Capitalism vs. Communism

[subwaylover#1]

Bill Gates had many advantages growing up, that others did not have, including a lot of money. He also had connections...

Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully

"There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it."
-- conventional wisdom in Italy
William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.
In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.


Lesson 2: Choose Your Parents Carefully

"A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."
William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC.
Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kiRAB there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.

Note: Recall that in the 1980s we venerated Donald Trump and studied his "art of the deal". If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited from his father and put it all into mutual funRAB, you'd never have had to suffer through one of his books. But he'd be just about as rich today.

http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

[0wn3d4life]

In addition to explaining speciation, evolutionary theory explains the behavior of organisms and their forms of social organization. Darwin wrote about this in "Descent of Man" but the ideas were distorted by the Social Darwinists, and consequently evolutionary theory fell out of favor in explaining human behavior until the 1970s.

In the 1970s world-renowned biologist, E.O. Wilson, who had spent much of his career studying ants wrote "Sociobiology" which was an elaboration of Darwin and attempted to explain human society as well as animal society. An increasing number of scholars have taken the same approach in studying humans. Wislon been called the "New Darwin" but not very many people know about him or this tradition of research because nobody likes evolutionary explanations of human behavior. For obvious reasons the Left hates it, but the Religious Right hates it too, so this has made it very difficult to get people informed on these issues.

Since evolutionary theory claims to be a comprehensive theory of speciation, behavior, and social organization, hyptheses can be derived from it concerning control of the means of production. I don't recall having read any hypotheses on this, but if they haven't been done, they will be.


They are not opposites if by "democracy" you mean things like everyone gets a vote, or majority rule, or things like that, but if you mean equal power among members of the organization, then hierarchy and democracy are opposed because hierarchy means unequal distribution of power among members.

[Sharon L]

Two cornerstones of capitalism are private property and competition. Neither of these were permitted by the Soviets. The Soviets locked up people who engaged in private business, and they and their sympathizers would have laughed at any attempt to use the word "capitalism" in any way to describe their system. They were sworn enemies to private property and markets and competition.

Many instances prove that communist ideology made operative on the ground always creates a nightmare. Yes, they have not followed precisely the pure ideology, and history shows it will never be done. People continue to make rationalizations for this failed ideology and its consequent social system.

You may have industrialism in mind when you say the Soviets were really capitalists. They were able to build up some heavy industry under communism, but it did not enrich the average person in the slightest. And it neeRAB to be re-emphasized that wherever coomunist ideology has won over, human rights have gone out the window. Communist ideology has turned out to be very cozy with totalitarianism.

Of course cooperation is necessary to ANY society. For capitalism to work, it must have people playing within the rules. Sports are a good analogy. If participants break all the rules in the competition, you don't have a game, you have chaos. It is inaccurate to portray members of capitalist societies as not cooperative with each other. No social system is better at fostering ability and facilitating the realization of one's potential than a capitalist society, and why? Because ability, skills, and excellence is what a capitalist system is searching for. A communist society aims at sameness--how would this maximize the potential of every person?

By cooperation, you may mean help that may not be in one's direct self-interest; capitalist societies have often left these activities to institutions which do not use coercion and force and monopolize like government, and they generally are more effective at these activities than a coercive institution which first developed in order to use collective violence against other tribes and its own members.

[vsprincess]

Lesson #3 Make your own opportunities.
Tom Monaghan

[kyle the fun kidd]

You can compete with yourself with the co-operation of others. That co-operation of others better facilitates competing with yourself.

In aggressive competition our time and energy is spent trying to frustrate the aims of others, and the resources they bring, to make sure they lose. If a mutual benefit happens, that is not the main aim of aggressive competition. A small number of winners, wins.

Rules set by co-operation however, do set up any terms for competition. So even when we compete, co-operation is usually involved to some extent.

[Dave o]

Ah, well, then I guess we can agree that Marxism and sociobiology are two conflicting theories.



that would be interesting to read.




I haven`t read anything about equal distribution of power. As far as I know, Marx argued that everyone should have equal political power (democracy, 1 man-1 vote) and equal economic power (nobody owned the means of others production)

[pablood92]

They didn't get rid of the market, it was just not a private business or market. There was competition in different ways. Such as workers having to produce for five year plans, competing against one another to produce and accumulate more, as the bereaucrat managers kept setting the bar higher. See "atomization of the working class" at this link...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/clif...tecap/ch01.htm

This system just wasn't communism, although it was also not private capitalism. That link should give a detailed explantion, of the problems I've previously outlined. The bureaucrats were managers, and workers had few controls or rights.



If you are talking about the former USSR they certainly have not.



That's not what I was doing when it comes to communism.



None of that is true, because we are not talking about communism.



No, not sameness. Free and equal access and control of the means of production and to all that is produced, based on one's own unique abilities and interests and neeRAB. People will still have talent. Capitalist money is just an abstraction that cannot induce talent.



I question the effectiveness of charities to care for the victims of the destructive side of captialist competition. I don't believe in institutions which use coercion and violence whatever their form.

[KoleKyla]

They avoided starvation after the Native Americans taught them how to cultivate corn and squash.

[jordanm]

Historical experience gives us every reason to think that communist ideology is not a workable system. Every group that claimed to believe it and won the control to implement their version of it creating something that turned out to be very harmful to the people under it. History also shows over and over that, as Michels wrote, there is an iron law of oligarchy in any and all type of organizations of any size. The ordinary members of the organizations will end up not controlling the organization; without exception control enRAB up primarily in the hanRAB of the managers. All human experience leaRAB to Michel's empirically drawn conclusion. Even in hunter-gatherer societies made up of only only a few dozen people with very few material possessions, the banRAB were run by the elder males. And in modern day societies of tens of millions of people, Michel's law of oligarchy is even more true.

The answer to this thread question is just as obvious as if it had been, "Capitalism vs. Fascism--which is the better system?"

[VampireMike]

I do not disagree that capitalism produces waste and abuse. The only thing worse is everything else. The natural tendency of so many to "slack off" when someone more talented is on top of things is inescapable. I wish it were different but there you have it.