Consider:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/world-happiest-places-lifestyle-travel-world-happiest.html
Over in Europe, there are countries working fewer hours than Americans, with a much lower unemployment rate, and a much higher per capita GDP. They also have universal health care, longer length of life, and are measurably happier than us! It is ridiculous. Oh, and they've also managed to avoid any wars for the last 50 years, whereas we have been in wars non-stop, always telling ourselves that they were 'necessary' and 'world security' was at risk and 'New York City was about to become a mushroom cloud.' Somehow peace works for Europe, it's only America that's ever under attack. We may as well point out Europe has lower crime than America too.
Of course, this is apples and oranges, right? If America were 100% white like Denmark and Finland, maybe we could compete, right? WRONG. The capitalist system requires we import cheap labor immigrants from abroad. It requires that we live in a diverse society of worker-bee like unintelligent, criminal underclasses. It requires that our borders be open. Directly due to our capitalist economy, our society has always been more diverse than Europe. Starting with our enslavement and importation of blacks, for the sake of cheap labor, and moving all the way to the 1980's when Reagan gave an amnesty to illegal alien hispanics, announcing to latin america that we had an 'olly olly entrance free' policy from here on, Capitalism has directly and necessarily led to a majority minority country.
It's also likely that capitalism has directly led to our invade the world policy. If not for all sorts of corporations that profit off of war, how likely is it that America would always be at war? The rest of the world spends next to nothing on their militaries, but none of them have been invaded or nuked. We, meanwhile, spend over 400 billion dollars a year, and have nothing to show for it accept the smiling faces of military contractors.
Here's a great article on the complete failure of capitalism in America:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-warren/america-without-a-middle_b_377829.html
I'm not really interested in their solutions, I think they're dumb. But I am very interested in the data they provide about how bad things have gotten:
"Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work."
IE: I continue to say we have a 20% unemployment rate, not the 10% unemployment rate the government is reporting. Meanwhile Denmark has a 2% unemployment rate. Why does capitalism have ten times as high an unemployment rate as socialism? I thought capitalism was the best engine for jobs and socialism discouraged work? So much for that sack of lies. The truth is capitalism makes higher profits the more people it can lay off, so in a perfect capitalist system we would have 100% unemployment. Socialism provides job security and therefore Europe has a much lower unemployment rate.
"One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards."
Anyone who is in debt to a credit card is insane. The interest rates are usurious and the late fees just keep piling up. The fact that 1/9 of our people are now basically debt slaves, working every month just to pay off interest on their debts, without ever making a dent in their principle, is inhuman. In fact, it means we now have as high a slavery rate, as we had before slavery was banned in 1865.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm
As you can see, at the time of the civil war, 12.5% of America's population were slaves. 1/9 families 'not able to make their minimum credit card payments,' = 11.1%
The slavers never quit. If they can't enslave blacks, they import Mexicans. If they have to pay a minimum wage, they simply fire everyone. If usury is banned, they just introduce credit cards. When will we learn that the capitalists do not have our best interests in mind? When will we discover that the common good and the bottom line have nothing to do with each other?
Okay, next data point: "One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure."
So basically, if not for people simply living in houses and not making any payments on them, America would currently have a 1/8 homeless rate. I'm not sure what homeless rates usually are, but I have a feeling that even in the dark ages they were higher than 7/8. In fact, I've never really heard of a 'homeless crisis' until the modern age, where families no longer housed everyone in said family regardless of age. By randomly making it shameful for the same family to live in the same house, even though there is still plenty of room, and even though most of the world in no way shares this sense of shame and still does share a roof with their family, we now have 1/8 of our country unable to afford a roof over their heads, and, like usual, in massive debts they can never repay. Where will all these people go? To parents who don't welcome them and don't want them? What parents, anyway? Most families are broken homes, or remarried long ago. Will you really want to move in with a step-dad, a step-mom, and a bunch of step-brothers and step-sisters also fleeing to their parent, because the very idea of parents is long dead in this country?
Next fact: "One in eight Americans is on food stamps."
