Money is Evil
Out of context: Reply #112
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- ukit0
blitznutty, the whos and isms DO matter. Do you really think the current American libertarian approach to things is what has been practiced for most of history or that it represents some kind of natural human state?
If you go back to humans in their earliest form, what they practiced was closer to communism if anything. Go out and collect resources, and then distribute them among the entire group. There was no "rich guy" or "poor guy" in the tribe.
I'm not gonna recite an entire history of economics right here, but "capitalism" in the modern sense is a very recent invention that came out of the mid 1700s, and didn't really catch on until much later.
Mixed capitalism is the system that dominated during America's peak (40s-70s). We were capitalist but your ability to get insanely rich was somewhat limited, taxes were 90% on wealth above a certain point. In the 80s this was replaced by Friedmanite or monetarist thinking. A lot of the changes over the past 30 years (huge deficit, growing inequality) can be attributed to this. Maybe there's also been some good things to come out of it, but at least place it in the proper context.
Anyway, to make a long story short, our way of thinking has evolved over time. No reason to think it shouldn't continue to evolve.