Authored by DemocracyRules
1. Capitalism Causes Poverty
First we must define poverty, relative or absolute. Many Socialists use relative definitions. Some declare the lowest 15% of income earners as‘the poor’, but this is silly, because wealth is increasing rapidly in industrialized countries. If one compares contemporary Americans to other countries and other historical times, “virtually every American alive today is in the top one percent of income”.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/052004D.html
“In 1970, according to the American Housing Survey (from HUD and the Department of Commerce ,then called the Annual Housing Survey, Table A-1, p. 32), 36% of the 67 million households in America had air conditioning, 11% had central air. This is the earliest data available from this survey. In 2005, the most recent data from the same survey, (Table 2-4, p. 66) 82% of the 15 million households with income below the poverty line had air conditioning, 52% had central air.”
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/h150.html
http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/h150-05.pdf
The only sensible method is to use an absolute definition of poverty. That is, not enough money to eat properly, clothe oneself adequately, or live in safe secure housing. Even this is hard to calculate, because these absolute measures usually only focus on family income. “Measures of family income do not account for in-kind benefits such as food stamps, free or reduced-price school meals under the child nutrition programs, donated USDA commodity food, Medicaid, and public housing subsidies, nor do they consider fixed expenses, such as child care and child support, taxes, housing, and medical expenses. Since the 1960s, when the poverty concept was introduced, there has been tremendous growth both in the value of benefits from in-kind programs and in fixed expenses.”
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5071&page=42
Often, in the middle of an MSM story about poverty, we cut to The Homeless. This group is key for Socialists, who often call them the ‘Lumpenproletariat’. They seem to be poor in an absolute sense, the victims of modern society, the poorest of the poor. This group seems so very unlucky, and so very Capitalist-victimised. The problem with this is that most of the homeless have a serious, untreated psychopathology, like severe depression, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, substance abuse disorder, or dementia. Many of these people refuse housing, and most refuse medical treatment for their mental problems. This is tragic, and mental health professionals are still working on methods to treat them. In a perfect Socialist worker’s paradise, these homeless would still exist (as they do in Sweden), unless you force them into treatment.
The Swedish Homeless:
http://www.feantsa.org/files/indicators_wg/ETHOS2006/200613123.pdf
Karl Marx had little respect for the Lumpenproletariat. He called them the “refuse of all classes...swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants... beggars, and other flotsam of society.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat
In industrialized countries, true poverty is associated with low intelligence, poor education, and psychological problems. It is not helpful to give them money (most money given to beggars is spent on substance abuse), and it’s difficult to keep them usefully employed.
Thus in industrialized countries, the poor are not ‘victims of Capitalism’, they’re just difficult to employ. Socialist countries have the same problems with them. Socialism or Capitalism is not the issue. What helps are specific and cost-effective efforts to ameliorate specific problems of intelligence, education and psychological adjustment.
The key question is, if capitalism causes poverty, then why has true poverty declined so much in capitalist countries?
2. Capitalism Makes the Poor Poorer and the Rich Richer
And Socialists drift ever further from the truth. As global GDP per person increases, the average person is becoming progressively better off. Furthermore, both the poor and the rich are getting richer. It is true that according to a well-known statistical principle measured by the ‘Coefficient of Variation’, as the average wealth goes up, the variability can also go up. Income dispersion increases, but the average person is better off, and the percentage of people who are in real poverty decreases. Thus, the poor are not getting poorer in any absolute sense. This is great news for Free Enterprise Democracy, but it’s bad news for Socialist theory. When Marx first wrote about Capitalism in the middle of the 1800's, he did not grasp how incredibly rich the Free Enterprise Democracies would become.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/on-inequality.html
Many Socialist theorists calculate ‘poverty’ as the lowest 15%, of income (the relativist approach). They call it ‘Endemic Poverty’. If one calculates it that way then of course ‘poverty’ will always be with us. Among demographers, sociologists, and others who study variables like socio-economic status and income, it is acceptable for statistical purposes to designate the bottom 15% of the ‘bell curve’ of incomes as ‘low income’, or sometimes, ‘the poor’. (By the way, the ‘bell curve’ for income is actually stretched out quite a bit on the right-hand side, by a small number of high income people.)
