 Fri Feb 08, 2008 10:29 am Socialism vs. Capitalism |
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| underdog wrote: | | Jamie (K) wrote: | | underdog wrote: | | capitalism?? also a bad idea, because only the rich can invest with a lot of capital. so the poor will be poorer |
Usually, under capitalism, when the rich invest their capital, the poor get richer. |
really? i don't know much about politics. i would like to hear the reason why the poor would get richer. |
The rich (and not only the rich) invest their capital in various businesses. These businesses make the poor richer in two ways: (1) They learn to provide goods and services cheaper than other businesses do, so they raise poor people's standard of living. (2) They provide new jobs for people, and they order things from suppliers, who also provide jobs to people.
| underdog wrote: | | right now, the only example i can think of is wal*mart, which is a bad one: cheap labour, no benefit, all the wealth is gathered by the boss family......... |
I think you're confusing Wal-Mart with communism, where the government forces people to work and the government takes all the benefits.
Wal-Mart can't force anybody to work for them. Wal-Mart's wages are good enough that people don't refuse to work there. There are enough jobs around in most of the US that people won't work at Wal-Mart if someone is making a better offer. Remember, that the people who work for Wal-Mart are largely retirees or students, in which case they don't rely on the company for their full living, or they're people with very low education and skills, who can't do better anywhere else. So for those people, Wal-Mart employment is a good deal, or else they'd work somewhere else. The average hourly wage at Wal-Mart is almost DOUBLE the minimum wage required by the government, so there are plenty of people in other places working for MUCH less than what Wal-Mart pays. In addition to that, the company gives the workers a discount on their merchandise (which is already cheap). It gives their workers medical insurance, a pension savings plan, and one thing I've never seen at any company, which is a financial education program.
There are many worse places to work than Wal-Mart. One of the reasons people hear that it's so bad is propaganda from labor unions. American labor unions have been shrinking, and they want to be voted in to represent Wal-Mart workers, but the workers always choose not to accept them. The unions are very upset about this, because they see in Wal-Mart a very large number of workers who could be FORCED to belong to the union and pay many millions of dollars in dues to the union. The labor unions almost certainly couldn't provide better pay and benefits to Wal-Mart workers, but they want to get in there, and they try to influence public opinion of Wal-Mart by making it sound like its workers are suffering. But they're not.
Besides this, a lot of companies supply Wal-Mart, and those companies employ workers -- many are in China, but many are also in the United States. So people's financial lives are improved by the company indirectly also.
If capitalism made people poorer, the United States would have the poorest people in the world. Instead, one of the biggest problems of the American "poor" is that they eat too much and get immensely overweight. Most of the people who qualify for public assistance in the United States have their own houses or apartments, at least one car, various toys like computers and DVD players, and of course cell phones. Most people we consider "poor", and whom we're always trying to "lift out of poverty", actually live at the material level of a middle-class person in Eastern Europe. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4106
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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