I am going to attempt to explain how capitalism operates and why it is failing.

[StagesOfDefeat]

The basic life incentive which makes the world go around for the United States of America is money. Money is a paper note which represents a persons contribution of idea's, and energy(labor) to the world. By working hard an American can earn tons of money as a reward for his or her labor and ideas. Also an American can obtain tons of money by luck(winning the lottery, or being the situation from Jersey Shore). But many Americans often run out of luck and or are not motivated to earn these magically paper note currencies.

But the Alpha American takes there huge amounts of money which they earned because of their ideas and contributions and they buy a bunch of stuff for example; a huge house, an expensive SUV, a boat, and a home theater system. After purchasing this stuff that they didn't need the Alpha American uses the left over money in combination with more hard work to obtain more dollars so that they can out compete and paralyze their fellow Americans.

We know from our life experiences that in any kind of competition that is between many participants, they generally start with a bunch of people that are an equal distance away from the finish line, but the longer the competition continues to more people fall behind.

In America's "earn more money!!!" race to the finish line, there are a bunch of people that have barely made it off their starting positions and there are also people that have lapped their fellow Americans multiple times.

Nowadays whats becoming clear is that this American system (capitalism) is experiencing two huge issues.

Issue#1 As a result of the competition to earn more money, you now have the typical competition effect, which is that you have great distances between the participants. So the result of modern day America is a nation where people race to earn money and that has a few elitist billionaires and a masses of impoverished peoples.

What are elitist to do at a time as this? the answer is that the elitist do what anyone in their position would do in this "race to obtain more money" and that is to grow larger and to keep the potential competitors at their state of poverty. To take advantage of them and further degrade them because the main goal is to get bigger and gobble up all of the resources.

This is the reason why America has turned into the country where only the rich people can have a healthy and happy lives. The rest of us end up working 50 hours a week and retiring at 70 years old.

Issue #2 Since the purpose of earning more money is to live a luxurious life (aka the American Dream), people end up buying tons of things they don't need, for example; exotic fur coat, indoor gym, snowmobile and every apple product to hit the market.

Little do these people know that our planet doesn't have an infinite amount of anything. Everything is finite and with our advance technology, one man can have the capacity to haul 2 million pounds of coal in a locomotive across country. Therefore our massive man power and capacity to consume things has let us to corrupt the earths balance. This is the reason why were having all of these natural disasters, pollution, and scarcity of natural resources.

Conclusion: Earning money as an incentive for people to work harder will only lead to issue#1 and issue#2. So America will have to be the first country to invent a system that is more successful then capitalism.


Solution: I would like it if the U.S starts a new economic system called Respectisim. Which of course is a system that is created by me, StagesOfDefeat

In my system of Respectism people will not get paid for how hard they work or what type of work they do instead they will do the work for free, and their pay will be paid in RESPECT!

The harder you work, the more you will be a respected citizen, and the way the economy will work is that everything will be provided to you by your fellow citizens for free.

The dentist will fix your teeth for free, but when the dentist goes grocery shopping the farmers will give him fruits and vegetables for free, and when the farmers need someone to haul their fruits to the market the truck driver will do it for free. And it all goes in a cycle like that. And in the heart of the system is that the people will work for respect and perform their duties.

And as far as exporting and Importing goes the government will sell all exported material and buy imports with it.

Anyways is this shiit that I am saying similar to true communism because I don't know much about that.

[theanalogkid]

The basic life incentive which makes the world go around for the United States of America is money. Money is a paper note which represents a persons contribution of idea's, and energy(labor) to the world. By working hard an American can earn tons of money as a reward for his or her labor and ideas. Also an American can obtain tons of money by luck(winning the lottery, or being the situation from Jersey Shore). But many Americans often run out of luck and or are not motivated to earn these magically paper note currencies.

But the Alpha American takes there huge amounts of money which they earned because of their ideas and contributions and they buy a bunch of stuff for example; a huge house, an expensive SUV, a boat, and a home theater system. After purchasing this stuff that they didn't need the Alpha American uses the left over money in combination with more hard work to obtain more dollars so that they can out compete and paralyze their fellow Americans.

We know from our life experiences that in any kind of competition that is between many participants, they generally start with a bunch of people that are an equal distance away from the finish line, but the longer the competition continues to more people fall behind.