Of course most demographers and sociologists know the lowest 15% is not an objective measure of real poverty. In 20 years, the bottom 15% of the distribution can still be called ‘low income’ compared to the others. If you wanted to be silly, you could proclaim that poverty has not changed in 100,000 years, because it still comprises 15% of the population! Well, of course it does if you define it that way! In 20 years from now, the bottom 15% of the income distribution may be dragging along the ground in Lamborghinis and Roll-Royces, while the others zoom around in Sky Cars. The Ford Focus is already vastly better than any car available in 1910. Socialists could still proclaim that the bottom 15% is ‘poor’, and ‘endemic’, and still with us.
3. Capitalism Causes World Poverty
World poverty is actually DECLINING as a percentage of the population. “In the modern age, we take for granted that the US will grow at 3.5% a year, and that the world economy grows at 4% to 4.5% a year. However, these are numbers that were unheard of in the 19th century, during which World GDP grew under 2% a year. Prior to the 19th century, annual World GDP growth was so little that changes from one generation to the next were virtually zero.” – The Futurist
http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/economic-growth.html
What do Socialists think the relentless growth in real global GDP means? Chopped liver? Also good news is that global wealth is growing faster than population growth. In other words, world GDP per capita is increasing.
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html
The IMF and others agree that even in most poor countries, real GDP is growing. “Growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has picked up considerably, reaching an eight-year high of 5.6 percent in 2004.”
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2006/03/pattillo.htm
Poverty and Free Enterprise:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050207A
4. In Socialism, Social and Economic Problems Are Solved
Socialists show almost no interest in the crimes of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchov, Mao, or other Communists. Uncounted tens of millions died from Soviet Communism, and millions more are still dying from it. The Soviets brutally subjugated their people, destroyed democracy, starved millions of Ukranians to death, ran death camps for their German POW’s, victimized and murdered dissenters by the trainload, and bankrupted the country with useless hyper-militarism. They also left huge poverty in their wake, from which it will take many more years for Russians and other victim countries to recover. The Russian suicide rate is now the second highest in the world, and life expectancy (M=60, F=74) has fallen to one of the lowest among the industrialized countries. Much of this is attributable to the massive social disruptions leading up to and following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This was not incidental to Soviet Communism, it was CAUSED by Communism. Consider the logic of Socialism/Communism. Democratic Free Enterprise depends upon an mixture of co-operation and competition. Socialism/Communism requires co-operation only. This means that most forms of competition must be suppressed. Because competition is an innate characteristic of all living things, strong social control is needed to suppress human competitiveness. This requires a highly controlling and interventionist state which must enforce rules and laws with obsessive rigour. Democracy engenders too much individualism and dissent to be compatible with full Socialism/Communism.
5. Capitalism Exploits Women
“The Communist Manifesto” again, and now Marx says, “The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, ... by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour...
“But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
“For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.
“Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt
Well, there it is in black and white, it turns out that Hugh Hefner did not invent the “community of women” idea after all. Overall, radical feminism is remarkably congruent with Marx, although things have not worked out very well on the “community of women” project. I still cannot see how Socialism benefits women. The Suffragettes were mainly Classical Liberals. John Stuart Mill presented the idea of women’s suffrage in 1865. How does Democratic Free Enterprise exploit women by empowering them and giving them jobs?
The Suffragettes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette
6. The Family Is Bad
From “The Communist Manifesto” Marx and Engels, 1848, once again, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation...
“Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists... On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution...The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital... Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt
I’m sorry, beyond this puzzling rhetoric, I don’t get it. Why exactly is the family bad?
To be continued...
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