Does Greed and Avarice Spell the Eventual Demise of Capitalism?

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Even young REPUBLICANS are growing tired of capitalism,

American pollsters say

25 Jun, 2021 14:22

A protester holds up an anarchist symbol flag during a Black Lives Matter protest in Manhattan, New York,

August 1, 2016 © Reuters / Andrew Kelly

Fewer than half of young Americans have a positive view of capitalism, a new poll has found. Even young Republicans are increasingly skeptical – but don’t expect America to go full-on socialist just yet.

An Axios poll published on Friday revealed that in the capitalist US, just 49% of Americans aged 18-to-34 actually support capitalism. And 51% say they have a positive view of socialism.

For several years, polling has found support for socialism rising among Democrats and the young. As a result, Democrats running on explicitly socialist platforms – like Democratic Socialists of America members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) – have translated this discontent into electoral success.

However, the latest poll found that young Republicans, usually tireless advocates for free-market capitalism, have grown sick of the system they’re used to defending. Among Republicans aged 18-to-34, some 66% now have a positive view of capitalism, down from 81% in 2019. But 56% of young Republicans want the government to focus on reducing wealth inequality, up from just 40% two years ago.

Axios puts this rise down to more Americans seeing the “tangible upsides of unprecedented levels of government intervention” during the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, then-President Donald Trump criticized both parties in Congress for agreeing on sending out “ridiculously low” stimulus checks of $600 in December, instead of the $2,000 he pushed for – criticism that would have been alien from a Republican president in recent decades. Equally rarely, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib both agreed with Trump on the issue.

Yet the Right’s shift away from unfettered capitalism has been underway since before the pandemic hit. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched cable news host and an influence on Trump during his tenure in the White House, has backed proposals by Democrats to break up the Silicon Valley tech monopolies, and vocally condemned the “mainstream Republican” focus on the “religion” of “market capitalism.”

“We do not exist to serve markets,” he said in 2019. “Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

Yet most Americans aren’t ready to declare themselves socialists just yet. While a slim majority of young Americans have a favorable view of the term, just 41% across all age groups share this view, and 52% say they have a negative view. Carlson would likely call himself a populist rather than a socialist, and Trump – a self-declared “nationalist” – frequently railed against the socialism practiced in Venezuela, Cuba and the Soviet Union, while passing tax cuts that significantly benefited the rich.

What the poll does reveal, however, is that Republicans might not be able to rely on calling their opponents “socialists” as a blanket pejorative for much longer. Aside from the fact that many Democrats wouldn’t argue with the label, a small but growing number of Republican voters might roll their eyes too.

As I have watched capitalism display its spectacular greed in the past two decades, I have become more and more disgusted. I am not a socialist, but I am old enough to have seen the damage done to too many societies from that. 

Capitalism only works in a society that is ethically determined to be good corporate citizens. These are very hard to find anymore. The amazing greed that caused the 2008 economic crash has not disappeared. Big Pharma is 100% about profits and 0% about health care. As a Canadian, I can't imagine living without full access to medical specialists for everyone. 

I think pharmaceutical research should be done in universities without the help of Big Pharma. Governments should pay for the research and collect a good portion of the dividends on profitable medications. There should also be room for research on medications that may not be highly profitable but may save money and lives in the long run. 

Someone should have done a major study on the effectiveness if Ivermectin last spring, but any such effort was destroyed by Big Pharma's propaganda. I wonder how many medications were ignored or disposed of because it would not make big profits for Big Pharma?

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SWEDISH EX-PRIME MINISTER REBUKES BERNIE: SOCIALISM ONLY DESTROYS

And don't forget the Nordic Paradox!

By Alice Salles

Socialism never stopped enticing young American minds. But the more Democratic Socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez open their mouths, we learn the movement’s most vocal proponents simply ignore socialism’s incompatibility with democracy, as demonstrated by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in A Critique of Interventionism . Sen. Bernie Sanders is one of them.

With the Vermont senator announcing he’s running for president, his past comments defending socialism and socialist countries notorious for their failures become the type of material critics are eager to dissect. Especially because he still calls himself a Democratic Socialist while using Nordic countries as examples of what he defends.

Thankfully, political figures from the very countries the good senator from Vermont calls “socialist” are here to remind him that the ideology is nothing but a trap.

Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994, Carl Bildt, took to Twitter to warn Sanders that socialism is not the key to creating a great society as he and Ocasio-Cortez seem to think.

After old footage showing Sanders and his wife, Jane, praising the Soviet Union for its programs targeting the youth went viral online, Bildt responded by saying “Sanders was lucky to be able to get to the Soviet Union in 1988 and praise all its stunning socialist achievements before the entire system and empire collapsed under the weight of its own spectacular failures.”

To the former prime minister, the damage socialism can cause is still fresh in his memory. After all, he was the first prime minister in 60 years to not subscribe to the ideology. And thanks to him, Sweden’s capital gains taxes were cut to 30 percent and corporate taxes to 28 percent.

Bildt also privatized several state-owned industries, deregulated multiple sectors of the economy, allowed people to invest portions of their pension, and introduced school choice policies, improving the country’s education system.

After Bildt, Sweden, which had completely lost its host of entrepreneurs thanks to business taxes that sometimes exceeded the 100 percent mark, once again flourished. Even as Social Democrat successor Ingvar Carlsson took over.

Seeing the wonderful changes just a few years worth of reform had done, Carlsson kept Bildt’s policies in place. And business start-ups rose nearly 25 percent as a result.

Unfortunately, politicians like Sanders like to use countries like Sweden as examples of how socialism can work.

The same politician who, in the late 1980s, praised breadlines and celebrated the Soviet Union for forcing its youth to dedicate their whole lives to communism, now tells Americans that the so-called “Nordic model” of socialism can and will work in America. And yet, he seems clueless to the fact that the policies he pushes don’t mirror those adopted by the countries he celebrates.

As explained by Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen in 2015, countries like his Denmark “[are] far from [socialist planned economies].”

“Denmark is a market economy,” he added. And as demonstrated by Mises in Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow , there’s “no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.”

In other words, to claim the successes of Nordic countries are due to socialism is nothing but a lie.

As the Acton Institute pointed out, Sanders’ ideology, the same ideology upheld by Ocasio-Cortez and countless others who are now legislating in Washington, D.C., is about putting statism before freedom.

In order to apply the policies they push, we would have to relinquish complete control over our lives, allowing the state to squelch artistic expression, private initiative, and destroy any incentive left compelling people to serve each other better and more efficiently.

Is that the world we want to live in?

These Nordic countries that are the most 'progressive' in the world, the most socialist, the most feminist, have one huge problem that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez don't talk about. The have the highest ratios of spousal abuse in the western world. This is called the Nordic Paradox because socialists can't figure out why it is happening. There is so much socialists don't understand.

Just When You Thought the World Couldn't Get Much Stranger...

'Losers with women' stage anti-Christmas rally

BAH, HUMBUG!  Members of a group of men calling themselves “Losers with Women” march as they shout anti-Christmas slogans at Shibuya shopping district in Tokyo. AFP PHOTO
BAH, HUMBUG!

Japan - Anti-Christmas protesters calling themselves “Losers with Women” marched through Tokyo’s streets on Saturday, bashing the coming holiday as a capitalist ploy that also discriminates against singletons.

The group of about 20—part of the communist-inspired group that routinely protests Western holidays—marched under angry banners that read “Smash Christmas!” in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, where couples and families strolled for holiday shopping.

The scrooges—mostly single men—said they were against capitalism and were opposed to the commercialization of Christmas.

“In this world, money is extracted from people in love, and happy people support capitalism,” said the head of the organization, formally called Kakumeiteki Hi-mote Domei, or the Revolutionary Losers’ League.

“Christmas is the most symbolic event for this,” he added.

Shibuya district, Tokyo

The man, who identified himself only by the pseudonym MarkWater, said the rally was also in support of unloved men.

“Unpopular men, who don’t have a girlfriend or are not married, are overly discriminated. We want to break this barrier,” he told Agence France-Presse amid the shouting protesters.

In Japan, Christmas is not an official holiday and is mostly celebrated informally as a romantic event for couples, while New Year’s Day is an occasion for family reunion.

The Christian population remains small in the Asian country, stores offer special holiday sales and people decorate Christmas trees at home.

The group had held past marches to denounce imported Western holidays, including rallies against Valentine’s Day.

Great idea guys. Merry Christmas!