RE: Capitalism: Is it Working?
June 6, 2013 at 1:35 pm
(This post was last modified: June 6, 2013 at 1:56 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(June 6, 2013 at 1:21 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Yes, on land provided by the government, on the backs of extremely poor immigrants. I think it's a sign of the brutality of the exploitation of and hatred toward Chinese that despite millions of them immigrating in the 1800s; they make up a small fraction of our population in comparison to the descendants of people that were literally bought and traded as slaves. Without researching it, my guess is that a major factor was that Chinese men were so disproportionately represented that they couldn't grow their population significantly.Isn't it important to note here..that saying "on land provided by the government" attenuates the situation and may not really describe the full brunt of it?
If we continued to say -On land provided by the government - who had a glut of land and nothing to do with it, who hoped to glean the benefits that the railroads offered as infrastucture (but frequently found themselves in the position of not having been as clever as the railroads operators) -and land acquired from private citizens - on the backs of exploitative labor -and with the assistance of the media in forming public opinion - the private ownership of -all- means of production.
I also don't think that capitalism on it's own actually solves problems of inefficient resource allocation...as we should all be fully aware that there's a profit to be made in allocating resources inefficiently...... At best it might offer a heuristic - but without understanding why it works (or doesn't) I could hardly call this a solution.
Private ownership of the means of production with the aim to produce a profit. Isn't this all that capitalism is? What sense does it make then to call it a problem solver? If your problem is that the means of production are not privately owned...and no one is looking to make a profit..and you wish that they were - then capitalism can solve this problem, sure..but going too much farther is a stretch. I suppose this cuts to the question in the OP. Is capitalism working? Are the means of production privately owned, are people looking to make a profit? If so then yes, but the rest of this stuff....something else is required, because "efficient allocation of resources" is not required for capitalism to "work"..nor does it seem to be offering that service by the sheer weight of it's own simple principle.
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