What do you think about the police?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I’ll do this one. When the Irish potato crop was destroyed by blight in 1845, the country was absolutely bursting with other foodstuffs. However, due to the absentee-landlord farming system, that extra food was shipped out of Ireland (often under arms), so the owners of the farms wouldn’t lose profits.

Capitalism - raw, naked, government-supported capitalism - caused more than a million deaths of Irish men, women and children due to starvation and disease. Couple with mass out-migration, the population of Ireland dropped by 25% in just five years.

Boru

Just replace "capitalism" with its definition, "voluntary exchange of goods and services", you will realize how silly you sound. Forced exports of food is capitalism?!

Yes, forced exports of food to profit absentee landowners while allowing a million workers to starve to death is classic capitalism. Had the UK been a socialist state (or even a social democracy), the food would have been purchased by the government and distributed in order to avert the famine.

And that is NOT the definition of capitalism. This is:

Capitalism (n): an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.

Boru

Edit: and the ‘exchange’ in The Great Hunger was anything but ‘voluntary’.