Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson

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• 
  vehed80345
  October 15th, 2021
  

  

  From the book:

  A WORLD FOR THE CHANGING
  Winston Churchill, prime minister of Britain during the Second World War, famously said, “If you’re not a socialist when you’re twenty, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re forty, you have no head.” This was his version of TINA, his way of saying that capitalism is here to stay.

  Well, I for one would rather have my heart than his head. Churchill was a right-wing colonialist and white supremacist who thought that the Indian people weren’t capable of governing themselves. He dismissed Mahatma Gandhi—who would non-violently lead India to independence from the British Empire—as a “half naked lunatic fakir” who “ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back.”

  Unfortunately for Mr. Churchill, young people today are showing that perhaps it’s his head that wasn’t on right. The last few years have seen people revolting across the globe, from the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, to the anti-austerity protests in Spain and Greece, to the grassroots movements propelling new anti-establishment figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, to the youth-led Black Lives Matter protests in North America. Young people are changing the world.

  If you read this book and start talking about lefty ideas, it won’t be long before someone looks down their nose at you and says there is no alternative or condescendingly quotes Churchill. But as much as these people may wish otherwise, there are alternatives. Sorry, Churchill, but we have hearts and heads. And we’re not going away.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  yanico
  October 15th, 2021
  

  

  vehed80345 - and India explode economically when they stop lissen to socialist like Gandhi and start embracing capitalisms.
  Grass roots… financing by oligarch from wall street,
  you are the sheep that build global fascism - neo corporatism wet seen Benito Mussolini on a global scale.
  Under the leadership of the American Ku Klux Klan party that found the greatest source of slaves in human history Communist China.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  illodiini
  October 15th, 2021
  

  

  Well, yanico, garble, garble, garble to you, too.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  alnilam
  October 15th, 2021
  

  During the 20th century, almost as if in accordance with some natural law, socialism marched triumphantly around the globe with an intellectual and moral impetus to shape the world in compliance with its values. However, by the end of the century in most socialist countries, redistribution of wealth had reached the end of its potential, egalitarian values gradually eroded and socialist economies spectacularly collapsed.

  The proponents of economic equality failed to recognize the immutable fact — freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty. The greatest moral injustice is an attempt to regulate (control) wealth by the people of limited abilities who are seeking to satisfy their unlimited needs under the banner of self-serving definitions of justice and fairness.

  https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/inequality__the_engine_of_prosperity_.html

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  erouting
  October 15th, 2021
  

  @alnilam

  Communism was the predominant form of wealth management for almost all of human history. All precontact societies were some iteration of communist. Functional families are also communist. As are the internal workings of all organizations. The system breaks down at scale due to greed, complexity and sociopaths, but your quotation suggests a lack of historical knowledge and an inability to recognize the thing you appear to hate in the organizations you are advocating for.

  One solution is better education and to identify and eliminate the sociopaths who abuse free markets, while also regulating free markets to ensure they operate for the benefit of society, rather than for a few individuals alone. Subjecting all of humanity to unregulated trickle up economics in an elaborate pyramid scheme has resulted in each generation for the last 50 years owning less than the generation before them. Being lucky and clever, but mostly lucky, should not justify the imposition of perpetual, and worsening, economic serfdom on the overwhelming majority of the human race.

  Also, if the greatest moral injustice is regulating wealth what are your thoughts on slavery, child sexual assault, murder, genocide, and Randy Newman? Your line of reasoning dictates that any law which interferes with the free movement of capital is a greater evil than the thing which it seeks to prevent. So, child slave brothels are less immoral than regulations that stop people from profiting from child slave brothels. A Randy Newman concert would even be considered less immoral than killing Randy Newman, because a dead Randy Newman can’t hold concerts and generate profit thereby. The child brothels you favor I could let slide, we all have our thing and I guess that’s yours, but leaving Randy Newman alive reveals you for an irredemable monster.

