Capitalism = EVIL
So I was on YouTube, and this guy made a comment to me when I said something against capitalism. His comment:
Considering how an immigrant can just move in, set up a flower/shoe/clothing/trinket shop and be successful, I don't know is capitalism is all THAT bad. Capitalism has it's pros and (plenty of) cons, but I'm not willing to weigh the two since I'm am lazy...Penny for my thoughts?
My response:
LOL that's not how it works. Immigrant comes in, has no home yet because he has no money, can't get a job because he has no address. Maybe he's lucky and has the money for a fruit cart. Where does he get the fruit from? Maybe he's really lucky and has enough money for some fruit to sell. Great. Now he has to get a license to sell his fruit, and a food handler's license. Those cost money too. But hey, he's really lucky, our guy, and he has some friends to help him out with that, or he sells some blood plasma to raise the money. Great. Now he sets up shop somewhere, becomes successful, he's doing great. But what's this? Oh hey Wal-Mart moves in next to his spot and he has to sell it somewhere else. But oh no, the Target nearby now has a produce section. Well he moves again. And again. And again. Until he runs out of places to go because big multi-billion dollar companies keep squashing the little guy.
But let's say he has a brilliant idea for a new kind of food, something nobody else has, and he starts selling that. He needs to buy a bigger cart now and machines to cook it and store ingredients. Great, he's doing good again for a while. Then someone steals his idea and suddenly there's hundreds of the same thing again, he's lost in the crowd. Or some company happens to be generous enough to buy his idea from him for a million dollars, while they go on to make billions on it. Meanwhile, he's been poor all his life, doesn't know how to invest properly, he spends all his money and now he's homeless.
Or maybe he's smarter than that, and he like, rents a franchise from the company that bought his idea so he can keep going. Great. He gets a tiny percentage of the profits, while they get the lion's share. He's barely getting by. He cuts employee hours and benefits so he can keep more of the money for himself. And now he's part of the problem. His employees can't pay their bills and feed their children because someone stole from him and now he's stealing from them. Some of his employees work two or three jobs and are one paycheck away from homelessness, or maybe they've already lost their home and their address is a PO box. They don't have anywhere to keep their stuff, their money's in a bank but they can't safely store a bank card anywhere. Or maybe they've got massive student loan debt with such a high interest rate they'll die before they can pay it off even if they give the loan company every penny they have, so they can't get a bank account because if they do, the loan company will find out and confiscate the money they need to survive, leaving them with nothing.
And maybe our original guy gets promoted to regional manager. Great, now he's stealing even more money from employees, he's an even bigger part of the problem. A referendum comes up to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and he's like "I didn't get no $15 an hour, nobody else should either!" so he and others like him fight that, so that doesn't pass. Which is really dumb because if the minimum wage was $15 an hour, employees could buy more than just bare essentials for survival, which would boost the economy, which would mean our original guy and his bosses end up with more money than ever, but no they have no concept of future gains if it means sacrifices in the now, even if they have more than enough to sacrifice.
Oh yeah, and while all that's going on, the Big Money guys are doing shit like drilling for oil on sacred land that doesn't belong to them because Fuck Native Americans, money ROOLZ! And for years, people in Flint Michigan still don't have safe drinking water because of capitalistic greed and racism. Monsanto is killing the bees, which we need for about 90% of the food we grow to keep surviving. Monsanto is also planting horrible corn that's designed to not be able to make viable seeds, the pollen from their corn keeps getting into corn crops that don't belong to them, and so they sue those farmers for using their product without paying, even though there's no possible way the farmers could have stopped it happening even if they'd known it was going on... and WINNING those lawsuits.
Other companies dump toxic chemicals into the drinking water and get a slap on the wrist when they get caught. Others are lax about safety standards and can shrug off fines and lawsuits when someone gets maimed or killed. Others deliberately bet against the fucking economy itself and get rich while everyone else suffers. Capitalism is supposed to be about survival of the fittest and competition, but when big companies suffer, they whine to the government and get bailed out. Most corporations don't even pay taxes anymore because they've bought so many tax loopholes or hid their money in offshore accounts, and other companies have actually managed to get paid by the IRS on the regular even though by all rights they owe the IRS billions of dollars in taxes, and the IRS doesn't even seem to give a fuck anymore.
Then you've got people like Trump who buy businesses and deliberately run them into the ground for their own personal profit. (Trump bankrupted a CASINO! That's impossible, unless you're doing it on purpose, and even then it should still be impossible!)
Oh and Hershey's uses child slave labor in Africa to harvest their cacao beans, it's become an industry standard for clothing manufactuers to pay slave wages to foreign workers so they can spend $1 on clothes that they sell for a hundred dollars or more, Apple does basically the same thing with their iPhones and iPads and whatnot. The entire IDEA of capitalism, the way it fucking is INTENDED TO WORK, is exploitation, IE outright *theft*! It is literally impossible to have a capitalist society that doesn't involve everyone stealing from everyone else, that's how the system was DESIGNED to work!
So please, o great wise man, tell me what redeeming qualities capitalism has? Because I can't see any from where I'm standing.
