This is a report of today in the largest newspaper in Canada:
Please note the folowing point:
A few years before his death, prophet Mohammed announced the following covenant:
" ..to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens."
Oh, but money is evil. Economics is evil. It degrades humanity and our character
Let’s say I am good at making chairs and you are good at making shoes.
I can make a chair in an hour, but it takes me eight hours to make a pair of shoes. Likewise, you can make a pair of shoes in an hour, but you lack chair-making skills and equipment, and it takes you eight hours to make a chair.
So if I need a chair I can make my own. But why should I work eight hours to make a pair of shoes? Instead, I could work just one hour and make a chair, and then trade it with you for a pair of shoes.
You and I would both benefit from this transaction. This is “economics.” This is good.
Where I think the greatest mischief can be done is not in the free trading, but when the government gets involved and wants a piece of the action. So I trade ten chairs for ten pairs of shoes, but the government wants three of the pairs of shoes to pay for necessary costs, but also to give themselves some new shoes, or to pass out as favors to those who will vote for them.
[QUOTE=thomas;47647]Let’s say I am good at making chairs and you are good at making shoes.
I can make a chair in an hour, but it takes me eight hours to make a pair of shoes. Likewise, you can make a pair of shoes in an hour, but you lack chair-making skills and equipment, and it takes you eight hours to make a chair.
So if I need a chair I can make my own. But why should I work eight hours to make a pair of shoes? Instead, I could work just one hour and make a chair, and then trade it with you for a pair of shoes.
You and I would both benefit from this transaction. This is “economics.” This is good.
Where I think the greatest mischief can be done is not in the free trading, but when the government gets involved and wants a piece of the action. So I trade ten chairs for ten pairs of shoes, but the government wants three of the pairs of shoes to pay for necessary costs, but also to give themselves some new shoes, or to pass out as favors to those who will vote for them.[/quote]
That is more of a barter/“home economics” sort of system. You specialize in making a certain thing. You make it and trade it with someone who has something you desire.
We speak of capitalism as it is recognized with its mass production, competition in all sorts of levels from big corporations to small businesses, and etc.
This is a report of today in the largest newspaper in Canada:
Please note the folowing point:
A few years before his death, prophet Mohammed announced the following covenant:
" ..to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens."[/QUOTE]
Hello missionary666. You seem to be failing in maintaining a hermetic sealing of your true identity. It was not a "covenant" but an "umma." Second, you know nothing of Islam. There are a lot of bogus Hadith out there containing fabrications of what Mohammed said/did during his lifetime. This most likely is one of them. Christians and Jews are known as Al-Kitab in Islam and the Q'uran. This means no jizya and some level of toleration. That does not mean they are at peace with each other; the Muslims consider their religion the most correct of the Abrahamic faiths. Christians and Jews are still considered kaffirs to an extent. A Christian or a Jew will still have a fatwa issued on him if he utters blasphemy in a Muslim country (look at Pakistan), faster than they can finish saying "Allah is a false god." Besides, the Christian West has raped the world and the M.E long enough for Muslims and most other religious groups to hate Christians for eternity. Any sort of ties between them is solely the product of your perverse mind. Sorry but you will have to try harder to gain converts. Don't play the game of pretending to be tolerant. Most religious groups have learned not to trust most Bible totting Christians, especially when they say they respect other religions (but they really mean "I just want to convert you").
It is strange that this appeared in Canada. Why didn't the wise lady send it off to Iran, Saudi, Pakistan, Iraq, and etc to be published? Why didn't it appear there? I wonder...hmm....
Learn from Thomas.
[QUOTE=Nietzsche;47649]That is more of a barter/“home economics” sort of system. You specialize in making a certain thing. You make it and trade it with someone who has something you desire.
We speak of capitalism as it is recognized with its mass production, competition in all sorts of levels from big corporations to small businesses, and etc.[/QUOTE]
It’s the same principle.
[QUOTE=thomas;47652]It’s the same principle.[/QUOTE]
But capitalism is on a far more complex (wages, private ownership, supply/demand, investment, etc) and on a far larger and far more impersonal scale. Sure, it encourages growth; material growth, and often at the expense of someone or something, whether it is the livelihood of a person or the success of a business. It cultivates vices and negative qualities, such as material accumulation, desire for power/domination, etc…
What’s the alternative?
Because of capitalism we have all kinds of good things, including hospitals and cures for diseases which would have killed people in their youth in pre-capitalistic days.
