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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (269564)	1/27/2006 5:54:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573513

Sorry. Without people, an -ism has little reason to exist. I suppose that is true but it isn't really relevant. The "-ism" might be for people, and people may operate in a system based on it but people aren't the "-ism". Communism is on the decline. If it declined to the extent that there was no more communist systems on the planet the idea of communism would still exist. The idea is separate from the people who believe in an idea, or the people who live in a system based on the idea. "Also Russia is not a strongly capitalist society. At least not in the sense that I am using the term capitalist. Apparently you are defining the word a system where capitalists operate. I am using it to mean something more like "a free market economy"." It isn't now....it was for a while......Putin has begun to restrict the market and Russian freedoms. Exactly which is why I say that it is not a strongly capitalist system. So your problem is that capitalism allows people to spend to excess? That's not much of a problem in my opinion. I know that's not your problem. Libertarians/Republicans have conveniently come up with ways to ignore the poverty in the world. Spending to excess is not closely related to the issue of poverty. If wealthy people spent less it might cause more poverty. Whether it does or does not there isn't an kind of clear automatic connection. It wasn't Imelda Marco's buying of shoes that kept her country relatively poor. The libertarian point is generally not to ignore poverty or argue that it should be ignored but rather than more freedom and more economic growth will give you the best chance to get a serious long term reduction in poverty. You might have a better case if you argued that libertarians (and perhaps to a lesser extent Republicans) ignore inequality. But that is far from universal among libertarians and even less so among Republicans. Capitalism extends this ability beyond the ruling class because it gives wealth and freedom to more people. Giving wealth and freedom to more people is a good thing not a bad one. No, it isn't good thing if people are starving. The wealth produced by free market system makes it less likely that people will starve. The fact that people can get addicted to shopping/consumption suggests an underlying flaw to the capitalism system. If you have freedom you have freedom to do negative things. that isn't a flaw with freedom. The fact that a free market/capitalist system allows more people to consume a lot and the fact that some of those people might get addicted to shopping is no more a flaw in capitalism than the fact that some people say vicious horrible things is a flaw in the 1st amendment. Capitalism thrives on growing consumption. In a world where resources are finite, that is not a good thing. That is why at some point capitalism will be forced to evolve into something else or humanity will experience another crash. Perhaps our disagreement is so fundamental as to not even allow for us to really understand the other person's viewpoint. I was pretty sure we wouldn't agree but I thought that we could at least understand each other. That last statement makes me doubt it. But I guess the effort is still worth it. If a resource runs low a capitalist system will make it more expensive and reduce its consumption. It is one of the simplest most efficient ways of allocating resources whether they are abundant or rare, and it would deal with a decline in a resource better than any other existent, historical, or proposed system. Also why resources are finite at any given time, they increase over time. We find more resources, including things that were not considered resources before. Yes there is an absolute limit, there is only so much energy and matter in the universe, and there is much less that we will probably ever be able to use. But absent a third world war, or a titanic natural disaster (like a massive impact from space that wipes out civilization), we are likely to be able to use more resources than we do now 1, 10, 500, 10,000, and a million years from now. Tim