Capitalism is lie

I have seen some friends posting about capitalism and socialism and I feel compelled to explain what I understand about capitalism, first off that it is a lie, or at least that we tend to buy into it because of a lie, the lie being that everyone can succeed and be rich.This is not true, at least, not the way many people believe. It is true that capitalism is a system that give the everyone the chance to succeed and be rich, but it is not true that everybody will be able to achieve it at the same time. Capitalism is dependent on the same structure as every other system in the world, for the top 1% to have everything at the expense of the other 99%. This is because wealth is a relative measure, in order to have rich, there must be poor, in order for anyone to succeed in this structure they must do it at the expense of others, this is an unavoidable truth. The only exception is socialism, but we are generally afraid of socialism because the prime example of socialism we have to measure the system by is communism which in pratice has been communist dictatorships which are ultimately capitalism skewed to an extreme. Communism fails because it is not pure socialism as it was menat to be but an extreme monarchy in which on person gets everything and everyone else gets to share what is left equally, and that's not much, and they excuse it because they claim they desrerve it for the responsibility of taking care of everybody else. This stems from an innate, natural problem with any social strucure, but more on that later, first let me explain socialism.

Socialism is actually the idea that resources are allocated equally among everyone. This is a good idea, it takes care of everybody, if it's done right. The reason it doesn't seem to work, the reason we're all afraid of this is, if we do the right thing and take care of everybody, there will be no more rich. This is bad news for rich people and anyone who aspires to be rich. In socialism, we need to be responsible enough to make sure that our resources first go to important things like healthcare and food and housing for anyone and everyone who may need it, including those who may not be able to afford it under capitalist circumstances. This would mean using tax money to benefit the poor, and that money will probably come from the rich. The rich hate this because they work hard for their money and they don't want it taken by free loaders. They explain this to the rest of us and make us feel like it's not in our best interests because there is no point in working hard if your money is going to people who don't work. There are a few flaws with this argument that many do not think about, they just take the "I work hard for my money and I don't want it going to free loaders" argument at face value. The truth is, socialism generally seeks to make sure everyone does their fair share, run properly it does not support freeloaders, it provides for people who can not provide for themselves for legitimate reasons and makes sure the rest of us work for the greater good. Capitalism on the other hand rewards entrepreneurs. This sounds good because any of us can be entrepreneurs, that is the lie we are told. The tuth they do not tell us is that entrepreneurs need money, so if you don't have it to begin with, you're probably screwed.

Also, many of the rich in our country don't actually work hard, they rely on the labor of middle class citizens who are currently paying taxes because the rich have loopholes and the poor have no money to pay at all. Many rich live off of investments, meaning the stock market. The stock market is basically high stakes gambling. To understand the stock market, you need to understand that there are three types of companies, private, partnership and corporations. What makes corporations different is that the other two types are owned and operated by the same people, but corporations sell out shares to other people so they are at least partly owned by people other than those who actually run the business. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, it happens when a private or partnership business gets large enough that they need more money to grow and they get it by selling the company, and by selling it in small parts, none of the other owners have enough ownership to actually claim the company with any control, but they do put money in and they get paid back in dividends. The problem is that the stock market manipulates this by creating artificial value by having people trade their shares. This is the part that sucks for the rest of us, because when these stocks are being traded the money is not going back to the company, the shares no longer have anything to do with their namesake companies, they still have dividend yields to whoever is holding the hot potato when that time comes and those who hold enough shares have some degree of control over the company, but mostly the market is relying on people buying low and selling high. Stock brokers make their money by selling stocks at higher prices than they buy them for, and often do this within days, or even minutes, too little time to actually have anything to do with the company. This means that the vast majority of people who make their money in the stock market are not doing any actual work that benefits anybody, they are simply gambling and the stocks are no different than race horses, dice, cards, or numbers on a roulette wheel or lottery ball. The only difference is that the idea that somebody might actually do something productive makes the system legal. For example, I managed to acquire one share of stock in Hershey's, and as along as I hold onto this, I have a vote that I could use a stock holder's meetings at Hershey's, a vote which will be overshadowed by people who own many more shares than I do, but still, I do hold a share of the company in exchange for paying the company or at least reimbursing someone who did, and for that I get paid about $2 a year. Assuming I just sit on this stock, I am effectively a part of the Hershey's company and I am in some small way helping them, I have covered the cost of wrapping some Almond Joys. Hwever, I could decide to sell this stock and get some money back in my pocket right now, and if it was more than I bought it for, I just made profit. This is legal because I have purchased a share in good faith that I believe in the company and support them as a part owner. Someone else who also owns shares in the same way can do all of this on a much larger scale, and there is no legal way to discern between good faith ownership and high stakes gambling with the same resource, Since it is all based on something legal that affects major companies there is no way to challenge the legality of this practice without destorying the American economy. I'm not saying we should challenge it, I'm saying we need to recognize that many of the people who claim they work hard for their money are getting their money this way and leading us to believe that they deserve to keep their millions more than we deserve to be paid for actually working for those companies and doing what actually gives them value in the first place. Just think about that the next time the 1% argue about how we all deserve to keep our hard earned money instead of giving hand outs to lazy unemployed poor people.

