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Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System?

JTM

"Just in case"
Premium Member
From: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/rrpope/rrpopepwd/articles/socvcap.html

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]C. Bradley Thompson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashland University and Coordinator of Publications and Special Programs at the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs.[/FONT]

Noteworthy clips:

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Socialism is the social system which institutionalizes envy and self-sacrifice: It is the social system which uses compulsion and the organized violence of the State to expropriate wealth from the producer class for its redistribution to the parasitical class.

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[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Capitalism is the only just system because the sole criterion that determines the value of thing exchanged is the free, voluntary, universal judgement of the consumer. Coercion and fraud are anathema to the free-market system.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Welfare, regulations, taxes, tariffs, minimum-wage laws are all immoral because they use the coercive power of the state to organize human choice and action; they're immoral because they inhibit or deny the freedom to choose how we live our lives; they're immoral because they deny our right to live as autonomous moral agents; and they're immoral because they deny our essential humanity. If you think this is hyperbole, stop paying your taxes for a year or two and see what happens.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The requirements for success in a free society demand that ordinary citizens order their lives in accordance with certain virtues--namely, rationality, independence, industriousness, prudence, frugality, etc. In a free capitalist society individuals must choose for themselves how they will order their lives and the values they will pursue. Under socialism, most of life's decisions are made for you.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]According to socialist doctrine, there is a limited amount of wealth in the world that must be divided equally between all citizens. One person's gain under such a system is another's loss.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]According to the capitalist teaching, wealth has an unlimited growth potential and the fruits of one's labor should be retained in whole by the producer. But unlike socialism, one person's gain is everybody's gain in the capitalist system. Wealth is distributed unequally but the ship of wealth rises for everyone.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As a consequence of our sixty-year experiment with a mixed economy and the welfare state, America has created two new classes of citizens. The first is a debased class of dependents whose means of survival is contingent upon the forced expropriation of wealth from working citizens by a professional class of government social planners. The forgotten man and woman in all of this is the quiet, hardworking, law-abiding, taxpaying citizen who minds his or her own business but is forced to work for the government and their serfs.[/FONT]
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drapetomaniac

Premium Member
Premium Member
While every ox and horse can find work, and is worth being fed, it is not always so with man. To be employed, to have a chance to work, at anything like fair wages, becomes the great engrossing object of a man's life.

The capitalist can live without employing the laborer, and discharges him whenever that labor ceases to be profitable. At the moment when the weather is most inclement; provisions dearest, and rents highest, he turns him oft' to starve.

If the day-laborer is taken sick, his wages stop. When old, he has no pension to retire upon. His children cannot be sent to school for before their bones are hardened they must get to work lest they starve. The man, strong and able-bodied, works for a shilling or two a day; and the woman, shivering over her little pan of coals; when the mercury drops far below zero, after her hungry children have wailed themselves to sleep, sews by the dim light of her lonely candle, for a bare pittance, selling her life to him who bargained only for the work of her needle.

Fathers and mothers slay their children, to have the burial-fees, that with the price of one child's life they may continue life in those that survive. Little girls with bare feet sweep the street crossings, when the winter wind pinches t.hem, and beg piteously for pennies of those who wear warm furs. Children grow up in squalid misery and brutal ignorance; want compels virgin and wife to prostitute themselves; women starve and freeze, and lean up against the walls of workhouses, like bundles of foul rags, all night long, and night after night, when the old rain falls, and there chances to be no room for them within; and hundreds of families are crowded into a single building, rife with horrors and teeming ,with foul air and pestilence; where men, women, an,l children huddle together in their filth; all ages and all colors sleeping indiscriminately together; while, in a great, free, Republican State, in the full vigor of its youth and strength, one person in every aeventeen is a pauper receiving charity.

--Albert Pike - Morals and Dogma
 

JTM

"Just in case"
Premium Member
while, in a great, free, Republican State, in the full vigor of its youth and strength, one person in every aeventeen is a pauper receiving charity.

hrm?
 

JTM

"Just in case"
Premium Member
oh, i've seen "the corporation" and agree. it's this manipulation of a mixed economy that allowed it, though. not capitalism.
 

drapetomaniac

Premium Member
Premium Member
Neither system has an inherent ethical system built in. You need moderation in either - and I think the "socialist urges" in this country are a reaction to the hyper-capitalism which has been permitted.

A lot of the "leftists" elected in Latin America in the past decade are heads of businesses or have economics degrees, experience or backgrounds. They come with moderation built in.

I use to debate with a co-worker on a regular basis and in many instances he would end with "but everyone does it" or "that's how businesses run" or "its legal." He was right, but I finally realized we were discussing ethical issues and capitalism isn't a morality in its own. You had to include it. And those were the situations we were discussing, where morality fell by the wayside and the legalistic application of the process became its own defense.

Because it was, it was good.
 

HKTidwell

Premium Member
Hey ya'll are missing the "New" type of government. It is called Market Socialist, Geez not sure how many times you can rebrand the same screwed up mentality before people get tired of buying into the same failed Socialism of yesteryear.

By the way the reason we have the capitalism that we do is due to the socialist influence. I'll use a recent example, bank bailout. If a business is greedy and does bad business practices then they should fail and so should the people backing them. Sorry guys nobody is to big to fail, the failures of people, companies, etc allow for new growth, new ideas, and better innovation.
 

drapetomaniac

Premium Member
Premium Member
I think people are too big to fail - but that's because they violate the anti-trust measures of capitalism.

Anyone so big they can cripple the economy when they fail is a monopoly or too close to being one.
 

JTM

"Just in case"
Premium Member
Neither system has an inherent ethical system built in. You need moderation in either - and I think the "socialist urges" in this country are a reaction to the hyper-capitalism which has been permitted.

A lot of the "leftists" elected in Latin America in the past decade are heads of businesses or have economics degrees, experience or backgrounds. They come with moderation built in.

I use to debate with a co-worker on a regular basis and in many instances he would end with "but everyone does it" or "that's how businesses run" or "its legal." He was right, but I finally realized we were discussing ethical issues and capitalism isn't a morality in its own. You had to include it. And those were the situations we were discussing, where morality fell by the wayside and the legalistic application of the process became its own defense.

Because it was, it was good.
what this article is claiming (and provides extensive argument for) is that the moderation is inherent in capitalism.
 
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