At what point does it become evil?
It’s just a system. A system isn’t evil. Sure there could be evil people exploiting it, but I think any other system could be exploited in worse ways.
In the US a person can be in an independent business with practially nothing, and build up to something substantial. There is room for all to grow and prosper, and this growth and prosperity is not at the expense of making someone else poorer.
It’s just like my example of trading shoes for a chair. Each party becomes richer in the process.
[QUOTE=thomas;47655]What’s the alternative?
Because of capitalism we have all kinds of good things, including hospitals and cures for diseases which would have killed people in their youth in pre-capitalistic days.
At what point does it become evil?
It’s just a system. A system isn’t evil. Sure there could be evil people exploiting it, but I think any other system could be exploited in worse ways.
In the US a person can be in an independent business with practially nothing, and build up to something substantial. There is room for all to grow and prosper, and this growth and prosperity is not at the expense of making someone else poorer.
It’s just like my example of trading shoes for a chair. Each party becomes richer in the process.[/QUOTE]
Yes, all that is fine. Materially. Take the U.S for example; we have all the “merits” you have mentioned. But what does the majority of society show for all of it? Americans are also some of the most ignorant people in this planet. Willfully ignorant to be exact, the worst kind of ignorance. America provides many opportunities and the ones who are mostly taking advantage of it are immigrants. Most entrenched Americans do not have a clue about anything; they reject Global Warming (even though it is a scientifically verified theory), always bathe in stereotypes and racism, care little about intellectual development, know more about pop culture than anything else, are far too insular and narrow minded (thinking their country is the best country in the whole world, trashing other countries and making fun of their poverty), are easily swayed by the media and societal dogma, fail to look holistically look at a particular circumstance affecting their individual lives (resulting in the incumbent political party being made a scapegoat for the suffering)…need I go on? America is economically and intellectually failing nowadays no matter how one likes to pass it of by saying “China has a horrible human rights record,” “Chinese education system is based on rote memorization,” and etc. I ultimately attribute this to a mixture of capitalism and mobocracy.
Capitalism can go both ways you know. It is a fragile system in the long run.
[QUOTE=Nietzsche;47654]But capitalism is on a far more complex (wages, private ownership, supply/demand, investment, etc) and on a far larger and far more impersonal scale. Sure, it encourages growth; material growth, and often at the expense of someone or something, whether it is the livelihood of a person or the success of a business. It cultivates vices and negative qualities, such as material accumulation, desire for power/domination, etc…[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but you said “there’s nothing wrong with me having a few extra dollars in my pocket”, meanwhile the money you may spend at Starbucks every month could feed a third-world family for a year. Either it’s wrong, or it’s not. Evil, or not. Just because it applies to you, that doesn’t make it okay.
This is another example of your hypocrisy. Don’t point at other rich people, other rich kids, universalize or shut up.
"Bark Bark! Bark Bark Bark! Woof woof! Foams at mouth Feral gleam in its eyes - Indra Deva’s previous post which I cannot see.
[QUOTE=Nietzsche;47671]"Bark Bark! Bark Bark Bark! Woof woof! Foams at mouth Feral gleam in its eyes - Indra Deva’s previous post which I cannot see.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, that <IGNORE> function’s working like a charm :lol::lol::lol:
Nietszche can see through ignores…,…,he has the power…but he is at school at present or tucked up in bed…bless, he will see this later…
[QUOTE=thomas;47655]What’s the alternative?
Because of capitalism we have all kinds of good things, including hospitals and cures for diseases which would have killed people in their youth in pre-capitalistic days.[/quote]
There are hospitals and universities in communist countries too 
In fact the very first country to have hospitals and universities was India, and that was not capitalist, but had its own Vedic system of society.
Therefore, it is not because of capitalism that we have hospitals and universities etc, otherwise communist countries and the Vedic system of society would not have them.
At what point does it become evil?
It’s just a system. A system isn’t evil. Sure there could be evil people exploiting it, but I think any other system could be exploited in worse ways.
The system itself is based on exploitation. This is basic sociology that we get at school. Capitalism thrives on creating surplus value. It goes a bit like this: the workers works for the capitalists(the ones that own the capital, land and means of production) in exchange for wages. The worker createss for the capitalist the product which the capitalists then sell on the market at a higher value than was used to make it and creating a huge profit for the capitalist. The wage the worker gets paid is extremely disproportionate to the profit that they make from selling the product(the workers made!) thus creating a surplus value for the capitalist. In other words the worker is exploited by the capitalist.
