Even if you completely overlook the rampant consumerism that is drilled into every citizen from an early age, no one is guaranteed a living or endless support beyond what they work for, except when politicians pander to such a notion.
Ah, the socialist groupthink - straight out of the communist manifesto. One must recast the core competency of a capitalist society, which is the satisfaction of wants and needs through the creation of mutual interdependent relations, into some form of hierarchical control. Hence, individual wants, which are the basis for forming all interdependent relationships, must be illegitimate.
The set of reasons people buy that beemer instead of the Ford or the Sub Zero instead of the fridgidaire are more related to why they increase their bets and roll the dice one more time in Vegas than they are to what the government tells them.
Or in other words, qualitative differences in products appeal to non-rational aspects of human behavior. Therefore, society as a whole will be better off by mandating the products that are produced, and therefore the specific needs that are satisfied.
It's the same set of complex psychological reasons that prevent people from selling when their stock goes down or that leads them to think they can get away with ignoring their investments.
Now this is a novel concept. But, given that people have different intertemporal preferences, who is to say why someone holds a stock as its price fluctuates. Given the long-run behavior of stock indices isn’t it a rational thing to hold through price fluctuations, and therefore, isn’t ignoring an investment with long-run growth potential exactly what one would want to do? Or are you simply saying that individuals would be better off by buying low and selling high? That would certainly be consistent with the near omniscient knowledge required to determine which human wants are legitimate.
People are not prepared to actually take their lives into their own hands
Here it is - the core belief of a socialist – a distrust of people.
If the society truly wanted to promote that ethic, they might be given the tools somewhere along the way.
And this statement marks the distinction between a Socialist and a Marxist. A Marxist would be preparing for the inevitable disintegration of capitalist society, while a Socialist advocates the saving of capitalism through hierarchical control of individuals and the production process, in what can only be termed industrial feudalism.
it's in the interest of business both to promote social structures that provide an educated workforce that can accept responsibility for some of the risk or life while also being quite happy with an endless supply of dependent and cheap labor. The world you long for was left behind a hundred years ago. Get used to it..
Nice that you conclude with a falsehood. An educated workforce increases their marginal product, thus increasing the returns to any given quantity of capital, which the capitalist expropriates a percentage for himself. And while it would be nice to imagine a world where labor is in no position to bargain, the reality is that labor has consistently received 70 percent of the returns on capital. Therefore, without one group needing to be in control of the other, it has been in the interest of capitalists to create incentives for the work force to increase their skill, just as it has been in the interest in labor to promote the activities of the capitalist. That is the capitalist world we live in, get used to it. |