  Isn’t playing demagoguery fun? Your turn.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  Jack_Milad
  October 15th, 2021
  

  @alnilam capitalism is going so well you can’t afford the audiobooks you want with your disposable income, so you have to rely on sites like this one.
  ‘Please, step on me harder capitalist daddy’

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  caesar963
  October 15th, 2021
  

  @erouting - Before you depart on the communising routing into remote dayes of yore, recall the essential part played by trade & markets in human history & development. You have a speedier dinosaur that I want, and I have a more sexually desirable dinosaur that you haven’t been able to take your eyes off. Let’s negotiate amicably. Thus civilised humanity advances.

  As for serfdumb, are we not unimaginably better off - across the range of objective measures - than the people of 100 years ago? Of 50 years ago? Certainly better off than the unfortunates who live & have lived under the grinding heel of “progressive” utopian dystopias, which centrally plan their barbaric cruelties on the grandest of scales.

  We can’t design human flaws/sociopathy out of any of our systems or dynamics. We’re stuck with each other & our benighted selves. Even Randy’s Short People & their great big lies.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  alnilam
  October 15th, 2021
  

  @erouting

  The only argument I had in mind was this one:

  “The proponents of economic equality failed to recognize the immutable fact — freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty.”

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  Bytbiter
  October 15th, 2021
  

  @caesar963

  I agree exponential percents. There’s no other possible reason we’re better off. Like science or anything.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  caesar963
  October 15th, 2021
  

  So, we’re better off? Woo-hoo! By science, do you mean evil Western science (boo!) or innovative, heroic, successful Soviet science (hooray!)? All scientific advances had 2 b attributed to one ideological moustache, y’know. The moustache of innovative progress, dontcha no.

  For some reason, they were better able to foster an environment free of fear, free of want, free of food, and free of freedom, while we languished in the West. This accounts for their, er, Great Leaps Forward.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  erouting
  October 16th, 2021
  

  @caesar963

  And we have a player!

  Actually, the claim that hunter gatherer folk traded really isn’t supported in the historical record. I grew up in a remote part of Alaska and spent most of my college years in the dusty archives of UA’s two main universities studying precontact societies.

  The idea of two people exchanging things really wasn’t a part of hunter gatherer societies. Its taught that way in economics courses. But its wrong. From what we can tell, both from the historical record of western folk encountering primitive societies and writing about them, coupled with modern ethnographic accounts of recent primitive societies, esteem attaches from the act of giving, which was the only benefit people derived from giving. So if you liked something I had in that time period, I’d most likely give it to you, and feel accomplished for having done so. If you later saw that I needed it more than you did, you’d probably give it back. White people called this “Indian Giving.” Natives called it being a decent human being.

  The barter system never existed in the form its taught in most schools. It didn’t really show up until cities did. And then you only bartered with people outside your tribal unit, however you mentally defined that demarcation point. Capitalism has shrunk the tribal unit down to the individual. Any properly civilized primitive would be utterly horrified by how we treat each other. And some of them ate people. Admittedly that was mostly part of remembrance rituals, rather than spit roasting intruders, but still.

  And no, many of us aren’t better off. Sure, a friend of mine has a cell phone. But she also sleeps outside in Michigan. Because she’s homeless. She’s scared of freezing to death this year as all the poor houses are full up. A millenia back she could have built a house. Granted not a great house, but a better house than no house. Now her potential house is illegal because someone owns the uninhabited stretch of forest she sleeps in to attempt to avoid being assaulted by other homeless folk, or bored teens. Having a fire is also illegal. Because someone else owns the wood. I’m building her a tiny home. But that takes time. And there aren’t enough people who do that kind of thing to make much of a difference. Just too many poor dontcha know.

