Capitalism for 99% of us is the government we work for and deal with daily. It is hostile and treats us guilty until proven innocent. It has no loyalty to us, hates us and blames us for all that is wrong. When we make a mistake we pay for it! When the capitalist makes a mistake, we also pay for it yet they keep their job.

I have many reasons why I have moved away from capitalist arogance. My experiences during the dot.com crash and how executives robbed the company I was at and hurt hundreds of people. The arogant attitudes of libertarians that tell people that have had their jobs out sourced they better like it and suck it up as they deserve nothing. The hatred of all forms of government by capitalists to the point of seeking anarchy in society. Our government isn’t designed to be a tyranical business for a reason gentleman. We had tyrannical businesses before and it was called monarchy and aristocracy. Capitalism is very similar and borderlines on aristocratic feudalism.

Many people I meet daily who are hard core capitalists with money are rude and egotistical. They believe they deserve special treatment. Just watch a customer in a store. I am going to be paying $2000 dollars for blah, can I get some help! NOW! They expect everyone else to stand aside and let them move on in. And then when I chat with many of these wealthy people, as it is part of my job, I learn that most of them are “Owners” of something and they themselves didn’t actually create the business that makes them wealth. I even had a young man a few months back tell me he hoped is father died soon because he wanted to inherit his money, yet he had bucket loads of money from where I was standing. He wanted MORE and his father to die so he could get his selfish arogant hands on it. He told me he knew it was wrong but he just wanted that wealth, NOW! Capitalist greed at it’s best, yet none of you take responsiblity for what greed does to society.

Capitalists need to take responsiblity for what greed brings and does harm too. Instead of acting like a bunch of religious zealots who say that the guy that wanted his father to die isn’t a capitalists by your standards, stand up and own up for what it is. He is a capitalists who owns a business and wants more PROFITS and doesn’t care how he gets them. And the solution I hear the most is, “the free market will solve it all!” as you bow down.

The hatred for collective bargaining and workers having any say in what they do daily. The corporate arogance of guilty until proven innocent on how they treat employee’s. Standard business practice being that right from the start that we must sign documents that undermine our rights or we won’t qualify for the job. And the libertarian arogance that tells us, you can always walk away and you better not bite the hand that feeds you. And yet the capitalists have the audacity to take handouts from government and many of you say it is just smart business and you shouldn’t blame the capitalist for taking that money. So the worker has to walk away and live on the street to uphold his morality and liberty but capitalists can rob and pillage as they please all over society and never have to walk away. As you laugh and chortle behind the workers backs knowing full well they have to take the job or be a social outcast and live in poverty. But the capitalists going to government for hand outs is governments fault, not the capitalists as they couldn’t say no.

When I go to a meeting I see “How much I am costing the company!” not how much I am earning the company. I am an enemy to their profits, not a partner in it. The desire to lock down and force labor into contracts that is intellectual slavery such that workers are not allowed to compete in the market place.

The free market dogma and the desire to bust unions telling everyone it is for the best. yes some unions are garbage but if they are in the free market, who gives a damn if they exist? That arogance that the free market can do no wrong and produces the best results for everyone. Yet capital has protectism in all sorts of forms from ownership and so forth while labor doesn’t even own their own labor!!! Capital even has protectionism through copyright and patent laws, you never talk about undoing these things first for the free market so that labor can compete without fear of capitalists attacks on labor to stop them from participating in the market as you cart them off to prison. Capitalists have a government union and protectionism for capital, which is considered necessary but labor must be forced to the LCD. You believe the singular capitalist made something and so they deserve a return on what they made. Yet an individual that invests and does labor isn’t able to copyright or patent his labor, but his boss can copyright and patent this persons work and protect himself, as is the most common case.

And Wall Street itself, the slum of society. A no strings attached means of having people hand large sums of money without responsiblity in using it. And from corporate personhood, another capitalist form of protectionism, has created multitudes of fraud and shell companies, outrageous compensation and out right desire to harvest vast some of wealth from society with no intent to do anything of value for anyone. If anything of value happens that is secondary to the motivation of harvesting the wealth. I worked with a small startup which I left because they were hot and heavy into trying to get to that point where they could get their hands on all that juicy investor money. They didn’t care about the product they just wanted to get to a point where they could play with other people’s money and cut and run. Disgusting and frustrating. We could have created something amazing but because of greed it blew up in their faces.

