Here is a story:
A guy looked at my Corvette the other day and said:
“I wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that sports car cost.”
I replied:
“I am not sure, it fed a lot of families in Bowling Green, Kentucky who built it, it fed the people who make the tires, it fed the people who made the components that went into it, it fed the people in the copper mine who mined the copper for the wires, it fed people in Decatur IL. at Caterpillar who make the trucks that haul the copper ore. It fed the trucking people who hauled it from the plant to the dealer and fed the people working at the dealership and their families. BUT,… I have to admit, I guess I really don’t know how many people it fed.”
That is the difference between capitalism and welfare mentality. When you buy something, you put money in people’s pockets, and give them dignity for their skills.
When you give someone something for nothing, you rob them of their dignity and self worth.
Capitalism is freely giving your money in exchange for something of value.
Socialism is taking your money against your will and shoving something down your throat that you never asked for.
I’ve decided I can’t be politically correct anymore. (I never was, actually)
A story from Tom Nicholson on Facebook.
300k shares, 500k likes, 55k comments.
This story is a “nugget of wisdom” that has effectively hardened the same crappy, wrong, stupid convictions and weak, superficial ideas which are plaguing our collective politics for centuries.
The story is right but it’s not correct. It is right because, well, it is the old adage of teaching someone how to fish instead of giving them fish.
However, it is not correct because:
socialism doesn’t ask why do you spend your money the way you do
but rather
socialism asks what part of your money is 100% yours
People of the world, get this once and for all:
capitalism is an economic model, socialism is a political model, socialism is capitalist and capitalism works with socialism.
No one smart enough and leftist enough literally cares at all about your Corvette or your Jet or your four beach houses or your gold plated smart watches. They’re your well spent, hard earned cash, transformed into comfort.
Therefore the question is:
are you giving back?
And to that question there are two opposing answers: the antisocial answer and the social answer.
The antisocial answer (or sociopathic) is that everything is owned in its entirety. This answer justifies meticulous interpretation and cunning use of the law to give back as little as mathematically possible. Hide your money, the welfare queens are out to get them.
The social answer is that most of acquired wealth is owed to the society that its owner belongs to. The degree of debt varies from welfare states to social security states. This answer justifies flattening discrepancies between people by taxing success. No man is an island is the law and no one, independent of the person, is considered to be able to succeed on their own.
None of the answers are completely right nor completely correct. There are people who, given specific privilege and birth circumstances, make it on their own. No self made man ever makes it on their own. Only those born rich have this potential specifically because they pay their way. The poor who ascend socially have more debt to society than the born rich who stay rich. The born rich who become even richer are also more in debt to society than those rich people whose success simply keeps them in their bracket.
We must understand that capitalism is an economic model that favours capital owners over value producers, and socialism is a political model that favours the society over the individual. They are very compatible.
Capitalism does not discuss so much welfare and taxation. The azimuth of capitalism is to not have stale capital. And most of the neoliberal champions, who are the real opposition to socialism, use this argument of capitalism as being the true and tested force of progress, while denying the core of the capitalist model by hiding money in Panama and fencing wealth in all imaginable ways: hoarded wealth is stale capital. They don’t give back to society neither by consumption, nor by taxation.
Most hard core capitalists are risk adverse. They are also tax adverse. They also wand small government. These three factors combined are the death of human potential in societies.
Wealth gets hoarded and siloed. The silo begets inequality, Inequality requires power to be preserved. The hoarding begets scarcity. Scarcity becomes the means of preserving the power.
Dead easy.
Dead easy way to die as a civilisation.
The goal of every society should be the same as the larger goal of life itself: resilience. However, because of the desperation involved in hoarding and siloing, there is a specific set of propaganda items designed to discourage divergent opinion and action and which invented a haze of goals, the misdirection of humanity.
Free things are for the poor
Propaganda item number one, and basically the biggest enemy of the basic income movement, claims that only the really poor should be given free things. The main argument is that free things kill competition and business opportunity by dismantling markets.
Yet, the truth is free sustainable things should be the goal of any state for its people, because free things are giving humans back their time. With that new found time there is the greater chance, statistically speaking, to push human potential into action at a faster speed than the crawling drag of today.
Succumbing to work and chores, so that one can pay for the chance at existing, is a big factor holding us back as a species.
Welfare is for the lazy
Propaganda item number two is just evil. Basically the real goal of welfare is to allow humans to do what they do best: fail. Simply put, the rich have way more slack when they take on fail prone activities, while the poor mostly need to resume to safe scripts prescribed by the rich.
Welfare is a cushion to land on when you follow your dreams. Even if we had welfare queens, which we don’t, it doesn’t matter because most people do not settle with the bare minimum, otherwise there’d be no great migration to fill the Earth with our genome.
Sharing is for the weak
The deification of ownership and the glorifying of property are the two tricks played on the masses in the bloody transition from middle age political systems to modern age political institutions.
Property: a haze of security protecting the average human’s trinkets equally ferocious as the privileged’s fortunes.
There is a fake great equaliser at work here. For example, there are many who praised the markets shaped by technology as a bridge between wealth groups. For example both rich kids and average, middle class, kids have iPhones. But, alas, it’s a thought trap so easy to fall into. In class terms what matters is the personal value of the iPhone, not the mere possession of it.
The real difference in class is always in regard to common value, what is generally disposable and easy to obtain. The joy of richness is in the abundance of generally available items, much more than in the select luxury items. Luxury is not a member of class definition.
Luxury is an intra-class differentiator and hence there is luxury among the poor, just as it is luxury among the ultra rich.
Equality is a moniker for mediocrity
There can be only one. Corporate tigers, young wolves and alpha dogs are running this joint. Leadership this, leadership that. We started on this doubtful “everybody is born equal” idea, and have been half assed about it ever since. What hoarders care for is differentiation, and they are now selling this hard to everyone else as a way to justify their egotistic selves.
Equality is not a given, it is an ideal. Equality is not a right, it is a privilege. We need to fight to obtain equality and then fight to preserve it.
Great societies are built on top of the faulty human nature in order to bring it above itself.