In America's "earn more money!!!" race to the finish line, there are a bunch of people that have barely made it off their starting positions and there are also people that have lapped their fellow Americans multiple times.

Nowadays whats becoming clear is that this American system (capitalism) is experiencing two huge issues.

Issue#1 As a result of the competition to earn more money, you now have the typical competition effect, which is that you have great distances between the participants. So the result of modern day America is a nation where people race to earn money and that has a few elitist billionaires and a masses of impoverished peoples.

What are elitist to do at a time as this? the answer is that the elitist do what anyone in their position would do in this "race to obtain more money" and that is to grow larger and to keep the potential competitors at their state of poverty. To take advantage of them and further degrade them because the main goal is to get bigger and gobble up all of the resources.

This is the reason why America has turned into the country where only the rich people can have a healthy and happy lives. The rest of us end up working 50 hours a week and retiring at 70 years old.

Issue #2 Since the purpose of earning more money is to live a luxurious life (aka the American Dream), people end up buying tons of things they don't need, for example; exotic fur coat, indoor gym, snowmobile and every apple product to hit the market.

Little do these people know that our planet doesn't have an infinite amount of anything. Everything is finite and with our advance technology, one man can have the capacity to haul 2 million pounds of coal in a locomotive across country. Therefore our massive man power and capacity to consume things has let us to corrupt the earths balance. This is the reason why were having all of these natural disasters, pollution, and scarcity of natural resources.

Conclusion: Earning money as an incentive for people to work harder will only lead to issue#1 and issue#2. So America will have to be the first country to invent a system that is more successful then capitalism.


Solution: I would like it if the U.S starts a new economic system called Respectisim. Which of course is a system that is created by me, StagesOfDefeat

In my system of Respectism people will not get paid for how hard they work or what type of work they do instead they will do the work for free, and their pay will be paid in RESPECT!

The harder you work, the more you will be a respected citizen, and the way the economy will work is that everything will be provided to you by your fellow citizens for free.

The dentist will fix your teeth for free, but when the dentist goes grocery shopping the farmers will give him fruits and vegetables for free, and when the farmers need someone to haul their fruits to the market the truck driver will do it for free. And it all goes in a cycle like that. And in the heart of the system is that the people will work for respect and perform their duties.

And as far as exporting and Importing goes the government will sell all exported material and buy imports with it.

Anyways is this shiit that I am saying similar to true communism because I don't know much about that.

Your post is littered with logical fallacies and misinformation. We don't have capitalism here, we have corporatism.

And your respect system would fail since there's no way to determine how much should be produced, and shortages would result. Just like socialism fails, because there's no capital pricing structure.

[StagesOfDefeat]

Your post is littered with logical fallacies and misinformation. We don't have capitalism here, we have corporatism.

And your respect system would fail since there's no way to determine how much should be produced, and shortages would result. Just like socialism fails, because there's no capital pricing structure.

can you elaborate on these logical fallacies and misinformation

[levdgg]

can you elaborate on these logical fallacies and misinformation

Yes. See below, in quotes.

The basic life incentive which makes the world go around for the United States of America is money. Money is a paper note which represents a persons contribution of idea's, and energy(labor) to the world. By working hard an American can earn tons of money as a reward for his or her labor and ideas. Also an American can obtain tons of money by luck(winning the lottery, or being the situation from Jersey Shore). But many Americans often run out of luck and or are not motivated to earn these magically paper note currencies.

But the Alpha American takes there huge amounts of money which they earned because of their ideas and contributions and they buy a bunch of stuff for example; a huge house, an expensive SUV, a boat, and a home theater system. After purchasing this stuff that they didn't need the Alpha American uses the left over money in combination with more hard work to obtain more dollars so that they can out compete and paralyze their fellow Americans.

We know from our life experiences that in any kind of competition that is between many participants, they generally start with a bunch of people that are an equal distance away from the finish line, but the longer the competition continues to more people fall behind.

In America's "earn more money!!!" race to the finish line, there are a bunch of people that have barely made it off their starting positions and there are also people that have lapped their fellow Americans multiple times.

Nowadays whats becoming clear is that this American system (capitalism) is experiencing two huge issues.

Issue#1 As a result of the competition to earn more money, you now have the typical competition effect, which is that you have great distances between the participants. So the result of modern day America is a nation where people race to earn money and that has a few elitist billionaires and a masses of impoverished peoples.