  One solution would be to mass produce bootstraps. If folk pull themselves up by them high enough, they’ll eventually hit space. And space has no property rights. Yet. Be a nice place to build a house. Other than the space junk. And lack of air. Be warm if they pick the proper side of the planet for a geostationary orbit though.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  caesar963
  October 16th, 2021
  

  I’m really more of a player™. True enuff, we have to develop to the point (beyond mere subsistence) where we’ve crafted stuff to trade. And we should appreciate the constellation of relationships & networks of reciprocity & obligation which accumulate around giving. Lots of mutual benefits derived thereof.

  We didn’t have “Indian Giving” in my own neck of deprivation (we were regarded as the “Indians” to an extent) - but it looks like it means something like “give a thing, and take it back?”

  I commend you for your actions, in all sincerity.

  I see you live in the US, and you quite appropriately use local examples. I’m in benighted Europe, & I too wish everyone treated each other with more dignity & respect. Homelessness here in Ireland usually involves mental health issues & addiction. More people have been accommodated recently due to the Covid crisis, & services want people in need to remain in contact. Frequently, they break contact, and will often refuse shelter. Independent living is difficult for them because consistency/paying bills presents challenges.

  Stability is absolutely crucial for kids (I had the opposite experience myself, so I know whereof I speak). Individual responsibility, and the child witnessing this example within the family, is indeed almost too obvious to even state. There are many people in very complex & difficult situations, not all of their own making, and they have not had the luxury/necessity of this beneficial example.

  Funding, improving, and targeting public education is key. Early intervention & identifying mental health problems would be enormously beneficial.

  Here, we made a decision to prioritise education many decades ago (after we achieved independence). Economically, we faced considerable challenges, and this was a vital long-term goal, in the interests of survival (we lacked industry at the time, many vital natural resources, & had an enormous emigration problem).

  Our schools were mainly Catholic, the education provided was genuinely excellent. Taxpayers began to fund these to an even greater degree (with parents also contributing extra resources) and university education became grant funded. This was/is for everyone.

  Now, this is not a socialist country by any means. We did this within the market context, and we vote on how to redistribute the dividend. It was just about what works - without the stupid, toxic ideology. The result was: the economy went from strength to strength - and more funds became available as the economic base grew. Foreign direct investment (attracted by low corporate tax): technology companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc. made this one of their prime destinations in Europe (to a greater extent since Brexit - including Brexiteers’ own companies). Emigration tapered off, and we imported a skilled workforce to add to the existing population.

  Apparently, we have the highest educated population within the EU (with women having a slightly higher level of educational attainment than men - which is even more beneficial in the raising of children).

  This is not an idle boast - we did all of this because we had to. Without which: no economic survival, and no ability to pay our way in the world.
  Are we better off than 100, or even a few decades ago? Absolutely beyond doubt. Across all objective measures.
  Ought the 20th century be an ideological warning to us all? Absolutely beyond doubt; to regard it as otherwise would be insane.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  Gweilo
  October 16th, 2021
  

  “There is no alternative to free-market capitalism.” Of course there is. e.g., China. And there aren’t any countries that actually practise “free-market capitalism” anyway. As there are no countries that actually practise communism.

  Every economy is a mixed economy, and the trick is to steer between the dog eat dog pure “free market”, that ends up in feudalism, as wealth flows upwards to those who own capital, and the totalitarian poverty of say North Korea.

  Socialism with a free-ish market is what produces the greatest wealth and well-being of the greatest number.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson
• 
  caesar963
  October 16th, 2021
  

  It is indeed a balance. Many in the US imagine that Europe doesn’t have that balance, and that all (or the majority) of the states are socialist. We really aren’t, though. Crucial programmes are funded thru sustainable taxation on incentivised industry & entrepreneurship. Broadly, we reduce taxes in order to attract investment.

  Tax unsustainably & you get capital flight to more accommodating locales (& diminished economic activity, generally). Similarly, regulation is necessary, but too much regulation also has a repellent effect. Pragmatism works; ideological socialism has always failed, often catastrophically, as we know.

  Fired Up About Capitalism - Tom Malleson

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