Until capitalists start taking responsiblity and owning up to what is wrong with capitalism we have serious problems. Stop blaming government and socialism for all the failures in society and OWN up to the failures of capitalism. I doubt you can see any though as you are far to blind to find any but you will say it isn’t perfect, yet can’t point to anything wrong with it can you. Can any of you capitalists point to anything wrong with capitalism??

And the worst part of capitalism in my opinion is it undermines liberty.

Why? Because it is fundamental to the philosophy of liberty promoted by the founders of this country as they understood it that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. When the strong prey upon the weak and destroy them that is tyranny. Capitalism promotes social tyranny as it ages and moves away from the roots of liberty. It undermines society and hijacks governments through corruption and bottlenecks the ability to have real honest discussions about how to manage our society at where we stand.

Greed and liberty when taken to infinity become mutually exclusive. If capitalism embodies greed as it’s core motiviation it eventually must destroy liberty. Even worse our current capitalism promotes a social darwinistic hatred that justifies acting like animals with each other. So not only does it undermine liberty it also undermines an enlightened society as we are to busy competing with each other to actually discuss and move as a team in positive directions.

I much prefer what I think your definition of capitalism is to “fundamentalist’s” more narrow definition. We are a capitalist species. A lot of us ants would like to be grasshoppers though, ha ha. I’m all about discouraging that.

#1. No. Capitalism is far more than that. It is the rule of law which protects property from theft by the state, the nobility, or any other group. Capitalism didn’t come onto the scene until the Dutch Republic of the 16th century when for the first time in European history the Dutch protected the property of the middle class and poor from the state and the nobility.

3. How do you explain the fact that wealth lasts only three generations. That’s an old Chinese proverb, but it holds up well in the US. The first generation accumulates the wealth. The second spends it without adding to it. The third generation kills of what was left. In real capitalism, there is a great deal of mobility in and out of wealth.

Also, capitalists must share wealth with others. Any new invention reduces the cost of living for all consumers of the new product, increases wages and adds to the profits of the capitalists. It’s not a zero sum game.

#4. That was Marx’s idea, but history has proven him wrong time and time again. Marx’s theory applies well to traditional economies, as described by Douglass North, in which the dictator maintains power by giving his supporters the freedom to plunder the wealth of the masses. But it fits very poorly the experiences of the West.

#5. The “haves” increase the wealth of the “have-nots” by investing in new businesses and equipment which raise wages and reduce the cost of living. For example, at least one economist thinks WalMart should get a Nobel prize for helping the poor more than any state program by reducing the cost of clothing and food.

1. Yes

2. Yes

3. Yes, but that’s not the only reason around here.

4. Here in America the problem was quite a way to being solved (leaving aside the legacy of evil racial and patriarchal theories) There was a rule of law so prevalent that it was generally understood that being a “have-not” was no ones fault but ones own. Nearly full emancipation of adult white males, circa 1850, just as Bastiat described. This has been slowly rolled back.

5. No. The big “haves” need to go back to the rule of law (universally applied this time, of course) instead of what most of them have engaged in for the last century or so: a systematic (though not uniform) bribery of the lesser “halves”. Whether caused by foolish guilt, ignorant benevolence or the desire to keep all competition at bay, the result has been mass infantilization.

1. Economically, the creation and use of capital – capitalism – began with the first laboriously polished stone axe, which means that it is capitalism – regardless of ownership patterns and legislation about it – which makes the difference between human existence and the mostly hand-to-mouth survival in the animal kingdom.

2. Use of the word Capitalism in the restricted sense of private enterprise and ownership, is an economically confusing legacy of Marx. Once it is realized that without capitalism there would be no culture nor civilization beyond hand-to-mouth subsistence, intellectuals could not really criticize capitalism nor Capitalism without being exposed as hypocrites, because education is also capital investment and PERSONAL ownership.