What are elitist to do at a time as this? the answer is that the elitist do what anyone in their position would do in this "race to obtain more money" and that is to grow larger and to keep the potential competitors at their state of poverty. To take advantage of them and further degrade them because the main goal is to get bigger and gobble up all of the resources.

This is the reason why America has turned into the country where only the rich people can have a healthy and happy lives. The rest of us end up working 50 hours a week and retiring at 70 years old.

Issue #2 Since the purpose of earning more money is to live a luxurious life (aka the American Dream), people end up buying tons of things they don't need, for example; exotic fur coat, indoor gym, snowmobile and every apple product to hit the market.

Little do these people know that our planet doesn't have an infinite amount of anything. Everything is finite and with our advance technology, one man can have the capacity to haul 2 million pounds of coal in a locomotive across country. Therefore our massive man power and capacity to consume things has let us to corrupt the earths balance. This is the reason why were having all of these natural disasters, pollution, and scarcity of natural resources.

Conclusion: Earning money as an incentive for people to work harder will only lead to issue#1 and issue#2. So America will have to be the first country to invent a system that is more successful then capitalism.


Solution: I would like it if the U.S starts a new economic system called Respectisim. Which of course is a system that is created by me, StagesOfDefeat

In my system of Respectism people will not get paid for how hard they work or what type of work they do instead they will do the work for free, and their pay will be paid in RESPECT!

The harder you work, the more you will be a respected citizen, and the way the economy will work is that everything will be provided to you by your fellow citizens for free.

The dentist will fix your teeth for free, but when the dentist goes grocery shopping the farmers will give him fruits and vegetables for free, and when the farmers need someone to haul their fruits to the market the truck driver will do it for free. And it all goes in a cycle like that. And in the heart of the system is that the people will work for respect and perform their duties.

And as far as exporting and Importing goes the government will sell all exported material and buy imports with it.

Anyways is this shiit that I am saying similar to true communism because I don't know much about that.

[StagesOfDefeat]

Excluding the solution part the rest of it is dead on.

Capitalism is a system that needs constant growth, and that is impossible because our resources are finite and are running out. The economy can not grow when costs of resources are sky rocketing because of the scarcity of things, plus the increasing cost of fixing the sky rocketing natural disasters will add to the burden.http://images.angelpub.com/2009/27/2...ac-chart-1.jpg

example, fuel for cars, plastics, land surface.

The gap between the poor and rich is increasing, and the wealth of the country is in the hands of a few corporate managers. and these few wealthy people are working on a way to increase their wealth by producing more and forcing people to consume their products.

http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/fac...ome&wealth.htm

In order for a capitalist economy to keep going you need consumers to buy, and now our piece of shiit plan is crumbling beneath our feet. Obama was the best choice but even he can not stop this economy from collapsing.

[Gtrght77]

Hopefully the system will fail soon and it will all go down the drain. With how stupid everyone is in this country it is well deserved.

The budget arguments going on right now just make me sick. They keep cutting taxes on the rich while lowering the quality of life for everyone else.

[TheRealist]

Yes. See below, in quotes.

+1...hahahaha

[RicoVacilon]

Not a bad summary. Even Schumpeter warned of similar problems -- and he was a classic liberal (not to be confused with a political liberal).

Behavioral psychology teaches early on that positive results occur when the type and amount of reward is varied. For an economic system based on only one type of reward (money), you're going to get less than ideal results.

I didn't see any fallacies. And I'm a fallacy hawk.

[StagesOfDefeat]

Not a bad summary. Even Schumpeter warned of similar problems -- and he was a classic liberal (not to be confused with a political liberal).

Behavioral psychology teaches early on that positive results occur when the type and amount of reward is varied. For an economic system based on only one type of reward (money), you're going to get less than ideal results.

I didn't see any fallacies. And I'm a fallacy hawk.

good point about the need for variation when it comes to rewards. I think that the whole issue is that everyday people in the U.S are not aware of these problems which are pressing down on us. And in order for them to support the radical change that we need to happen here, they probably will not welcome it unless some type of major economic collapse happens and then the people will wake up.

[kevin21boston]

#1- Money is a medium of exchange. It's hard to trade a cow directly for a cell phone but money allows us exchange equal values of the two.

