Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to That's called "capitalism", isn't it?

Not really, unless you're a bit simpleminded.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Wealth can be either created, or simply looted from those who have created it. Wealth is created by independent minds, operating in a free society. This is, ideally, capitalism.

Leftists, who tend to have perceptual mentalities, have difficulty in seeing how wealth is created unless it's something simple, like a worker making a bench or a farmer growing corn. This simplistic view underlies most of the philosophy of Marxism. You start throwing abstractions like capitalization of labor to increase productivity, and you start to lose them. Suffice it to say as one example that because of invention, mechanical and otherwise, investment of capital, and intelligence, one farmer today can do what it took hundreds of laborers to do in the distant past. A lot of them slaves.

Multiply this across every field of human endeavor.

On the other hand, looting wealth from the productive for their own purposes is what socialists do. The famous socialist nations of the recent past would not have gotten one tenth as far had they not been able to copy and feed off of the inventions and productivity of the capitalist nations.

The lab experiments in the past century--Korea, Germany, Vietnam, China--comparing the two systems under otherwise identical conditions, would convince any rational person which system is better.

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