So basically, if not for the government feeding people directly, 1 in 8 Americans would be starving to death. This from a country that has the most farmland on Earth, and exports billions of dollars of crops all over the world. In fact, we have so much access to food, our government pays dairy farms to slaughter their cows, and pays farmers to leave their fields fallow. We also pay farmers billions to take all of their corn and turn it into expensive, unusably bad oil called 'ethanol' that even the environmentalists despise. So the government is using its left hand to get our country to produce as little food as possible, driving up the cost of food, and using its right hand to give food stamps to all the people who can no longer afford food. What sense does this make? In what world does this make sense? In the capitalist world of course. Because in the capitalist world, it isn't about production, it's about supply vs. demand. Profit comes from marginal return. IE, if you can make more money by producing less of a good and selling it at a higher price, that's what you will do. Only in the capitalist system could America have a food crisis, but of course we've managed it expertly. Just like in the Great Depression, we had starving people right alongside massive crop harvests guarded by people with machine guns to make sure no one stole food they could no longer afford.
"More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month." Good luck. Recent rules passed by George W. Bush have made it virtually impossible to declare bankruptcy and get out of your debts. Of course, if you have the proper connections, whenever your company goes bankrupt you can just get billions of taxpayer dollars from the Government -- like AIG, or GM. For the rest of the 'hoi polloi,' you're just sunk. And of course, supposing people do escape their current debts with a bankrupty, they face the same problems as when they entered bankruptcy. They're probably unemployed, their house foreclosed, with some health cost that far exceeds anything they can pay, and some insurance company determined not to pay for said health problem. It's not like bankruptcy solves the underlying causes of a person's poverty, it's just a symptom of how bad their poverty has become. Capitalism has discovered that the best possible system is where they can get taxpayer bailouts, but none of their customers can ever escape from the insatiable debt collectors on all of their products -- health care, housing, cars, education, and every other basic necessity to simply live in America by.
Next data point: "In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family."
Whatever gains we made in the entire decade of the 00's is now wiped out. We still have not reached the same economic health we had under Clinton in the 90's. For all we know, we never will again. Perhaps this is the start of a permanent decline. How can it be otherwise when Capitalism has bankrupted the entire country while giving trillions of dollars away to the few super-rich?
Next data point: "The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s."
And we aren't talking about some minuscule gain in productivity:
How is it that for decades productivity and wages rose in perfect sychrony, as though an honest day's work netted an honest day's wage? How is it that in the past, people understood that if you made more money per hour for your company, you should also be paid more money per hour by your company? This fascinating logic has ceased to exist in the modern economy. Instead you must work harder for less. And the reason, of course, is our population continues to rise at a staggering speed while our job opportunities have remained flat. If one hundred million people are steamrolled into the country on various H1-B visas and an open borders policy, then companies can demand more from their workers and pay less, or simply show said workers the door. With a 20% unemployment rate, who is going to complain that their wages aren't as high as they are worth? Who is going to demand that they are compensated commensurately to their productivity, when they are fortunate just to have any job at all? Even as this country has been losing jobs all year, another million hispanics have entered our country looking for work. How are you going to stand up to that kind of tidal wave? Of course it's impossible. And so of course, ever since the floodgates opened in 1965, we see these diverging lines that get wider every year. Isn't capitalism grand?
Next data point: "But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance."
Why are people paying twice as much for houses that are no better than the houses of a generation ago? I can think of a few reasons: The extra hundred million Americans forcefully shoved down our throats these last few decades has created a housing crunch compared to the number of people needing to be housed. Furthermore, every time mud people immigrate into your neighborhood, whites are required to move out of their current houses and buy new ones in whiter districts. Since realtors know whites will pay any price to get their children out of hellish schools and high crime neighborhoods where they're liable to get raped or murdered, they can jack up the price of housing while not actually making any better houses. Simply the location of the house, away from the mud people who they intentionally moved in to be your neighbors, to create this exact scenario and reaction, is enough to sell their new houses for mega bucks.