#2- The greatest predictor of wealth is education. There are outliers. But they are extremely rare. The Situation and lottery winners are more rare than what a human brain can comprehend. Education leads to wealth. Show me 100 mechanical engineers and 100 high school dropouts and you will see that the engineers are far better off.

#3- Not having a market clearing mechanism in the Respectism economy will lead to collapses in the market. If the doctor has a bad day and says "fck these peeons, i'm going to Jamaica" the economy fails.

#4- The incentive to take up a profession that requires more work than what it will payout will cause the system to collapse. Eventually the labor market will sort itself out, resulting in everyone choosing the easiest profession. For the sake of this example we'll assume that the easiest profession is Record Store Owner (RSO). Eventually the entire labor force will consist of RSOs because they each assume that by running an awesome (or terrible) record store, they will be compensated with food, healthcare, and education. But, at a certain point there will be no doctors, farmers, or teachers because the incentive to choose those professions (more money) is gone.

#4.1- I'll use myself as an example. All I want to do is smoke weed all day. In our current economy (a hybrid of socialism and capitalism) smoking weed all day will very likely lead to me earning very little if any money. So I balance my smoking weed all day by earning a degree in economics that will theoretically get me hired. The only reason I want to be hired is so that I can make money to buy weed with. By having incentive to get the best job I can (to support my habit) I am providing a service (theoretically) than cannot be done by most people. I want to become a doctor, professor, fireman, etc because I will be compensated according to my ability. In the Respectism system there is no difference in compensation which will cause the evaporation of incentive to become a doctor, professor, fireman which in turn leads to a bunch of Record Store Owners and nobody growing crops, healing the sick, and teaching the children.


#4.2- Think of society in an economic sense. The economy currently is some function that is dependent on Hard Work and Compensation. The lazier you are the less you make and the harder you work the more you make. If compensation is always guaranteed, people will stop working hard. A perfect real world example of this is Chinese workers in the planned system before the reforms in the late 70s.

[RicoVacilon]

#2- The greatest predictor of wealth is education.

I'm guessing a more accurate predictor of wealth is how wealthy your parents are. I don't know a whole lot of billionaires with PhDs. I get what you're saying, though.

[RicoVacilon]

And in order for them to support the radical change that we need to happen here, they probably will not welcome it unless some type of major economic collapse happens and then the people will wake up.

I actually think the changes that need to be made are not all that drastic. There are a combination of two that I think are direly needed (and related). (1) as pointed out by Russ Roberts over at Cafe Hayek (yes, I'm agreeing with a neo-liberal -- scary huh?), loss needs to be returned to the market. The financial meltdown occurred in large part because the financial industry felt confident betting with other people's money with the implied assurance that the government would bail them out if something drastic happened. (2) the state needs to supervise the market as opposed to the other way around (a point brought up by Foucault cited by Palma in a good article on the meltdown). It doesn't do us much good to ask GE to write tax laws. It doesn't do much good to allow Wall St to pick and choose which regulators they'd like. Or to ask polluters to write laws on pollution. The government determines the rules that the market will play by. Or at least that's the way it should be.

There is nothing "natural" about markets or capitalism. They are products of our cultural milieu -- in much the same way that football is. There is nothing "natural" about football. Someone invented it and then we found out it worked (and we liked it). But football does not exist outside of the rules that were constructed to play it. The same goes for the market. The government sets up the rules that the market should play by, then the market plays. The way things have been operating (since 1980 or so) has been, in effect, that the Super Bowl winners have been allowed to write the rules for next season.

[theanalogkid]

The basic life incentive which makes the world go around for the United States of America is money. Money is a paper note which represents a persons contribution of idea's, and energy(labor) to the world. By working hard an American can earn tons of money as a reward for his or her labor and ideas. Also an American can obtain tons of money by luck(winning the lottery, or being the situation from Jersey Shore). But many Americans often run out of luck and or are not motivated to earn these magically paper note currencies.

But the Alpha American takes there huge amounts of money which they earned because of their ideas and contributions and they buy a bunch of stuff for example; a huge house, an expensive SUV, a boat, and a home theater system. After purchasing this stuff that they didn't need the Alpha American uses the left over money in combination with more hard work to obtain more dollars so that they can out compete and paralyze their fellow Americans.

So there shouldn't be inequality even those some people are lazier than other others? Hardwork shouldn't pay off?