This was cross-posted from https://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1364082.html
You can comment either here or there.
Considering how an immigrant can just move in, set up a flower/shoe/clothing/trinket shop and be successful, I don't know is capitalism is all THAT bad. Capitalism has it's pros and (plenty of) cons, but I'm not willing to weigh the two since I'm am lazy...Penny for my thoughts?
My response:
LOL that's not how it works. Immigrant comes in, has no home yet because he has no money, can't get a job because he has no address. Maybe he's lucky and has the money for a fruit cart. Where does he get the fruit from? Maybe he's really lucky and has enough money for some fruit to sell. Great. Now he has to get a license to sell his fruit, and a food handler's license. Those cost money too. But hey, he's really lucky, our guy, and he has some friends to help him out with that, or he sells some blood plasma to raise the money. Great. Now he sets up shop somewhere, becomes successful, he's doing great. But what's this? Oh hey Wal-Mart moves in next to his spot and he has to sell it somewhere else. But oh no, the Target nearby now has a produce section. Well he moves again. And again. And again. Until he runs out of places to go because big multi-billion dollar companies keep squashing the little guy.
But let's say he has a brilliant idea for a new kind of food, something nobody else has, and he starts selling that. He needs to buy a bigger cart now and machines to cook it and store ingredients. Great, he's doing good again for a while. Then someone steals his idea and suddenly there's hundreds of the same thing again, he's lost in the crowd. Or some company happens to be generous enough to buy his idea from him for a million dollars, while they go on to make billions on it. Meanwhile, he's been poor all his life, doesn't know how to invest properly, he spends all his money and now he's homeless.
Or maybe he's smarter than that, and he like, rents a franchise from the company that bought his idea so he can keep going. Great. He gets a tiny percentage of the profits, while they get the lion's share. He's barely getting by. He cuts employee hours and benefits so he can keep more of the money for himself. And now he's part of the problem. His employees can't pay their bills and feed their children because someone stole from him and now he's stealing from them. Some of his employees work two or three jobs and are one paycheck away from homelessness, or maybe they've already lost their home and their address is a PO box. They don't have anywhere to keep their stuff, their money's in a bank but they can't safely store a bank card anywhere. Or maybe they've got massive student loan debt with such a high interest rate they'll die before they can pay it off even if they give the loan company every penny they have, so they can't get a bank account because if they do, the loan company will find out and confiscate the money they need to survive, leaving them with nothing.
And maybe our original guy gets promoted to regional manager. Great, now he's stealing even more money from employees, he's an even bigger part of the problem. A referendum comes up to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and he's like "I didn't get no $15 an hour, nobody else should either!" so he and others like him fight that, so that doesn't pass. Which is really dumb because if the minimum wage was $15 an hour, employees could buy more than just bare essentials for survival, which would boost the economy, which would mean our original guy and his bosses end up with more money than ever, but no they have no concept of future gains if it means sacrifices in the now, even if they have more than enough to sacrifice.
Oh yeah, and while all that's going on, the Big Money guys are doing shit like drilling for oil on sacred land that doesn't belong to them because Fuck Native Americans, money ROOLZ! And for years, people in Flint Michigan still don't have safe drinking water because of capitalistic greed and racism. Monsanto is killing the bees, which we need for about 90% of the food we grow to keep surviving. Monsanto is also planting horrible corn that's designed to not be able to make viable seeds, the pollen from their corn keeps getting into corn crops that don't belong to them, and so they sue those farmers for using their product without paying, even though there's no possible way the farmers could have stopped it happening even if they'd known it was going on... and WINNING those lawsuits.
Other companies dump toxic chemicals into the drinking water and get a slap on the wrist when they get caught. Others are lax about safety standards and can shrug off fines and lawsuits when someone gets maimed or killed. Others deliberately bet against the fucking economy itself and get rich while everyone else suffers. Capitalism is supposed to be about survival of the fittest and competition, but when big companies suffer, they whine to the government and get bailed out. Most corporations don't even pay taxes anymore because they've bought so many tax loopholes or hid their money in offshore accounts, and other companies have actually managed to get paid by the IRS on the regular even though by all rights they owe the IRS billions of dollars in taxes, and the IRS doesn't even seem to give a fuck anymore.
Then you've got people like Trump who buy businesses and deliberately run them into the ground for their own personal profit. (Trump bankrupted a CASINO! That's impossible, unless you're doing it on purpose, and even then it should still be impossible!)
Oh and Hershey's uses child slave labor in Africa to harvest their cacao beans, it's become an industry standard for clothing manufactuers to pay slave wages to foreign workers so they can spend $1 on clothes that they sell for a hundred dollars or more, Apple does basically the same thing with their iPhones and iPads and whatnot. The entire IDEA of capitalism, the way it fucking is INTENDED TO WORK, is exploitation, IE outright *theft*! It is literally impossible to have a capitalist society that doesn't involve everyone stealing from everyone else, that's how the system was DESIGNED to work!
So please, o great wise man, tell me what redeeming qualities capitalism has? Because I can't see any from where I'm standing.
This was cross-posted from https://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1364082.html
You can comment either here or there.