Of course, with housing mortgages doubling in price, everyone is competing with each other not with their salaries (which haven't risen since 1970, and can't possibly buy a house), but by how far they are willing to go into debt. Then, with the entire country in debt, they have to pay another bogus, unearned, unfair amount of money to various bankers with 'adjustable rate mortgage loans' that start at 1% then shoot up to 20% whenever they choose. First they force you to go into debt by artificially creating a housing shortage and driving up prices, then they attach enormous interest rates to them there's no way anyone can repay. And everyone simply has to grin and bear it, because your alternative is to be raped and murdered by the Capitalist's hired thugs, the blacks and browns. It's like a protection racket. Pay interest on your debts, or we'll throw you to the wolves of Detroit and LA, and we wouldn't want that to happen, now would we?
In an all white country, it wouldn't matter where you lived. You could buy a humble house for a few thousand dollars, and it would still be peaceful, clean, quiet, and have a good public school nearby, full of kids that your kids can make friends and fall in love with. It will still be near a good job because business thrives amid industrious, peaceful, clean, smart white people. But capitalists weren't content with that, they wanted us to pay more for a basic good like a roof over our head, and they just couldn't find any other way than genocidal immigration rates. So they decided to genocide us. Now that's a system we can all rally behind. Capitalism is just so slick, so smooth, and its bottom lines are just so fat, what could possibly be the problem?
Next data point: "To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer."
Putting a second parent into the workforce is like Sparta fielding its women to hold their city for one last stand (They did stand, and they defend their city, God bless them, but Sparta's decline was unstoppable by then, and it didn't save them for long). It means you are at the end of your rope. Making women work to afford your bills is not a sign of economic health, it's a sign of economic catastrophe. It used to be that the man of the house could earn plenty for his entire family, and the woman could concentrate on church, charity, kids, gardening, chores, or simply networking and communities. It's not like women sat around doing nothing all day prior to 1970. Everything they were doing has been displaced by their need to work instead. As a result, we have soaring adultery rates (women have never had so much access to men), plummeting birth rates (women have never had so little time to raise kids), soaring divorce rates (women have never had so little reason to stay married, now that they make more than their husbands), and still nothing real to show for it. The economy is no better off, and families still can't pay their bills. The idea that debt could somehow make up for all the things people can't afford is about as sensible as drinking salt water to make up for the fact that you're in a lifeboat and out of water in the middle of the Pacific. Sure, it might taste good for the first few seconds, it might even solve your thirst for the ten minutes or so before the salt strips all its value away from your body -- but in the end you're just poorer than when you started, and in need of even more debt, even more salt water, to reach 'tranquility' again, which will soon revert to an even higher debt, and even higher drink of salt water, for the next round, until you bottom out and the game ends.
Think of it this way. Women are our reserves. If we don't have to commit our reserves to a battle, we shouldn't. The economy should, 90% of the time, hum along under the power of just our men. In the case of a national emergency, like WWII, we can then plug the hole with all of our women. But otherwise, they should be involved in non-economic activities, that help raise our quality of life, while not competing for limited job opportunities and lowering men's wages. These involve festivals, children, housekeeping, family gatherings, tending to aged grannies, whatever. Women were imaginative in the past, they can be imaginative in the future. If you commit your reserves to a battle and then just leave them there, fighting endlessly but incapable of actually overcoming the emergency, you have entered WWI. You are simply hurling troops at unstormable trench lines, losing hundreds of thousands of men a day, and producing absolutely no impact on the larger situation. An economy that sacrifices all the wonderful things women used to do, like, say, have and raise children, so that we'll have another generation of mankind after this one, while producing no gains in family income, is an insane cost-benefit ratio. It is an insane economy. The only people who benefit from it are the employers, the people who get twice the employees at one half the cost, and therefore get yet richer, yet again. Why should the rest of us put up with this? Why are we so eager to fall for this trap? For the same reason sharing a home with your family has become shameful, the media has made the role of housewife and mother shameful. They have spent decades brainwashing women with the utterly ludicrous idea that a woman's honor is in her productivity, career, degrees, etc. That women have breasts and wombs for no reason, and that God put them down on this earth to sell houses and make lipstick commercials.
