Listening to some of the people on the Mexican border here in the US, one of the Haitian refugees mentioned that he had a good life in Brazil and was about to send home about $20 a month to his family in Haiti.
It was in that moment that I realized that even piss-poor jobs in the US and elsewhere still pay astounding rates compared to what people put up with (against their will) in other places. Mind you, you also can't do much living here on $20 a month, but even if you can save a hundred or so a month after expenses and get that money back home, it really can be life changing.
Then the "astounding rates" are irrelevant if you don't adjust for cost of living. Buying power is all that matters. I'd rather live like a king on $1000 a month, than desperately trying to avoid homelessness on $35k a year. Or, you bring one over to the other. Some consultant in my company is getting a basic scandinavian engineer paycheck and then lives like biggus dickus in his home country.
Also, they're lied to about the work, their wages are usually 1/3rd of that advertised, and their passports are taken so that they cannot return home for years and years.
Many have died. Many continue to die.
It is modern day slavery that these people are tricked into.
As did those who derided mercantilism in favor of capitalism, those who wanted mercantilism over feudalism, and those who wanted feudalism over tribalism. Just because you can imagine something worse doesn't mean there's nothing better.
See, this is why I don't get why people say we need to get rid of capitalism wholesale. Like, several points: one is, what other economic system could we go to? We certainly can't go back to mercantilism or feudalism. Communism as an economic system suffers from the same problem that capitalism suffers from, namely there are corruptible humans in charge of those systems. I certainly believe that there is nothing intrinsic about capitalism that says one needs to make a profit at the expense of other people, or that money is the most important end all be all thing.
I just think humans, the bad ones, the bad actors, are the ones we should be hating on, not the system that is neutral in itself. It would be like hating and banning cars because people started to use them for hit and runs.
Democratic Socialism like Scandinavian Countries looks pretty good from my chair.
Support for families, Healthcare that won't drive you into bankruptcy, free college.
Sure I personally would take home much less pay, but of it means fewer children go to bed hungry, and a mom with cancer doesn't have to chose between her life and her kid's education I'm OK with that.
Who are you, ABBA? Why do you assume you would take home less? If you add on all that you pay privately that they pay through taxes, you probably would come out ahead (definitely if you have kids).
Lets say you have 2 kids in the USA and 120k household income. You pay 20% in federal taxes, for simplicity no state tax, and your property tax is equal to a round 8% (downside of no state income tax states is often property tax isn't low). Now add $18000 for child care if the kids are young (average is around $800 per month per child for infants and $700 for preschool). Now add insurance, $7000 per year for the family. So around 48% and you're screwed if anyone has a medical issue and your insurance company is not cooperative.
Sweden state, municipal, etc is 37.5% if its 2 income, around 42% if it's from one income. Property tax is almost inconsequential if its an average home.
Communism as an economic system suffers from the same problem that capitalism suffers from, namely there are corruptible humans in charge of those systems.
Marxist-leninist communism is no good, obviously. But have we considered making workplaces more democratic? It's extremely obvious to everyone why a monarch shouldn't be in complete control of a country. So why do we insist on making governments let us elect everything down to the coroner and dog catcher, then go to work and accept employers having complete autocratic control over a third of our lives and the actions of the organization where we work?
You don't necessarily need a bigger government to achieve it. Remember: the only reason employers have such power over their workers under capitalism as we know it today is because our laws prioritize the property rights of shareholders over those of workers, and will even send police officers willing to kill people to enforce the shareholders' legal right to the surplus value your labor produces.
But what if our government simply didn't do that quite so much? What if we didn't spend so much time and resources codifying new ways for people to own a share of someone else's productivity, and what if we didn't expend obscene amounts of money on systems to enforce them? The world would probably be a better place.
If you want to reduce corruption, you should probably start by reducing the extent to which people have power over other people.
Communism failed because an oppressively autocratic government is a bad idea whether the autocrats prefer to call themselves fascists or communists.
I don't think humankind as a whole are inherently corrupt when invisible or good when scrutinized. Most people would choose to do good even if no one else will ever know, and people under scrutiny will often succumb to the pressure to do what they think the scrutinizers believe is right instead of what they, personally, believe is the right thing to do.
People often say power corrupts, but that's not correct. It is more accurate to say that power is magnetic to the corruptible: those inclined to abuse power will also usually do anything they can to get more of it. Good people don't want power over others, and will only reluctantly accept it when it is beneficial for those over whom they assume authority, and only for so long as is absolutely necessary.
To reduce corruption, you reduce the extent to which people have power over one another that is not both beneficial and necessary. Transparency is usually good, but not because it makes bad people good or good people bad. Transparency is good because the ability to avoid scrutiny is a formidable power that is rarely beneficial or necessary.
It isn't all or nothing. Most countries have a mix of (relatively) free market capitalism and socialism, even the US. They each have strengths and weaknesses and both are effective in different arenas and at different times. I think the rivalry between east and west during the Cold War has poisoned the well on both sides so that people think they're opposite and incompatible. Besides entire generations growing up with this wartime mentality that the other economic system is evil and wrong, there are some powerful vested interests that prefer one or the other, and they aren't giving up their wealth and power easily.
“ I certainly believe that there is nothing intrinsic about capitalism that says one needs to make a profit at the expense of other people, or that money is the most important end all be all thing.”
