Political confusion
As someone who considers myself a libertarian socialist, I found it quite ironic that the most forthright and rational defence of birth control and abortion I have yet come across online should be in a publication called Capitalist Magazine.
A quick glance through some of their other categories confirmed my suspicion that this was the only issue upon which we were likely to agree. For instance, I found their stance on animal welfare and environmental awareness downright infuriating and disgusting.
From what I can gather, serious adherents of captialism see this economic structure as the backbone of the preservation of individual rights. Trouble is, their notion of individual rights seems, to me, to be rather less than a true notion of human rights. What they seem to believe is that governments exist to protect the rights of individuals - but only those individuals who take the trouble to exercise their supposed right to accumulate wealth (with which, incidentally, the government should never be suffered to interfere). Anyone who leads a life of disadvantaged circumstances can happily be left to fall by the wayside, since they obviously haven't taken responsibility for themselves.
What they don't see is that free market capitalism and hands-off government generally pave the way for exploitation and corruption, and the transformation of ordinary workers into wage slaves for the ludicrously rich executives. So much for individual rights. The implication seems to be that the more money you have in a capitalist society, the more rights you have, and the more you can overlook, with impunity, the rights of others.
To my way of thinking, individual rights always have to be weighed and balanced against the collective good (which is why, for instance, in our present system, I am content to pay taxes to support schools to which I will most likely never send children of my own), and I take that collective good to cover more than just humans. That, in a nutshell, is why I am against rampant capitalism - even if its adherents do occasionally see the light :)
A quick glance through some of their other categories confirmed my suspicion that this was the only issue upon which we were likely to agree. For instance, I found their stance on animal welfare and environmental awareness downright infuriating and disgusting.
From what I can gather, serious adherents of captialism see this economic structure as the backbone of the preservation of individual rights. Trouble is, their notion of individual rights seems, to me, to be rather less than a true notion of human rights. What they seem to believe is that governments exist to protect the rights of individuals - but only those individuals who take the trouble to exercise their supposed right to accumulate wealth (with which, incidentally, the government should never be suffered to interfere). Anyone who leads a life of disadvantaged circumstances can happily be left to fall by the wayside, since they obviously haven't taken responsibility for themselves.
What they don't see is that free market capitalism and hands-off government generally pave the way for exploitation and corruption, and the transformation of ordinary workers into wage slaves for the ludicrously rich executives. So much for individual rights. The implication seems to be that the more money you have in a capitalist society, the more rights you have, and the more you can overlook, with impunity, the rights of others.
To my way of thinking, individual rights always have to be weighed and balanced against the collective good (which is why, for instance, in our present system, I am content to pay taxes to support schools to which I will most likely never send children of my own), and I take that collective good to cover more than just humans. That, in a nutshell, is why I am against rampant capitalism - even if its adherents do occasionally see the light :)