capitalism
Out of context: Reply #293
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- locustsloth0
First of all, you are putting the health of the machine (our government and it's economy) above the health of it's people. While it is valid that an unhealthy machine cannot support it's people (no matter how healthy they are), a machine set up in the ways ours currently is will only cause more people to become more unhealthy and eventually take the whole machine down with them.
Yes, competition and free-markets and (sadly) inequity drives innovation and production. But in essence what you are talking about is greed (shut up Michael Douglas). You are saying that using greed as our carrot is the best way to drive the horse-cart. i think that a mass acceptance of greed as a motivating factor will be the ruin of our (or any) society.
This brings us to another erroneous assumption.; that with social inequity absent, the country would disintigrate into a pile of lazy lie-abouts. This would be true if we pulled a switch and went from a capitalist society directly to a social democracy or a (gasp) socialist society. What is missing is imbuing the knowledge into our peoples that all our fates are interconnected, that the bad that happens to you happens to me. If 4 people are in a boat that is sinking and all 4 know that each one of them has to bail or paddle or else they will die, you'd be hard pressed to see one of them pull out a beer and a fishing pole. And even if one did, the urging of the other three for their survival would most certainly encourage the fourth.
Not realistic? Wanna know why? A couple centuries of putting wealth first and people last. We are marinated in the filth of greed. But enough people have their heads above water (sometimes by standing on the backs of others) that we're still saying it's a mighty fine cruise.
i don't expect this to change your mind. i don't expect this to happen. it can't happen, we're not evolved enough to care about others with little or nothing in return. But if enough people put as much faith, devotion, time and energy into the system i've described (or one better constructed) as they do in the current system, it would work as good if not better, but with a better point of motivation.hey, but who the fuck am i?