Capitalism uses the media as a tool to shape society towards things that benefit capitalism. They make glamorous people, people with good looks and are well respected by everyone else in the TV shows/movies/commercials, people you want to emulate because of their obvious high status, endorse capitalism. And in turn, everyone thinks a good life, to be a glamorous person like in the magazines in movies, is to go down the capitalist path. For women, it means living for career instead of family. For consumers, it means buying gadgets they don't need and will never use. For cars, it means buying style over substance. For clothing, it means chasing the seasonal fashions instead of simply owning enough pairs of clothes to go from laundry day to laundry day. ((Oh for the good old days when people had two sets of clothes, sunday clothes and work clothes, and looked better in either of them than the slobs and sluts of today. . .)) The power of television is simply overwhelming to these highly suggestible nincompoops. If something is high status on TV, it must be high status in real life too. So here we are, all drudging away, for the illusion of high status, when high status in the past was free of charge -- a man got it by keeping his word, a woman got it by preserving her virginity and being faithful in marriage, and neither of them had to spend a dime to do it.
Now of course, before anyone will look or think twice about you, you'll need hundreds of thousands of dollars of spectacular consumption -- the house, the car, the furniture, the clothing, the jewelry, blah blah blah. All of it simply to show off to your friends, none of it of any real practical use for yourself. All of it lining the pockets of the capitalists who changed the rules of the game for what status would now be. What fools we were to let them define it! What fools we were to allow a weapon like the TV, that spends more hours with our kids than their own parents, that has more lessons to teach than all our schools, churches, and books combined. . . God what fools we were to let corporations decide the content of our shows! What did we think would happen? We all complain about state controlled media using all of their time simply to promote the State -- but no one ever thought that maybe, just maybe, a corporate controlled media might just use the media to promote consumerism? Is that just too wild a theory? Can only the government ever abuse power? According to libertarians and republicans, yes. According to common sense, which says humans are humans no matter what hat they are currently wearing - no. Stupid, stupid, stupid preachers of freedom. If you want freedom, first kick a hole in your television and never watch another show. Until then, no one should care a whit what you have to say.
Now, it's obvious where socialism has gone wrong. A) It thought that people could somehow better themselves when that is impossible -- only eugenics can better people, people are helpless slaves to their genes, and will only perform at the levels they were born to perform at. All of LBJ's great society programs operate under this flaw. Combining eugenics, ie, control of who gives birth to whom, and who is allowed to immigrate into this country, with measures to help the poor and raise the quality of life for the unfortunate, is necessary to make any headway against our problems. In the 1920's this was understood, but sadly we threw that knowledge away with the advent of jewish Boazian liberalism. We must have it back, and return to the enlightened socialism we had before that stupid detour.
B) Opportunists have turned socialism into their own milk cows, instead of actual aid to the worse off. They divert most of the funding to their own pay checks and barely any of it trickles down to the actual intended recipients. The answer to this is to abolish all current programs, and all social worker jobs, and replace it with a direct citizen's dividend that no one can divert.
C) Socialism was not combined with the idea of virtue. Instead, it was championed by the proponents of vice. In a bizarre turn of events, the people who most wanted to help the poor, thought it would be brilliant and great if the poor all became drunks, druggees, abusive, divorced, illegitimate, criminals, sluts, HIV-positive, gay, transvestite, and so on. Why these socialists thought giving people money, while destroying their quality of life in all other fields, was some great boon to the poor, is beyond my grasp. As a result, poor people are far worse off today than they were in the Middle Ages. Maybe the poor back then didn't get meat except once a year, but at least they had their pride. At least they had their families. At least they had their souls. Today, we have fed the weak and the foolish so many lies, so many delusions, such bad advice, that they are simply self-immolating themselves from the start of their life to the finish, writhing in pain and declaring it ecstasy and freedom. We must restore basic values, basic virtue, to the high and the low. Hypocritically, our richest and smartest members of society are the biggest proponents of sin, and the least likely to indulge in it. That has to stop. There can be nothing more hateful towards our poor, than telling them free love and heroine is the path to success and contentment in life. I don't know who came up with that, I don't know why hippies latched onto it, but it's evil and it must be stopped.
Communism did not control drunkenness, it had a planned economy and rationing instead of a citizen's dividend, and it did not practice eugenics. It is not a good example of socialism. Neither is Nazism, which spent most of its money mobilizing for war and invading other countries. The socialism I'm speaking about has never been implemented. It deserves a shot. It especially deserves a shot, now that capitalism has so obviously failed. If not now, when? How much worse does our current system have to make things, before we try something else? Honestly.
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