Capitalistic greed is the main problem in the U.S.

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It works like this....you don't share my opinions on the pharma's and I certainly don't embrace yours. I am an executive for a company in WI and am knee deep in business. I don't know you and you obviously don't know me. I like it that way . Assumptions are are a poor substitute for knowledge, so I hope you don't mind me filing your opinion in the trash can.
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It's obvious you've never taken the time to understand Locke's arguments nor does it appear you're inclined to do so.

Capitalism is not purely voluntary in the United States because commerce itself is not voluntary. 300 plus million people can't go out into the wilderness to provide for themselves without having to engage in commerce. The person without the financial resources to say "No" to a low paying job that wouldn't provide enough income to live on is forced to accept the employment. They have no other alternative because the rent, utilities, food and other mandatory expenditures driven by "commerce" must be paid.

I won't waste my time providing the graphs that show the middle class is disappearing, that income inequality between the wealthy and the rest of society is growing, or any of the other studies that show poverty is increasing in America (e.g. four times as many households qualify for SNAP benefits now than they did ten years ago and the criteria hasn't changed). We're becoming more and more of a welfare society because capitalism is failing the American people.

Capitalism is failing in the United States as the rich keep getting richer and everyone else becomes poorer and virtually everyone knows it.

 

....and Hitler promised to make Germany great again.......

 

This issue is "greed". Your attempts to justify it with fantasy is really lame. All efforts by liberals to give affordable healthcare, are demonized by you right wing fascists.

 

This is what Trump Koolaid does.^^^^^^^^^

 

Liberal good intentions....Social Security for the eldery....affordable healthcare......aid to the poor....

Con greed.....Halliburton profited a trillion dollars from American dead soldiers in Iraq......deregulation of banks destroyed the U.S. economy in 2007 and 1929.

Gee, thanks for all that help.

 

Here's a clue....military contractors bid for contracts.....then charge billion$ for cost overruns.

 

It's so amazing, that cons always blame the government....and neglect the fact that they themselves put those politicians in the government. You are the government. You have no one to blame but yourself.

 

So did Obama and damn near every other politician that ever live. And Hitler promised the German people that in 20 years they wouldn't recognize their cities and he was right but I doubt bombed out ruins is what he had in mind.

 

Sorry but it is you that is trying to inflict a fascist health care system on the rest of us. Germany had national health care under the Nazi and Italy had it under the fascists. Me, I prefer freedom. The government already controls about 90% of the health care in this country and that's largely why it sucks.

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Note the lack of evidence presented in your statement.

 

Because the government issues a standard regarding what they want and then changes it in midstream with often bewildering frequency causing increased costs when the contractor nearly has to start over again nearly from scratch.

 

Sorry I didn't put Obama in charge and I certainly didn't appoint 90% of the bureaucracy.

 

Was it wrong to fight Hitler?

 

Social security robs wealth and is collapsing. Affordable healthcare Act is a completely false title. It is not affordable. The war on poverty is a dismal failure on almost any metric. In addition to all of these bad outcomes, these measures are immoral given that you are applying force to decisions. It is anti-freedom and anti positive outcome.

You are mislabeling corporatism with capitalism on the Halliburton thing. And, it was GSEs that destroyed the banking industry. Further, the good intentions of progressives gave us Dodd/Frank that makes it impossible to challenge the "too big to fail" competitively.

 

Yet another unresponsive reply.

 

Then lets fix it. Starting with you. You give half your income to the next homeless you run into. Once you've proven that you did it then I might consider doing the same.

 

"(The Capitalist) generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.". Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

The capitalist, driven solely by personal greed, doesn't give a damn about anyone but themselves and any benefit to society from the capitalist is purely accidental.

Only by government interventionism can capitalism benefit society as a whole.

 

I can totally sympathize with your thought, this is why secretly (in rhetorical terms) I wish America can be a land of 50 different sovereign republics, each has its own unique constitution and let all 50 states compete, then we gradually and peacefully adopt the best one, then produce another 49 different derivatives... and repeat the process, in the end, we will not have utopia or the garden of eden, but sometihng as close as possible.

We may have most of the entrepreneurs working for the common good, instead of proving something, earning more money, or simply impressing others.

 

Yeah, cons always say it's everybody else's fault, even though it was Bush that destroyed the whole economy, and wasted $3 trillion on the Iraq war that was started with lies.....and he did it with a republican congress and senate. Raygun tripled the national debt, Shrub 41 doubled it again in only four years and Shrub Jr. doubled it again. The last three republican presidents added $11 trillion to the national debt.

 

My understanding is the epinephrine has been cheap for over a 100 year and the pen may be unpatentable (as obvious)..

So why ISN"T someone doing this. What I hear is that no one is willing to use a "generic" product.

I mean, yes, it 's your CHILD and you want the best, but when the name is the ONLY difference....??

 

And Obama left to his own devices would have doubled it yet again in eight. And presidents do not act alone. Or at least they are not supposed to. Who passed those budgets?