Hilariously, then the workers uses the wages they made to buy the products that they contributed in making, thus giving back capital to the capitalist. The worker is alienated from the product they made. The product becomes the property of the capitalist. The profit, i.e., the surplus value, become the profit of the capitalist.
In order to generate more profit the capitalist has to undercut the wage of the workers. In order to compete with other capitalists the capitalist must lower the price of their product, but by cutting prices they have to simultaneuosly get their profit from elsewhere, and this happens at the workers expense. Today, capitalists can give us cheap products(televisions, clothes, laptops, cars) but they do so by outsourcing their work to cheap labour in third world countries, where the workers are paid abysmally low wages. As a consequence workers in the first world lose jobs.
The capitalists can make even greater profit by cutting the number of workers and replacing them with machines(automation) and increase their productivity and effiency. Today, many jobs that were previously done by workers are now done by machines. As a consequence jobs are lost.
A major contradiction which exists within capitalism is the tendency towards monopolization. Capitalist companies with one another and the one with greater purchasing power buys out the smaller company, as a result capital starts to fall into fewer and fewer hands and capitalists get richer, richer and even more richer and the gap widens between the capitalists and the workers. The extent of the power of companies today is such that they could buy out most countries in the world and have their own armies. This was not the case a few hundred years ago.
These three major contradictions in capitalism 1) undercutting the wages of workers 2) automation and 3) monopolization make capitalism a completely unsustinable system. This is why Marx said that capitalism has its own seeds of destruction. Hence why capitalism has historically been in crisis(wall street crash, great depression, recessions, global economic meltdown)
Capitalism works great… exceedingly great… for the rich. It allows them to keep almost all the capital in the world to themselves and everybody else just becomes a pauper. It can be seen today with the gradual disappearance of the middle classes in the first world countries, with the masses becoming equally pauperized. It can equally be seen just how powerful capitalists are today and how they are able to control everything in the world(foreign policies, international law, international regulations) and even decisions to go to war are based on capitalist intervention(Iraq etc) Weber called this beaurocratic capitalism.
In the end the future we are heading towards with capitalism is a refeadualized world where a very select and elite few control the world and the rest are dominated and controlled. A global technocratic dystopia. It might as well be ancient Sumeria.
In the US a person can be in an independent business with practially nothing, and build up to something substantial. There is room for all to grow and prosper, and this growth and prosperity is not at the expense of making someone else poorer.
Yep, and what happens to those small independent businesses eventually? They get bought out by the huge multinational monopolies. Capitalism is tipped in the favour of the rich. It is money that talks. A small independent company simply cannot compete. It is no surprise that the richest and most powerful families in the world have historically always been rich and come from elite families going back hundreds of years.
The capitalists can make even greater profit by cutting the number of workers and replacing them with machines(automation) and increase their productivity and effiency. Today, many jobs that were previously done by workers are now done by machines. As a consequence jobs are lost.
So?
You want laborers manufacturing horse whips? We lost a lot of ice delivery jobs when refrigerators were brought to us by the greedy evil captilasts. Would it be better they have their ice-delivery jobs and we have to work with giant chunks of ice to keep our food cold?
If machines can do the work of people, that’s wonderful. That frees those people to do other meaningful work.
Yep, and what happens to those small independent businesses eventually? They get bought out by the huge multinational monopolies? Capitalism is tipped in the favour of the rich. It is money that talks. A small independent company simply cannot compete.
Well that’s total BS. There are thousands of prosperous small businesses and manufacturers in the US. A small independent company can fill niches that the large companies cannot.
Capitalism works great… exceedingly great… for the rich. It allows them to keep almost all the capital in the world to themselves and everybody else just becomes a pauper.
Well it’s too darn bad we aren’t living like they did 300 years ago before capitalism and when the lifespan was 40, and everyone had to work from dusk to dawn to eke out a living. Too bad we are all “paupers” who have the weekends off, have vacations, flat screen TVs, a variety of foods fit for a king, cures for illnesses that in the past wiped out millions, etc. etc. etc. etc.
These three major contradictions in capitalism 1) undercutting the wages of workers 2) automation and 3) monopolization make capitalism a completely unsustinable system. This is why Marx said that capitalism has its own seeds of destruction. Hence why capitalism has historically been in crisis(wall street crash, great depression, recessions, global economic meltdown)
Economies always have ups and downs. There are periods of growth and expansion, and then overbuidling and overreaching, and then there is a shakeout and the market corrects itself. This is success and not failure.
