:: No, if you give Stoller's posts another look he makes a good case that the economically straitened circumstances engendered by capitalism make teh working class less charitablke and idealistic. If your statement is true, then why is it that the relatively wealthy American workers are relatively un-socialist, while the much poorer workers in places like India are much more favorable to communism.Why is the legend of Robin Hood popular? Try to add a little realism to your posts, Nik. Americans, in general are the most generous people on this here planet.
:: Students in America are far less favorable to revolution than students in places like France, Mexico and Korea. Much as conservatives like to talk about college campuses beinga hotbed of radicalism, have you looked at polls recently? some shocking number of students are conservative.
Not shocking - encouraging because the left is actually dying.
::Wealth is created by those who dig stuff out of the ground and make it into something useful.
:: There is, however, a limit to what you can do; you can't create natural resources out of whole cloth, nor can you substitute indefinitely.
No, but you can use your God given talents to further the utility of these resources instead of wasting them on thoughts of socialist revolution. You know, we can make cars that get 120 mpg. That stretches fossil fuels past 10 times the utiliity they had in the 1950's!
: :Capitalism motivates people to do that.
: No, because if you know that whatever you make is going to go to the profit of your employer, you are not going to be motivated to work hard- why SHOUDL you work to line teh bosses' pockets? To say that capitalism motivates, you would nbeed to run a controlled comparison with another system practiced under teh same circumstances, enedless to say that hasn;t been done.
Explain America or eat dust, Nik. What the above paragraph has in common with observed fact, I'll never know. Only a true socialist engineer would talk of controlled experiments when discussing economics. Are you some kind of mad scientist? These are people we are talking about.
: 'Pillage'? Nice unbiased terminology here, isn't it?
Pillage it is. Socialism can't create wealth. It can only steal it and and destroy the system that generated it. You aren't going to argue that capitalism creates vast wealth and that wealth affects the vast percentage of the population positively, are you?
:: In fact, profit itself is a form of pillage, because it's extracting a portion of teh workers' fair share from those who deserve it. Socialism is merely giving people what they deserve.
You can only characterize things thusly when you have reworked a morality system to accomodate your viewpoint. The word "pillage" won't be applied to capitalists by any reasonable segment of any capitalist society. Good luck convincing the masses with that tactic.
::Problem is, stuff stops getting dug out of the ground under socialism and economic systems collapse when that happens.
: But both self-interest and altruism are part of any highly evolved species, humanity included. If there was no possibility of humans being altruistic, then what was the point of Christianity promoting an ethic of brotherhood.
The early church suffered dire persecution (we are talking death and torture) and bonded closely as a result. The examples of biblical collectivism do not serve a model for world governance. It takes determined ignorance to pursue this tactic as well.
Stuart Gort
None.
