Natural capitalism vs unnatural socialism posted 10/7/2009 9:49:48 AM | 1 kudo what's this?     report abuse

thenewguy295

Just some thoughts here.

Capitalism has been with us a long, long time. Thousands of years before the Roman stock market there was capitalism which has evolved naturally along with human society.
Socialism in a form has been around too, usually within a family but in their most primitive forms both capitalism and socialism can be mistaken for each other.

Capitalism is people exchanging goods, services or labor with each other for mutual benefit.

Socialism is one person receiving the benefit of the labor of another person without reciprocation. In it's basic form a mother or father caring for their family members could be seen as a form of socialism.

Once we get to the village level though things get harder to define. Is the mother watching the village children or the wet nurse suckling the babies of other's performing a capitalist or socialist act?
Some would say socialist, I say it's capitalist since these women most likely would receive some form of benefit from other members of the village for the services they performed. Of course they wouldn't have bothered to define it at all. It was just what they did to help each other to survive.

Today though we do define these things. It is important for us to do so and to understand the differences as we appear to move towards a socialist society ourselves. We need to remember that outside of the family or small clusters of people, that human societies have evolved naturally as capitalists. Modern socialism is an artificial construction often usually imposed on half it's participants, the ones that do all the work. It is relatively recent, only a century or two old and not proven to work.

Socialism usually fails because those that do the most work receive the least benefit. Capitalism usually works because those that do the most work benefit from it the most. Those that benefit less often only need to work more.

Now at this point someone will pipe up about 'robber barons' and corporate greed but that's not the type of capitalism I am talking about. Those are a type of 'capitalist cancer' an unsustainable variance from healthy capitalism and to an extent they have tended to be self correcting. Unions and labor laws are the result. I could just as easily point out gulags and concentration camps as examples of bad socialism. There, we're even. In their most extreme forms they are hard to tell apart.

But what about those that can't work due to age, injury or mental disability? Well taking care of them is socialist and there is nothing wrong with the system doing it as long as the programs don't encourage those that can work to stop working in order to get benefits. Once that happens we get onto a huge cycle of more and more people receiving benefits and fewer and fewer people working to pay for them. The whole thing will collapse eventually as it must. It is the nature of humans to take advantage of a 'free lunch'. As time goes on it takes more and more intervention to keep the thing going, more and more government oversight to stop the cheating and abuse, more and more tax dollars, more and more....Socialism requires the intervention of government, an outside influence to impose itself on the common person. It's foundation is not sound, it therefore is unnatural and unsustainable as a basis for an economy. It is a defective system, an abusive system that goes against human nature and cannot work.

Capitalism on the other hand, flawed as it is, works because it harnesses the individual human desire to better one's situation and requires no outside help. True it is often inconsistent and subject to abuse (I could argue that those abuses are in fact socialist) but as a system it is sound, it is capable of evolving, it can be repaired or 're-purposed' to meet new requirements, usually by it's participants. If it grows unnaturally it will collapse and reset itself for a fresh start. I don't say it is easy or painless as life is not easy or painless either. It is the natural way for humans to interact with one another on a large scale basis.

We shouldn't be so willing to discard it in favor of a relative newbie of a system, one that has never succeeded.

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