The fact is that because of capitalism we are all far richer than we would be without it.
Are you a Marxist? You don’t believe in a free market?
[QUOTE=thomas;47810]Economies always have ups and downs. There are periods of growth and expansion, and then overbuidling and overreaching, and then there is a shakeout and the market corrects itself. This is success and not failure.
The fact is that because of capitalism we are all far richer than we would be without it.
Are you a Marxist? You don’t believe in a free market?[/QUOTE]
It’s like these kids read some Howard Zinn & think they have the whole story… :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=thomas;47809]So?
You want laborers manufacturing horse whips? We lost a lot of ice delivery jobs when refrigerators were brought to us by the greedy evil captilasts. Would it be better they have their ice-delivery jobs and we have to work with giant chunks of ice to keep our food cold?
If machines can do the work of people, that’s wonderful. That frees those people to do other meaningful work.
Well that’s total BS. There are thousands of prosperous small businesses and manufacturers in the US. A small independent company can fill niches that the large companies cannot.
Well it’s too darn bad we aren’t living like they did 300 years ago before capitalism and when the lifespan was 40, and everyone had to work from dusk to dawn to eke out a living. Too bad we are all “paupers” who have the weekends off, have vacations, flat screen TVs, a variety of foods fit for a king, cures for illnesses that in the past wiped out millions, etc. etc. etc. etc.[/QUOTE]
Yes we should return to the Horse and cart and deal in shells, fish, and grain…Ha…I remember my Father commented many years ago that he had never met a more unhappy bunch of people than he did in Russia…and as my brothers wife is Cuban, they too cant wait for their government to die If you want a visa to travel to Britain fast, you just give them some under the table money and you get it…they are all corrupt in their dealings.,everything is hidden…they want what Capitalists have and resent their own government…
All the people taking part in this thread are happy to use the parts of Capitalism that suit there ends…you are all hypocrites and you know who you are…
Haha, Thomas I am going to dub you now the reality denier.
You want laborers manufacturing horse whips? We lost a lot of ice delivery jobs when refrigerators were brought to us by the greedy evil captilasts. Would it be better they have their ice-delivery jobs and we have to work with giant chunks of ice to keep our food cold?
If machines can do the work of people, that’s wonderful. That frees those people to do other meaningful work.
Nope, what it does is it means lesser and lesser jobs are done by people and more and more jobs are done by machines. Eventually, all jobs can be done by machines as the intelligence of machines increases. This means a massive increase in unemployment.
Well that’s total BS. There are thousands of prosperous small businesses and manufacturers in the US. A small independent company can fill niches that the large companies cannot.
That rely on larger companies for their products. The small businesses and manufacturers are allowed to exist by the large companies, as long as they do not pose any threat to them and cooperate with them. Taking out a small company is easy for a big company.
Well it’s too darn bad we aren’t living like they did 300 years ago before capitalism and when the lifespan was 40, and everyone had to work from dusk to dawn to eke out a living. Too bad we are all “paupers” who have the weekends off, have vacations, flat screen TVs, a variety of foods fit for a king, cures for illnesses that in the past wiped out millions, etc. etc. etc. etc.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. 300 years ago Indian people were living very well, had higher life spans, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals and they did not have a capitalist society, but a Vedic society.
The capitalists did not produce the TV. The TV was an invention by an inventor. The capitalists then appropriated the TV. They created the means of production to mass-produce them(factories) hired out workers to operate the means of production(assemlbly lines, machines) Then it sold those TV’s on the market at a price higher than was used to make it, and thereby the capitalists got rich and richer. Then in order to deliver the same product at lower prices on the market they undercut the wages of the workers by outsourching to third world countries.
Your flat screen tvs, laptops, other electronics, foods, clothes all all produced in third world countries by exploiting their cheap labour. I hope you are proud
[QUOTE=Surya Deva;47837]Eventually, all jobs can be done by machines as the intelligence of machines increases. This means a massive increase in unemployment.[/QUOTE]…which creates an ‘industrial reserve army’ which in turn makes it possible to keep wages at minimum.
Thomas: Just because one is critical towards capitalism, one does not necessarily have to be a Marxist. Personally, I believe Marx provides a very very good instrument in deconstructing capitalism, but I do not necessarily think that communism is a more rational solution. I am therefore a Marxist, but not a communist.