Wealthier people often save their money and that money is lent out to others, and many people start businesses with that capital. Should they not be doing that?

We know from our life experiences that in any kind of competition that is between many participants, they generally start with a bunch of people that are an equal distance away from the finish line, but the longer the competition continues to more people fall behind.

In America's "earn more money!!!" race to the finish line, there are a bunch of people that have barely made it off their starting positions and there are also people that have lapped their fellow Americans multiple times.

So? You have no right to be equal to other people.

Nowadays whats becoming clear is that this American system (capitalism) is experiencing two huge issues.

Issue#1 As a result of the competition to earn more money, you now have the typical competition effect, which is that you have great distances between the participants. So the result of modern day America is a nation where people race to earn money and that has a few elitist billionaires and a masses of impoverished peoples.

There's masses of impoverished people here? Granted there are poor people in this country, but compared to other parts of the world, they are way better off. Not where you want to be, but poor people in India would be envious of them. Some people actually don't want to get a job, and would prefer to panhandle and make $20-$25/hr untaxed.

This is the reason why America has turned into the country where only the rich people can have a healthy and happy lives. The rest of us end up working 50 hours a week and retiring at 70 years old.

I'm not super rich, and I don't work 50 hours a week. So that kind of deflates your "only the rich" argument.

Issue #2 Since the purpose of earning more money is to live a luxurious life (aka the American Dream), people end up buying tons of things they don't need, for example; exotic fur coat, indoor gym, snowmobile and every apple product to hit the market.

Little do these people know that our planet doesn't have an infinite amount of anything. Everything is finite and with our advance technology, one man can have the capacity to haul 2 million pounds of coal in a locomotive across country. Therefore our massive man power and capacity to consume things has let us to corrupt the earths balance. This is the reason why were having all of these natural disasters, pollution, and scarcity of natural resources.

So capitalism is causing scarcity of resources, if we had communism here, resources would be unlimited? Do you know what scarcity is? I'd also like to see your proof that using natural resources is causing natural disasters.

Capitalism is a system that needs constant growth, and that is impossible because our resources are finite and are running out. The economy can not grow when costs of resources are sky rocketing because of the scarcity of things, plus the increasing cost of fixing the sky rocketing natural disasters will add to the burden

According to your logic the economies of every capitalist nation should have collapsed when whale oil was prohibited, instead kerosene was invented by profit-motivated individuals.

In order for a capitalist economy to keep going you need consumers to buy, and now our piece of shiit plan is crumbling beneath our feet. Obama was the best choice but even he can not stop this economy from collapsing.

Consumption isn't an economic driver, production is. You need production to keep the economy from collapsing, which is why the economy has been in the ****ter for a long time.

Obama can't stop the economy from collapsing because he is part of the problem. Massive government stimulus doesn't fix the economy. How's the housing industry doing after the first time buyers tax credit went away, oh right, it's still in a slump and will be for some time until the supply and demand hit the equality point. The effects of stimulus are temporary at best and do not address the underlying problems.

Now, I'm not saying we're in a great position. But many of your gripes are caused by government regulation and a fiat monetary system run by a central bank. The wealthy are pretty immune to the effects of monetary expansion mainly higher prices, since they own assets that scale where as the poor have most of their money in savings accounts and CDs and get raped when the Fed decides to inflate. How can anyone get ahead in that situation? This is a policy that the Fed actively peruses. According to them rising prices is good for an economy. It's real good for someone who lost their job though and now has to pay more for things.

[StagesOfDefeat]

#1- Money is a medium of exchange. It's hard to trade a cow directly for a cell phone but money allows us exchange equal values of the two. .

having a medium of exchange is good, but having a bunch of people compete for money and later telling them that if they don't have money they can not live is a bad idea.

The greatest predictor of wealth is education. There are outliers. But they are extremely rare. The Situation and lottery winners are more rare than what a human brain can comprehend. Education leads to wealth. Show me 100 mechanical engineers and 100 high school dropouts and you will see that the engineers are far better off.

In my original post I agreed with this because I said that hard work and ideas earn you money.

but what I don't like about the wealthiest people in this country is that they spend their time scheming on how to defeat smaller competitors and to gobble up more money.

for example look at guys like Barney Madoff and the dudes that run ENRON and Goldman Sachs.

[levdgg]

You guys are dignifying this with way too intelligent responses. Rico, I'm particularly disappointed in you.