PPC Emulator for x86

[mdwh2]

Red_Melons wrote:
Capitalism 'works' very well for a small proportion of the world, but it depends on the poverty and misery of the majority to do so. How many men women and children died of starvation and preventable disease today while a handful of people sit on unimaginable wealth?

How exactly has capitalism caused men, women and children to die of starvation? Just because an economical system doesn't help other nations doesn't mean it causes those problems - and communism doesn't really say anything about distributing wealth to other countries.

Agreed that capitalism doesn't distribute wealth equally as a communist society would try to, so you could cite the differences between the rich and poor in a particular country. But if you're talking about 1st versus 3rd world countries, then I don't think this is relevant.

The driving force behind capitalism is not the betterment of mankind, but the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. In the long term that is not sustainable - who will buy the capitalist's products if nobody else has any wealth?

Can you give any evidence that wealth will move into fewer and fewer hands under capitalism?

You yourself give a reason as to why this would not happen - because no one would be able to buy from you.

Historically, most if not all human societies have had an unequal distribution of wealth. Granted, there may be theoretically systems which are better at distributing equally, but I don't think it's true that capitalism is worse than previous systems, nor do I see it is true that capitalism makes people rich by causing other people to go poor.

[mdwh2]

Atheist wrote:
The point is that capitalism, allowd to run its' course becomes a monopoly. This happened many many years ago, and in a technological age (oh, like the one we live in right at this moment) would happen in a shorter and shorter amount of time. Therefore capitalism DOESN'T actually work at all. A system that just STOPS: is hardly a system one would want to use, right?

Firstly, I'm not aware of conclusive evidence that capitalist societies will tend towards a monopoly without government intereference - what happens is very much a matter of debate. It happens in some cases - no one's saying that any capitalist country is perfect - but this doesn't mean that the economy will always go belly-up, and they wouldn't have under a different system.

Secondly, not everyone who advocates capitalism believes that there shouldn't be a government, or government intervention in the market (indeed, with no government, you wouldn't have laws upholding the private ownership of the means of production, which is the very definition of capitalism). Personally I believe that a government should intervene in order to make up for possibile deficiencies in a free market. If this is taken to mean that capitalism is broken, then every system is broken (in that I can conceive of a particular example of it where things would go bad).

Just like it can be argued that there was never a truely communist country, there hasen't been an actual capitalist country either. I would like there to be one, just to prove to all of you that it doesen't work AT ALL.

Yes, exactly - I hate it when people are always allowed to say that the communist countries weren't examples of "true" communist economies, but on the other hand they can pick holes in the US and cite them as examples of capitalism going bad.

However, it seems what you have in mind to what an actual capitalist society is differs from mine. I'd rather keep the anti-trust laws as I said - but I am against the way that governments can often be seen to help make large companies stronger (particularly the messed up copyright and patent laws). That's the reasons why I don't consider the US and other western societies to be the best conceivable example of a capitalist economy.