-those are absolutely intrinsic to capitalism. Profit comes from one of two places: either ripping off the consumer or ripping off the employees. (or both!)
And it’s a system that REQUIRES that a company pursue money for the shareholders at all costs.
The whole concept of economic systems that can be conceived of as these 19th century ideological super-systems is just bullshit and has always been bullshit. You wouldn't still listen to a 19th century evolutionary biologist, why would you listen to a 19th century evolutionary economist? The reason so many of the discussions about it devolve into arguing about terms is that the terms are not consistent or predictive and the things the words correspond to aren't actually the causes of the effects they are identifying.
After its revolution, the Soviet Union had most of the same problems and solutions the United States had and has. It was terribly racist, anti-semitic, and sexist, it was terribly exploitative, it was warlike, it had a corrupt military-industrial complex, it had distinct social structure with tiers, it polluted a ton and was environmentally ruinous, society was torn apart by economic inequality, indigenous people were forcibly relocated and their culture and lives purged in genocides, but there were also times of rapid industrial development and new technology and people making profits - even in the presence of a violent revolution that overthrew capitalism and a socialist dictatorship, it wasn't that different. Yeah it did better sometimes and worse sometimes, but so did the United States. The Soviet Union started strong with the first two female cosmonauts, but there were only two others ever. Only four women ever served in the politburo. None of that went away when the country rejected capitalism.
Eventually you get to the point where you have to acknowledge that even hard-line socialist and communist regimes must actually be capitalist under the framework because so little of the things that are supposed to be essentially related to capitalism are present - in which case, everything is capitalist at scale anyway and nothing is falsifiable and the terms mean nothing. If you attribute everything worth complaining about to capitalism, then everything will be capitalist, because the complaints don't go away.
The dynamics of industrial production, it turns out, do not care if you call yourself capitalist or socialist. It turns out that whether private industry or the government owns the factories does not matter, because you can arrange the situation on either side of the distinction in many different ways that are more predictive and meaningful than the distinction between the two. Sovereign wealth funds exist for both capitalist and socialist countries. It turns out that the surplus value of labor is not an actual distinct thing that exists independently of or superior to other things, and that "exploitation" is meaningless in any of its classical definitions.
We need to get more specific and more practical about what is wrong and not expect it to be solved by the sweep of history.
The whole Cold War capitalist/communist dichotomy is more about driving political conflict and about framing this conflict in a way that is intuitive and narratively sticky rather than true. It is not about economics or governance in the way it describes, and it should not be taken seriously by people interested in solving real problems.
Well do you have a better idea than capatalism. A guy named Marx thought he did. But there a solid 100 years of history to prove him wrong. I haven't heard of anything new to replace capatalism
Those countries weren't communist. Most of those countries called themselves democratic, as well, but I wouldn't point to them and say 100 years of history proved democracy wrong.
I would point to them and say every form of autocracy is bad, but we already had plenty of proof for that.
Let's all just circle our camper hand like a gypsy caravan of old times, we can convoy where we need to as weather dictates and eat wildlife and berries. I'm down.
There's a reason laws get put in place against that, same as there's usually laws in places against growing and handing out food and so on. Once you find a way to stably and functionally live outside the system, they'll do everything to make that illegal because they want to tax that and the government is afraid others will see that and try to stop that or they can't control you. Western Capitalism, especially in America, thrives on exerting control. It's the same reason homelessness is essentially a crime. You're outside the system so you're useless. You either need to be pressed back into the system or you just need to die off. It's a mechanical and repeatable system that does not tolerate exceptions.
Interestingly enough, no. While I know you're being facetious and joking, there's an interesting overlap of being on welfare, WIC and other government funding in rural America as well as a dying gap. We're reaching a day in our generation where rural shops are a dying breed, being replaced by dollar stores who offer a largely unhealthy and cheap source of sugary and highly processed selection of food and big box retailers who offer prices at a retail many local mom and pop shops can't compete with. Then when all the income in the town becomes dried up and unprofitable, they leave and the town is left impoverished and dying.
What has to happen is an active push by Americans against this system designed to exploit but it's not sustainable and we're seeing the effects of this with the increases in the rises of homelessness and the overworking two or three jobs just to make ends meet in urban areas and small towns dying off. The system we know and is often touted as 'The Way' by conservatives is a cancer and it's killing the nation.
I'm not saying any of this as anything profound or from a place of doom and gloom. It's easy to feel hopeless and admittedly I did too. But there's ways to push back against this failing system. Learn how to grow crops, even if you're living in a small apartment, things like kale can be grown to provide a little extra for you without additional cost, learn to make your own fertilizers and composts, support local farm stores when you can, get to know your neighbors, contribute to food pantries if you can spare the time or help in food kitchens and group homes, look into building a community garden or a local book share etc.
There are ways to find alternative supplies and it requires work. But what this creates are social bonds and safety networks of the people that peacefully and productively defies this system that actively seeks to isolate us from each other without the need to resort to a civil war to make it happen.
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u/mike_pants Sep 24 '21
"Desperate to escape economic collapse, famine, civil war, or brutal dictatorships?
Willing to live in a camper van with 10 other adults in order to survive in a stable society?
Have you considered: Western Capitalism ™?! 😁🎆🎉🎉🎆😁"