Originally Posted by
seattle smitty
"Religious people all think God is on their side. Rich people know He is."
In the USA, Democrats/liberals/Leftists all point out how the rich, corporate officers, bankers, Wall Street traders, globalists, and other members of the (Republican and conservative) political/economic Establishment are devoted to working the system to line their own pockets in ways no ordinary citizen can do. Then they tell us about all the unfortunates at the bottom of society, poor through misfortunes of various sorts, who deserve any and all welfare they get, and should get more still.
Then there are the Republicans/conservatives/Rightists who condemn the poor as mostly being too lazy to do honest work, preferring to steal and to cheat the welfare system to support their drug habits and their stupidity and sloth. Meanwhile, they ask us to believe that the people at the top of corporate America are busy creating jobs for the rest of us while our (liberal and Democratic) government Establishment taxes and regulates them excessively.
These are the two political parties "representing" us. Seems to me their philosophies are each simultaneously astute . . . and clueless.
I took an introductory Economics class in school with a clever prof. When his lectures got to comparing economic systems, he started with Communism. He laid out a beautiful description of hard working citizens laboring for the mutual benefit of all, with no fat cats raking off all the profits, and ordinary people living prosperous, cooperative, fulfilling lives. He ended by saying to the big lecture hall full of students, "Now I submit to you that this is the best of all possible worlds!"
The next day, he launched into a similarly detailed exposition on Socialism, then on (economic) Fascism, and finally on Adam Smith's capitalism. In each case he was laying out the theories of the best advocates for each of the four economic philosophies, and at the end of each he would say, "I submit to you that this is the best of all possible worlds!"
And as far as it went, he was justified in saying that every time. If any economic system actually worked out in practice as it was supposed to work in theory, we would be delighted to live under that system.
Alas, they never do. Every one of these systems gets seriously warped out of shape, subverted (to my thinking) by roughly the same class of sharp, energetic, self-assured, self-aggrandizing, rather ruthless men who, though they usually see themselves as patriots, always rise to power and use it for the benefit of themselves and others of their kind. The early dreams of a classless communist society never had a chance against the men who took control. We who hold out hope for capitalism tell each other that communism was a nice idea, maybe the sort of system Jesus of Nazareth might have approved of with it's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," but that it never could have worked out in practice. We point to the self-adjusting nature of Adam Smith's system as the only method that can work in actual practice, given the self-centeredness and imperfectability of actual human beings. Yet even capitalism has been twisted badly by an establishment of the same men who twisted every other economic system for their own benefit. Crony capitalism has turned out to be far from the best of all possible worlds.
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