Capitalism Keeps Winning, Socialism Keeps Losing
I’ve read the umpteenth article lately complaining about corporations making record profits while X million people are hungry, and this situation can’t continue, capitalism will inevitably collapse, the people will revolt, blah, blah, blah.
Leftists continually whine about corporations making profits, the P-word being the most profane feature of capitalism. But that is the whole point of running a business, making a profit by providing goods and services that people want. Are businesses supposed to lose money and eventually go bankrupt? Many do, which inevitably leads to more articles predicting the collapse of capitalism because it is so flawed that businesses are failing, people are losing their jobs, ad nauseum.
The collapse of capitalism only happens in leftist’s dreams, and most people’s nightmares. The majority of people support capitalism, are invested in it, work and many thrive in it. Most people, at least the ones who are financially responsible, have some sort of retirement account invested in mutual funds, IRAs, 401ks, where the money they earned is invested in Wall Street, our capitalist economic system. Workers are also owners of capitalist enterprises when they own stocks. Ironically, this is what the democratic socialists/socialist democrats want, to have workers be the owners.
Do these workers in the capitalist system want to destroy it? They are invested in it and depend on it to maintain their standard of living. Fly over our cities and look at all the houses and cars that people own. How can people seriously think that the economic system that created all that wealth that is owned by all those people needs to be destroyed? Yet, that is what leftist politicians are telling us all the time. Do they really want our economic system to collapse?
What about the hungry people, shouldn’t we care about them? Yes, people do care, so much that a huge percentage of our government’s budget is spent on them with various programs giving them food, shelter, and other basics. One of the biggest lies repeated in these “capitalism is doomed” articles is that there is no social safety net. The fact is that the safety net is huge, and it has millions of people trapped in poverty, right where the socialists want them. Capitalists don’t want poverty where people are not working and dependent on government. Capitalism needs workers who do the work necessary to keep business running.
Are all these X millions of hungry people starving in the street? No, they aren’t, show me where there are emaciated skeleton people with distended bellies in any capitalist nation. If anything, poor people are fatter than average, so nobody is starving. They may be hungry, but everybody gets hungry every day. Is that what the leftists are complaining about? “Everybody is hungry every day, capitalism must be crushed”.
The ugly fact is that socialism depends on having losers in society, so they can rouse them and get them to destroy the capitalist system that “oppresses” them and forces them to live in poverty. I really don’t like calling the poor “losers”, but that is how the left treats them. The left is outraged that some people have less, so the left tries to rectify the situation by redistributing wealth. Another way to look at it is: “here, you lost the game of life, take this money and vote for me in the next election”.
Does capitalism create poverty? No, poverty existed since the beginning of mankind’s existence. Hunter-gatherers, nascent farming communities, feudal serfs all endured poverty. Capitalism allowed most people to escape poverty, standards of living rose during the industrial age. Now even the poor have supercomputers in their pockets, that didn’t happen in Marxist-Leninist nations.
The pervasive inter-generation poverty that leftists complain about but continues to propagate is caused by many things. Most of it is cultural and influenced by the environment that poor people live in. They get trapped by a shared mindset that rejects education and glorifies violence and drug abuse. Dysfunctional families produce children that grow up conditioned into that way of life, who then produce more children, on and on it goes, which is really tragic for each innocent child that gets caught into it.
Drug abuse and addiction is a huge contributor towards poverty. Many homeless people have addiction and psychological problems. As a libertarian, I oppose the insane War on Drugs that has incarcerated millions of people, most of them minorities, for non-violent drug offenses. Sending all these people to prison perpetuates the cycle of poverty. The crime caused by underground criminal enterprises contributes to an environment of poverty and misery. I discourage the use of drugs and alcohol, even though I think they should be legalized. Being continually buzzed or drunk doesn’t enable a person’s best abilities. Addiction needs to be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one, so that the underlying causes can be addressed and fixed for each person. When people are well, they can lift themselves out of poverty.
If there were some miraculous solutions, everybody would want to fix the problem. Everybody, except the left who is reliant on the segment of society that is trapped in poverty. The left doesn’t really want to solve the problem of poverty, the left is more concerned about their power over people, and what better way to have power over their constituents than to keep them in poverty? If people escaped poverty and became financially independent, they wouldn’t need the left to redistribute wealth to them. Self-sufficient people actually resent the left taking their money and redistributing it through a system that doesn’t fix the problem but instead perpetuates it. The USA has been fighting the War on Poverty for more than 50 years and poverty has yet to be defeated.
In a free market economy, nobody is stopping anyone from donating their own money to charities, so the issue isn’t about not caring about the poor in a free society. There are people who suffer temporary misfortunes who want to overcome them and need a helping hand. There are people who are handicapped and can’t take care of themselves, so they require the kindness of friends and strangers. That is all part of living in a civil society of compassion and self-sufficiency. The real issue that needs to be addressed is how to reduce poverty, and why the left continues this self-perpetuating cycle of failure.
Poverty will never be completely eradicated, like many problems that afflict society. My best advice to people who want to escape poverty is this: Stop using recreational drugs, be it nicotine, alcohol, weed or whatever else. If you are addicted, get help, there are plenty of resources and people who will help you. Listen to self-improvement gurus that want to help you lift yourself up; yes, many of them may be self-promoting scoundrels who want your money, but there are plenty of them that are free and have the same underlying message: you are accountable for yourself, so do something about it. Get an education in something viable that lets you serve others. Reject the culture of victimhood that liberals and their media poisons so many people’s minds with, through music and other entertainment. Good luck, most people want you to succeed, except the political left who wants you to fail and remain poor and dependent on them.
Nothing is perfect, including a free-market capitalist economy. There are definitely problems with how corporations, entities created by government, are constructed and run, and the perverse rewards that are given to those in power. Our economic-political system has evolved to generate massive wealth for a few elites. Many of the deficiencies in our current economy are due to socialist policies that corrupt free markets. Our consumer driven, perpetual growth economic model can’t continue forever in a world of limited resources; we may even need to rethink how our economy is structured if it adversely affects the climate we are all dependent on. These are all issues that I intend to address in the future, but for this article it needs to be said that an economy based on individual liberty such as capitalism defeats the socialist economic model that requires oppression and forced wealth redistribution.