Now for a quick history lesson: For most of human history we have relied on monarchies or in a few cases theocracies. If you don't know the difference the difference is that a monarchy is ruled by a monarch (king, queen, emperor) whereas a theocracy is ruled by God. Now, you may think, how does a god rule? None of us have ever actually seen a god, so how exactly does that work? Simple, the law of God is related to us through his priests and prophets who can communicate with God. In a theocracy, the basic principle is that everyone believes in God and questioning whether priests and prophets can talk to God is questioning God himself, so ask God if those priests and prophets are lying. God didn't answer? That's because you aren't a prophet, God only speaks to the priests, so now you have disobeyed God and questioned his chosen, which is invariably a crime under theocratic law. Convenient how that works? So yeah, theocracy is basically monarchy with a creaive twist that makes it less questionable to all of those within it. Relative to these systems, democracy is very new. Ancient Greece invented democracy, and it was practiced again to a cerain extent in the Roman Empire, but thn was largely ignored until it was reinovated in America when it was discovered that the six tribes of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy had figured it out on their own and it seemed better than listening to the king who lived across the sea. The problem is that the founding fathers of America decided to make our democracy more familiar and igestibel by basically making it a monarchy with a replacable maonarch we call a president. Someone once asked me "What is the difference between our president and a king?" He was tryign to make a point about government corruption by proving there wasn't a difference, but I replied without hesitation "Once every four to eight years we can replace our president without a bloody coup." Basically this is what we managed to accomplish, which is kind of a big deal. With monarchies, the only way to change leadership is to replace the monarch which gernerally require the death of the current monarch. With theocracies, the only way to change leadership is to change religions. With democracies, we change leadership by votign in a system that we all agree is open to any citizen to try. We claim the system is broken, but the ugly truth is that it's not really democracy, it's the constituents.

So now we are ready to go back and discuss the inherent natural flaw in social structures I mentioned earlier. In nature there are two types of animals, solitary and social. Innately we are all actually selfish solitary creatures, but circumstances sometimes lead us to find benefits in social situations. The primary situation would be mating, as animals that reproduce sexually, we need to get along with at least one other individual at some point in our lives in order for our species to survive. For some of us, sharing parental duties long term is beneficial, one can accquire food while the other protects offspring, and after offspring have grown up and left, it's easier to mate again with the same mate. From here we go to the family unit so the larger group takes care of everybody. This continues to grow to clan structure, then town, then city, then nation, then empire. At every stage, we need a leader, because everybody wants to do their own thing and we pretty much argue until someone lays down the law. At the family level, this is the elder, usually the father, sometimes the mother, at the clan level it's the chief, at the town or city level it's the mayor, at the nation level it's the monarch, president or dictator, and at the empire level it's the emperor. We naturally gravitate toward a leader, there must be a leader, otherwise we have anarchy which is a whole bunch of solitary people who are likely to act selfishly and the large population invariably collapses. Communism, or socialism on paper demands equality, which means having no leader, or at least a leader who recognizes he is equal while also mainting authority. But that doesn't really happen, because humans are selfish, and if we are in charge, we expect to get somethign for it.

This leads to the problem with capitalism and American democracy. Until the institution of American democracy, most companies just belonged to the govenrment, but in free cpaitalist America, the companies are free to do what they want. In believing in this freedom, we have created a blindspot that we are missing how companies are becoming empires. We use the term in a joking manner, but the reality is that companies are relying on the same social structure as government and they restrict us in the same ways, and by allowing them freedom we allow them to take over and oppress us the same as every other govenrment does. and they do it because of the lie that capitalism is for all of us.