B0ycey wrote:Born privilege is the most unfair aspect of Capitalism.
No, privilege is.
How is it fair that a person born into wealth has opportunities that someone born into poverty does not?
What you should be asking is how the person born into poverty had his access to opportunity forcibly removed and made into the private property of the privileged, whether the latter were born into it or not. Do you really think the worst thing about slavery is that some people are born into slave-owning families, or inherit slaves??
Working hard only creates the means to sell your Labour. What you get for that is determined by the skills you acquire throughout life.
No, it's determined by what the privileged are not legally entitled to take from you.
And intelligence is only one type of skill. There are plenty of skills even a dotard can acquire that he could sell highly. So stupidity is not an excuse to not make money. That is the idlers excuse.
Intelligence is not a skill. It is the capacity to understand. The US Army has determined that a person with an IQ of less than 83 -- about one standard deviation below the mean, accounting for roughly 15% of the population -- usually cannot be trained to safely do anything useful in the Army.
Crantag wrote:Communist China is seeing the emergence of 5000 new milionaires a week, and has a plan being implemented aimed at the elimination of extreme poverty by 2020.
It is absurd to describe China as communist. It was never communist; was socialist from 1949-79, and has since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping been more geoist than socialist or capitalist. It is important to understand why China has boomed since abandoning socialism, while Russia first collapsed, and has since then struggled economically. Russia privatized the land and natural resources, creating an instant capitalist oligarchy. China has retained land in public ownership, enabling it to gain the efficiencies of the market while avoiding much of the inequity of capitalism. Of course China is entirely corrupt, and gives away far too much publicly created wealth to location holders (almost all of China's rich have got that way by holding land); but at least it recovers a significant fraction of the subsidy it would otherwise give them.
Crantag wrote:Capitalism is about the right of owners of capital to earn money through the direct exploitation of the labor power of workers.
Nope. Wrong. Capitalism is about the legal entitlement of landowners to own workers' rights to liberty (i.e., their freedom to earn a living), and to make them pay full market value for permission to exercise those rights. Owners of capital (in classical economics, tools, buildings, and other products of labor devoted to production) must also pay landowners full market value for permission to employ their capital productively. The result is that the landowner takes all production above what labor can obtain on marginal land (the Law of Rent) plus the full value of all public services and infrastructure (the Henry George Theorem), leaving the capital owners to compete away each others' returns. That is why most owners of capital do not gain but
lose money, and only the inherent variability of returns in a dynamic market system enables a handful of them to get rich. Those who get rich under capitalism are almost exclusively privilege owners, not capital owners.
They are abetted by this through government policies specifically designed to hold large numbers of workers in misery, so as to maintain such workers in a dependent position whereby they must sell their labor to the capitalists merely to survive.
The policy in question is privilege: legal entitlements to benefit from the uncompensated abrogation of others' rights, such as land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc.
One conspicuous illustrating aspect of this is the maintaining of a 'surplus army of the unemployed'. Under the prevailing norms of American capitalism, this is referred to euphemistically in official parlance as 'full employment', which is not full employment in the sense normal speakers of English might understand the term, but is rather a target rate of unemployment.
The unemployed are unemployed because they can't afford to pay full market value to landowners for permission to earn a living.
Whereas in days of old 'owning capital' far more likely than now meant owning the physical means and mechanisms of production,
As long as you refuse to distinguish between the contribution to production made by the owners of buildings, equipment, etc. that
add to production and the non-contribution made by owners of land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, etc. that only transfer a portion of production to their owners
without adding to it, you will not be able to say anything informative on the subject of economics.
with the progress of the joint-stock company, it now means merely holding ownership interests, or 'shares' in such joint-stock companies.
That you imagine this difference to be significant is the measure of your lack of understanding.
The matter of inherited wealth was mentioned. If one inherits say $10,000,000, and they earn a measly average return of 2%, that amounts to a $200,000 a year income at the year of their birth. Thanks to compound interests, assuming they fail to spend each and every penny of that income, the amount of wealth will increase (at an exponential rate).
You again
refuse to distinguish between $10M
earning $200K/yr by increasing production by $1M/yr through investment in buildings and equipment and $10M merely
taking $200K/yr by being legally entitled to do so through owning land, bank shares, IP monopolies, etc.
You REFUSE to know the fact that the relevant difference is not between an inherited $10M and $10M obtained by a first-generation entrepreneur, but between $10M that represents the
cost of
ENHANCING production by providing useful buildings and equipment that would not otherwise have been available, and the
VALUE of being legally entitled to
TAKE a portion of production
WITHOUT contributing anything to enhance it, but just
threatening to withhold what
would otherwise have been available.
Workers more often experience compound interest the other way, e.g. through the mechanisms of debt, which operate in the same fashion as 'returns on capital', but move in the other direction. Thus, workers become 'bound' by their debts, and they must work ever smarter and/or harder merely in an effort to keep up with debt repayments.
No, that's not it at all. Workers have to pay debt interest because that is the cost of getting permission from banksters to use the debt money the banksters are privileged to create. If the productive don't borrow the money themselves, their employers or governments have to do it, and the productive are on the hook for the interest either way.
Is debt a matter of choice? Perhaps there is no greater necessary implement than a roof over one's head, and the system is designed to promote a state of debt bondage in return for this necessary implement. A tremendous amount of sales effort/expense is outlaid on the promotion of the assuming by workers of various forms of debt.
The system is designed to give banksters interest for permission to use the debt money they are privileged to issue. It doesn't matter who the borrower is, the productive have to pay the interest.
Capitalism has nothing to do with rewarding those who work hard. Capitalism has everything to do with rewarding those who own capital (that's why it is called 'capitalism').
Not capital. PRIVILEGE.
Even the small business person which employs workers is at most a proto-capitalist, with but a measly capital holding of their own (and likely with much debt, to go along with it).
It has nothing to do with how much they own, but whether it is actual capital -- buildings, equipment, etc. -- or
privilege. The firm that owns $10M in equipment but not the land under its premises will typically struggle to be profitable, while the firm that ONLY owns $1M worth of land, and produces nothing whatever, will reliably make profits year after year.