 

The last is bloody minded nonsense. The capitalist helps people in spite of himself the socialist helps himself to as much untrammeled and unjustified power as he can manage all in the name of helping people who, as general rule, would be much better off if he just left them alone.

 

This is no a comparison between capitalism and socialism. It is an analysis of capitalism as it exists without the necessary regulation to ensure that our economy benefits all of those involved in producing the vast wealth, over $16 trillion annually, from their contribution proportionately. With $16 trillion of wealth being created annually there's no excuse for "working poverty" in the United States.

Economists calculate that every working household could receive, at a minimum, enough compensation so they wouldn't be living in poverty and it would require between $3 trillion and $4 trillion out of that $16 trillion we produce annually. That leaves at least $12 trillion to be distributed through higher compensation based upon unusual job skills or as profit to the "capitalists" that own the enterprises. No one can argue that $12 trillion a year isn't enough money to divide between higher income jobs and the "capitalists" (owners of enterprise).

We could have a country of "Have's" and "Have More's" if we wanted to instead of our current economy of the "Have's" and "Have Not's" but it would require government intervention to ensure that the distribution (not redistribution) of the wealth being created benefits both the workers and the owners of enterprise in our Capitalistic economy.

Today our capitalistic model, based upon the Austrian School of Economics (with it's origin in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations), is all about the "owners" (capitalists) becoming rich, driven by greed, and to hell with the workers. That needs to change. That can be accomplished with "Capitalism" as opposed to Socialism which, as noted, is corrupt because it relies on "redistribution" of wealth. We merely need the proper "distribution" of wealth and that can be accomplished with the proper regulation of capitalism in the United States.

 

working poor are an unintended consequence of government over involvement in the economy. After almost fifty years of the federal welfare bureaucracy, we have more poor, poverty is more intractable, and the poverty line has risen by a factor of ten and the poor are killing each other in the streets. Compared to the war on poverty the war on drugs is a rousing success.

 

There aren't even any dots to connect to support this erroneous conclusion.

Let's start at the beginning with the official Poverty Guideline that's always been based upon a very limited criteria to address a very limited number of specific expenditures of the household. Poverty can most accurately be defined as a shortfall between household income and the minimum-mandatory expenditures of the household (a criteria not used by the government) and we can do a comparison between the official federal Poverty Guidelines and actual poverty in America.

We will assume a family of three with two adults and one child (to correspond with the average 2.54 people per household in the US) and the official Poverty Guidelines for the contiguous 48 states (and DC) and real poverty as measured for Detroit Michigan located in Wayne County.

For 2015 the official federal Poverty Guideline was $20,090 for a family of three.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines

According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator (that quantifies the actual minimum-mandatory cost of living) for Wayne Country, Michigan, the minimum income required for a family of three with one working adult is $43,348 and if both adults are working the minimum income required is $51,037.
http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/26163

The official federal Poverty Guidelines are less than 1/2 of the actual income required to meet the actual minimum-mandatory expenditures of the household. Of course the federal guidelines are used to deceive the American people when it comes to how many people are actually living in poverty in the United States. It's like comparing income taxes to the GDP because income taxes are not directly tied to the GDP but instead are related to the GPI (gross personal income) in the United States. The Congress, which mandates these measurements, can be quite nefarious in creating the numbers in an effort to deceive the American people for political purposes.

Next let's tackle the War on Poverty which was about improving education and providing job training. It wasn't about providing welfare assistance to mitigate the effects of poverty which would be reduced as the poor became more educated and/or received job training through federal funding efforts. Guess what. Republicans have opposed expansion of federal funding to provide low or no cost education and to increase the number of free technical schools for job training since the 1970's. We've seen virtually no significant federal funding for free college tuition or free job training that was necessary based upon the War on Poverty as established in the 1960's.

In short the federal government has never adequately funded the War on Poverty, in hasn't even come close to providing even minimum funding, so effectively it's never happened. Instead we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars mitigating the effects of poverty as opposed to reducing poverty with free college and free job training programs to provide job skills.

Of course even if the War on Poverty would have actually occurred it wouldn't have made any difference because of the "Market" because middle income jobs have been disappearing and have been replaced with low paying service sector jobs, Even if every American had a four year college degree the degree wouldn't matter because the only job a significant percentage could find would be a low paying service sector job and they wouldn't have the opportunity to move up the economic ladder because of the decline in the number of middle income jobs.

Yes, there is gang violence in some inner cities because there are no jobs, or the jobs don't provide enough income to live on, so many young people resort to the black market to fund their minimum-mandatory expenditures. We've denied them a legal means to actually earn a living and so they pursue an illegal means of earning a living. As always with the black market there is violence associated to control of the territory. We saw it with alcohol prohibition and it returned with drug prohibition laws.

The problem of poverty is exclusively related to the unopposed downward pressure on compensation for labor imposed by the Market. In the 1950's and 1960's we had organized labor to provide a counterforce to the Market but Republicans have managed to destroy the power of the unions throughout much of the United States. So today all we effectively have is the downward pressure of the Market on compensation and that's why poverty is expanding in the United States.