[Moshineko]

Originally Posted by whiteriot

yeah I agree I mean, how can a psychiatrist get paid millions to tell people depressed when the people who taught them that knowledge gets paid 5% of what they do. I mean its not hard to tell if someone is depressed or if they have a problem. Heck if you give me 20 bucks, I'll listen to your life story and tell you if you are depressed or not. Its really not that hard to do. Yet they get paid all of that money because they had enough money to get them through undergrad, graduate, and medical school. Its just bullshit

On this topic, remember that psychiatrists and psychologists aren't paid primarily for diagnostics, which can also be done by your PCP, but for having to listen to people tell them their depressing stories all day, and keeping quiet and professional about it. I'm sure most psychiatrists and psychologists would be ecstatic if they only had to deal with depressed folks. They're more likely to get people who are molested, abused, in a relationship with an alcoholic, or any one of a hundred different things we might not recognize or be able to deal with. I mean, they have to listen to people talk about their most horrible thoughts and not judge them unfavorably. That's most of the work, not really the technical angle of it.

Okay, back on topic.

All false applications of communism/socialism. And sure, "progress" comes, along with huge environmental degradation, consumption of resources, military intervention, and human rights abuses.

All bad applications of socialism. Just because no one has gotten it right yet doesn't mean capitalism is good. It's true, a lot of crazy, ruthless dictators like to give socialism a shot, and they fuck it up. And although I grew up in an extremely rich city, attend a damn good college, and live a pretty high standard of living, I'm far from being rich. My family walks a damn thin tight rope, and we barely make it happen.

We don't use capitalism? Um, yea we do? And what does your argument about government corruption in other countries refer to? Capitalism has very far reaching implications, especially through colonialism. If you just look at the disgusting over consumptive mindset people have today, the endless drive for profit at the cost of literally anything (be it war, human rights violations, or the environment), and the disgusting state of American culture, capitalism really sucks ass.

It seems most of your arguments, as mine, don't deal with the actual economic systems of the world, but the governing systems. No one has gotten capitalism right, by the standards of true free-market economics. We don't get things right, we're human. We'll never get communism or libertarianism, or any other economic/political/philosophical system right, because most of the really good ones depend on everyone playing fair. So, when one person mucks it up, or a group of them, be it socialism, capitalism, hell, even we-came-from-a-UFO-ism, it all fails.

We don't actually use a pure form of capitalism any more than communist countries use a pure form of communism.
Capitalism: n. An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

It should immediately become obvious why I maintain we don't have a purely capitalist system. Government sticks its paws in all over the place. For instance, in the state where I live, the northern part of the state has been undergoing some economic hardship. It was dependent, as many places were at one time, on a single industry, namely paper mills, to keep its economy going. Well, the paper mill has gone under, and the economy is in shambles.

In a purely capitalist society, what would happen? Well, firstly, there wouldn't be the "all the eggs in one basket" mentality, as part of free-market economics is diversification and education. But, leaving that aside, the economy would go bad, people would leave. Property values would go down, the land would look more attractive, people would move businesses up, more people would go up to work, property values rise, and the economy booms again.

But, since we live in a mixed economy, they're now giving tax breaks out, which encourages no economic growth, and does nothing to actually help what's happening.

What you're railing against isn't actually capitalism, it's consumerism. Capitalism no more calls for a constant, fast-pace growth of the economy any more than communism calls for killing off a majority of people and leaving a political dynasty. It just works out that way due to human frailty.

When I asked you to come back with "non rich person" answers, you actually replied with something that unwittingly shows that we're not in a capitalist economy. You maintained that you're not rich, but that you live in a decent neighborhood. Well, when I say rich, I'm sure about 85% of humanity thinks you are rich. You eat every day, you have a home, you probably don't go cold in the winter, you've likely never had anyone in your family die from an easily preventable disease. Communism vs. Capitalism is an easy thing for us to argue over, because we have all this.
For almost everyone else, the argument is moot, because they are both just names and frameworks around what amounts to a Feudalistic form of government. Communism won't look as bad as Capitalism because there isn't as much of it. Big countries will use capitalism because in people's minds, capitalism is tied to being a big country, with lots of power. Communism, in turn, is tied in with the connotation of a small group of mutually-supporting people, thus it's favored in small countries. In reality, the government that always occurs is an oiligarchy. Rich people control what we need, or think we need, to live, and poor people struggle to become rich.