Tag: capitalism

Capitalist Raider Culture or Why Geography Matters

Viking Reenactors - Iceland.

It’s easy to look at what happened between the so-called Western nations and the rest of the world and call it racism.  But what if the problem with white people isn’t racial, but geographic?

These speculations began while I was reading a Geography textbook from 1920 — that’s 100 years ago this year.  Reading about the land and resources of people around the world is interesting in and of itself — Vermont was a wood state, Maryland grew a lot of strawberries, that sort of thing.  But where it got especially interesting was when it came to the differences between peoples of foreign lands.  

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Thoughts on Coronavirus Relief

Wu Shaoxiang Walking Wealth 2009

Natural Law

There’s been an emergence in Trump’s most recent rhetoric of belief in a natural law which states something like the following:

The rich deserve to get more because they have more.

The poor deserve to get less because they have less.

The rich stay rich; the poor stay poor.

This is the way things are supposed to be.

So simple.

But is it true?

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Universal Debt Amnesty — a Solution to Capitalist Endgame?

Bank Run American Union_Bank

Originally written: 7/14/2011

There is much I don’t understand about the world’s economic crisis but what I do get is that everyone owes everyone else and no one has the money to pay it back. That is of course an overstatement, but when you look at it, it does seem that a lot of people are broke — the governments of the world are broke, large swaths of their citizens are broke, non-profits are struggling, and many businesses are hanging by a thread.

Universally, it seems, we are simply out of money. We owe more than we make and we can’t pay our bills. Or at least, not all of them.

The solution to this problem, if the United States Government is any example, is to borrow more money. That’s easy for them to say — they’re the United States Government. Oddly enough, their bond-rating is better if they raise the debt limit and borrow more than if they don’t. I guess being in debt up to your ears to the Chinese is a good thing.

I realize that everything the world over is connected and that if a check bounces in Cinncinnati, it can take out a whole franchise in Taiwan. Or maybe it isn’t that delicate or complicated. Consider this: debt default or no debt default, there will still be 300 million living people in this country, who will still want to get up, breath, eat, work, laugh, and sleep through the night, whether the U.S. raises the debt limit or not.

Which brings me to the solution: universal debt amnesty. Read More

The Debate on Socialism

I ran into a friend the other day, and the first words out of his mouth were “Since when did the Democratic party become Socialist?” My short answer was — they haven’t. They’re they same old corporatist, center-right party they’ve been for years. It’s just that Republicans, seizing on the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and a few others, have decided that socialism is the Democrats’ Achilles heel and so they’re making a big issue of it. Oddly enough, however, this could turn out to be a good thing. By drawing attention to it, they’ve opened a debate that’s been dormant for decades. Read More

The Limits Of Capitalism

1/22/2010

My argument, such as it is, is that Capitalism may be good at providing hefty benefits to the few, it’s no good at providing satisfying lives to the many.  And yet it dominates the lives of people worldwide, determining what work we will be able to do, how much we will be able to afford, what things will cost, and by extension, what kind of life we will be able to make for ourselves.  Capitalism is like Calvinism — it causes many things to be predestined.

As the moneys trickling down to the masses dwindles, we’re finding just how pervasive Capitalism is.  Everything we do is predicated on money and since the rules that govern money in America are predicated on Capitalism, we the people are forced to apply Capitalist principles in our lives, whether they really work for us or not.  Read More

What Is Capitalism?

Originally posted on iBrattleboro.com 10/28/2008

When I was ten, I borrowed a book from the School library called Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, which purported to explain the various economic systems to ten year olds.  My parents made me take it back because they said little children should not be reading about dangerous ideas like communism.  I showed them — in my senior year of high school, I wrote a term paper on The Communist Manifesto.

Despite this early interest in economics, I realized recently that I have almost no idea what capitalism really is, despite the fact that I use the word all the time.  So this essay is an effort to learn. Read More