3. By nature, wealth gravitates towards wealth, because once a higher income is achieved, it is much easier to save, invest, and risk more without risking everything, than at a lower income.

4. Because of that, practically all civilizations move towards mutually antagonistic polarization into haves and have-nots, and stagnate or even collapse when the proportion of have-nots for whatever reason becomes too large and too poor in relation to the haves – as repeatedly has been shown by history.

5. Therefore, isn’t it in the “enlightened self-interest” of haves to promote a basic, all-inclusive (compulsory, like in Singapore) personal savings rule towards at least a minimally meaningful level of personal (retirement) wealth ownership level by all citizens eventually, as effectively described by the slogan (or principle of) “Ownership Democracy”?

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”
– Henry Hazlitt

Othyem: “I think much of it has to do with inequality. Capitalism, the free market, or whatever one wants to call it, naturally produces an unequal distribution of income. This notion seems to be (wrongly) equated with unfairness.”

I wholeheartedly agree. In a perfect free market, the most productive people and businesses would naturally and (more importantly) rightfully rise to the top and accumulate more real wealth for themselves. To those who imagine a utopian equality for all mankind or who would likely sink to the bottom in such a system, that is unthinkable.

” You basically say: educate them right and they will be with us ”

No. I only said what is required. I am fully aware of how near impossible it is.

No, I don’t think that endorsement of selfishness as opposed to altruism would do any good. I think too much attention is given to the distinction between those two in political economic discussions. Probably because many early influential economists (notably Adam Smith) came from Protestant background.
But laissez-faire ethic neither denounces self-interest nor does it celebrate it. And the same goes for altruism.

Then, you actually support Mushindo’s argument, even though you start with agreeing with my counterargument. You basically say: educate them right and they will be with us (“people will welcome no system other than Capitalism”). I don’t want to be unnecessarily pessimistic but I believe that we can never win ultimate support of most people. For reasons discussed by Art Carden here and Ludwig von Mises in Anticapitalist Mentality.

FROM HERE:

What the Left has always condemned “capitalism” for most profoundly is its legal egalitarianism, its “formal equality” — that is, its granting of political equality to moral unequals. In such a society, a Catharine MacKinnon has no more power than anyone else to censor others. Would-be Lenins and Maos and Castros are reduced to the Man on the Street. Each citizen controls his own property, and no cete of socialists is authorized to redistribute that wealth according to any scheme.
The equality of political liberty is the fundamental evil the Left opposes — and the foremost evil the Left seeks to abolish.

” Zero Google hits on:

“blood drips from the rich man’s bread while milk drips from the poor man’s bread” ”

That’s not a standard phrase but a summary of a story in 1 phrase that I cooked up. Try the following set and follow any of the first few links you get – Guru Nanak poor man bread milk.

I live in India. This is a story that forms a part of the lore of the first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak Dev. (You might know that Sikhs are a religious sect originally from India. You can identify them by their bright turbans and long beards).

The story goes like this. On a hot day, when asked whether he is going to eat at a rich man’s house or at a poor man’s, Guru Nanak replies that he would prefer the poor man’s. When asked why, he picks up 1 slice of bread each from the rich man and the poor man. He squeezes both. The rich man’s bread oozes blood while the poor man’s oozes milk. The moral of the story is that it is more important to lead an honest life.

The hidden implication?? If you are rich, you must be dishonest.

Capitalism is a system which requires hard work, thrift, patience and risk.

The anti-capitalist system promises wealth without any of those things. Just put in your time at public school and state college, apply for a job in government or in the industries which government permits to exist, and we do the rest.

The anti-capitalist system is of course a fairy tale, but central banks and inflation were invented in order to disguise its failures. They will continue to do so, right up until the very last instant when total collapse occurs and suddenly everyone rediscovers their inner capitalist.

“it [Walmart] clearly engages in wage slavery”

Not too clear for me, I don’t even know what “wage slavery” is. Could you make your blunt assertion more clear to me by backing it up? Starting with a definition of what that term means, please. Thank you.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Bala,

Zero Google hits on:

“blood drips from the rich man’s bread while milk drips from the poor man’s bread”