Capitalism v. Socialism

There are at least two ways to interpret Americans Aged 18-29 Have A More Favorable Response To Socialism Than To Capitalism. One is that the young are inclined toward socialism and as they age they will become more capitalist. The other is that capitalism is on it’s way out and as the current capitalist age out socialism is inevitable.

I’m inclined to believe the first hypothesis is more likely to be true than the latter. One of the reasons is that young socialists have been predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism for decades if not longer. Here is one example:

In the last week of May 1968, a rallying call to the working class to take political power into their hands would have tolled the death knell of capitalism on a world scale.

In rural Idaho at the time, and a bit too young, I was too far removed from ground zero of the socialist movements of the 1960s. But I know people who were near the center of those times and places. They too believed within a few decades capitalism would be dead and buried.

I won’t deny that capitalism is weaker and is more likely to be crushed now than at any other time in the last 50 years but it is far stronger than it’s detracts of the 1960s thought it would be at this time. Many of those sympathetic to socialism at that time became more capitalist as they grew older.

Perhaps socialism will temporarily bury capitalism in the next few years or perhaps decades. But I believe the young will continue to mature and become more capitalist as they age. Socialism will succeed only because we grant them power based on their stated intention rather than based on the fruit they bring. And results versus stated intentions are becoming more and more clear with each victory the socialists make.

It is those stated intentions that are so seductive we can almost taste the sweetness of the candy. The candy that is laced, by it’s very socialist nature, with carcinogens. What the socialists don’t really understand, and why I say any burial of capitalism is temporary, is that as the cancer takes hold and destroys a society it destroys the great mass of the socialist advocates at a faster rate than it does the capitalists. The capitalists will move to protect their “capital” whether it is their tangible wealth or the intellectual and physical skills that made them more productive than the socialists to begin with. As the socialists rot from the cancer of their own making the capitalists will be the ones to recover and rise from the ashes of the civilization the socialists destroyed.

I don’t know the time scale. There are just too many variables. The elections next week, as important as they are, are probably a minor player in the big picture. The economic collapse of Western Europe and perhaps Japan and China will play a major role. Add in the price and availability of oil and the possibility of glass pockmarks replacing the cities of Iran and/or Israel and you have such huge variables that making such predictions is impossible.

But I believe that even if  it has to be resurrected from the ashes capitalism, particularly the right to property and all that derives from that, will rise because it is a natural law recognized and defended by nearly all animals and even our very young. I’ve talked to avowed Marxists and others who looked me directly in the eyes and said, “What’s wrong with socialism?” Their logic is non-existent, their data is cherry-picked, and their arguments are both fragile and brittle.

They can only succeed through deception and force. And at some level they know that too. This is why they have such violent tendencies. This is why they are genocidal. They can only succeed if they can kill off their intellectual competition. But as they run out of places to loot there is a “little problem” waiting for them. Their final, intended, victims are armed.

It is only as we humans go through the process of maturing in the teenage years that our brains turn to mush and advocate for socialism. Most recover but some do not. It is my belief that socialism is now making it’s final push to kill capitalism and although those with mush for brains might actually succeed in the end mush for brains will always lose to superior firepower.

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7 thoughts on “Capitalism v. Socialism

  1. What happened since the 1960s is that capitalism morphed towards socialism by accepting all those rules on enterprise which the gov’t wrote, and socialist governments got used to the capitalist bribes, and learned to relax the rules at the right times to promote “welfare capitalism”.

    A third political force, libertarianism, sprang up to replace pure capitalism with it’s property rights-driven theory, and a fourth force, Marxism, arose to inject pure collectivism back into what used to be socialism.

    The entire process is like watching clouds form and dissipate over the mountains.

  2. I wish we In the Right could/would stop using the term “capitalism”. It’s a Marxian canard, founded in the notion that what we’re about is a system of belief, rather than free markets, and free commerce, which are the natural, self-organizing systems that arise spontaneously when individuals are left in liberty, each to pursue his own enlightened self interest.

    Nor is “socialism” the only evil of the Left. Together, the lot of them all bear a single earmark: they are collectivist in nature and deny the sovereignty of the individual. The rest is just persiflage, allowing leftists to pettifog minor distinctions of no matter or moment, rather than getting to the basic point.

    M

  3. Another thing to remember is that you cannot crush capitalism any more than you can stop gravity from attracting masses. Even in a socialist hellhole, there is capital and it will be traded. The capital can change, but the trading of capital will always take place. Always.

    Your capital may be power. It may be money. It may be sex. It may be food. It could be guns and force.

    And I agree with Mark, it’s more of a free market that benefits society, not Capitalism in and of itself. The freer the markets, the more people can benefit from it. I think the socialism we are seeing exists solely as the byproduct of the inertia of the markets. We’ve built up so much wealth so quickly that the concept of socialism seems viable since there is excess. Since socialism cannot generate excess, eventually it will run out and when order breaks down, we revert right back to capitalism powered by a free market (this is a painful and messy thing, mind you).

    We need a small government much like a football game needs referees – simply there to ensure that the agreed upon rules are followed so that people understand that the effort they put into the system will generally result in a known outcome. What we have now are referees that have already decided which teams / players will win regardless of the effort put in. A game like that will not go on, neither will the roll toward socialism.

    P.S. When you apply socialism to these young people, they instinctively recoil from it. Try telling them they need to give up part of their GPA to students who didn’t study or take their iPad away and give it to someone else. Suddenly, it’s not such a great idea.

  4. “When you apply socialism to these young people, they instinctively recoil from it.”
    That’s because then it ceases to be abstract. It ceases to be somebody else’s stuff, and is about something they value or worked for. This is why the socialist impulse declines with, not age, but work.

  5. I simply think back to when I was a young adult (oh so many years ago). I didn’t care about politics. I cared more about going out, having fun, and building material wealth than who was running for office.

    There is a similar phenomena in South Korea, for example. Kids in College protest all the time, over stupid things (usually as anti-US protests). The parents just shrug their shoulders, and figure they are kids and need to blow off steam. Once they graduate they ae expected to actually go find a job and become a productive member of society. Until then, let them have fun. That’s the thinking anyway. It tends to bear out, as the older generations tend to be more capitalist/conservative from when they were younger.

    The question is, while our kids grow out of it? They tend to “grow up” once they are forced into the marketplace for themselves, and raise families. The issue is, with todays pampered middle/upper middle class spoiled pampered offspring of the hippy generation, will they face reality without clinging to the thought that it’s wrong that someone, somewhere, is out making more money than they are?

  6. Rivrdog, that Morphing is called “Demosclerosis”, where the administration changes parties but the laws linger on, and people learn to work around them in a fashion similar to working around the California AWB via Bullet Buttons and strangely shaped stocks, while the government learns that relaxing the rules at opportune times is a powerful tool for compliance and complicity, particularly when the rules are bent only for one company, not everyone.

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