question really should be, "Are we so stupid that we think free markets and capitalism are the same thing?"

 

China has State Capitalism which is a form of Communism and is what Lenin referred communism as during the Russian revolution. Granted, capitalism has had its ups and downs and by definition is free market. Capitalism in the American sense is a market system but it also has other ideologies mixed in, many I personally agree with and disagree with. However, I ultimately believe that Free market Capitalism is superior to most, if no,t all economic systems. I cannot think of a system that is statistically better from an economic and social standpoint.