[dohboi]

If you ain't drunk most of the time these days, you probably aren't paying attention!!!

But really, sorry, Loki, I shouldn't confuse a Norse trickster god with a permaculturalist that has long since given up on our sorry @$$e$!

[IM_Rich]

Just because you see ebola and capitalism in the same place doesn't mean one causes the other. Capitalism is impossible to eliminate.

[dohboi]

No one is claiming that one causes the other. Nice attempt at a straw-man fallacy, though.
And I like your handle!

[dohboi]

A little something to lighten the mood (with apologies to New Zealanders): http://m.tickld.com/x/capitalism-explai ... e-it-hurts

[Fishman]

Just love the conversation when Cid shows up
"This scam is already getting frayed around the edges. No military or police force in the world can keep down a people who no longer believe that nonsense." Now isn't that what happened to the communist Soviet Union almost exactly 25 years ago?

And who couldn't love "I am one of the few who benefits from a capitalist system, but the fact that I benefit from it, doesn't change the facts regarding it". Translated I got mine so I want to make sure no others do.

Dohboi, let me apologize for my harshness. Ebola is a rather unique and challenging disease. Trying to discern the best or worst social/financial system to combat it seems ... an unarguable position.

[Lore]

Modern capitilism works just fine as long as you have an infinite amount of cheap resources that don't present any kind of negative kickback.

[Cid_Yama]

Are you really such a simpleton to believe that the ONLY alternative to a Plutocratic Authoritarian regime pretending to be Capitalistic is a Dictatorial Authoritarian regime presented as Communism? That's a dead horse that has been beaten too many times.

That's like saying if you don't accept the Plutocracy you automatically get the Bogeyman.

You've also missed the point that achieving wealth through such a system is a phantasmagoria.

There is little evidence that there is upward mobility for the working classes, except in exceptional cases you can probably count on your fingers, while there is an abundance of evidence that the system as it is set up in this country works just the opposite, and disenfranchises the working classes.

There are many examples of systems around the world that work far better for their citizens.

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and many many more have a higher quality of life for their people than the US. (US 16th on the Social Progress Index, 17th on the UN World Happiness Report)

All of these countries recognize that some things, like health care, do not work well on a for-profit basis. That some things have to be socialized in order to work for the benefit of the people. Also, that ALL of their citizens matter.

The problem with income measurements being used in the estimation of standards of living, is that they can be skewed.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')ountries [like the US], with a very small, very rich upper class and a very large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of poverty measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of income can disguise the actual standard of living.

[Fishman]

Lots of systems Cid, I didn't argue capitalism was the best or worst. And ALL the countries you gave as examples are capitalistic with varying amounts of socialism also, as is the US. "Little evidence that there is upward mobility for the working classes, " Please feel free to give an example where a greater number happens in another system.
"The problem with income measurements being used in the estimation of standards of living, is that they can be skewed." as can health care standards.

The problem with a socialized health care system, .. and pandemic diseases like Ebola that it consumes huge amounts of resources in a system set up for some smaller amount of care for all. Socialized system only offer the individual inadequate amounts of care for such a devastating disease. Perhaps that's why Canada has now banned travel from the involved countries. If you are speaking on the Duncan case being kicked back into the community, no socialized system making the mistake of his travel, would have admitted a person with just a fever.

[Cid_Yama]

Study after study has shown that people are more satisfied with their healthcare in nations that have universal health care.

A couple of examples:

The British Are Surprisingly Satisfied With Their Socialized Health Care System
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t turns out the British National Health Service (NHS) — a system free at the point of service and funded by tax money — is pretty popular.

An impressive 61% of respondents said they were "satisfied" with the socialized health care system, according to a British Social Attitudes survey released today.

To give you an idea of how that stacks against the U.S. health care system, take a look at a comparative study that appeared in the Health Affairs journal earlier this year. Using patient satisfaction surveys from 11 different countries, the authors found that just 28.9% of U.S. citizens felt that their health care system "works pretty well, and only minor changes are necessary to make it work better." The figure for the United Kingdom was 61.3% — almost exactly the BSA result.

[dorlomin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', '
')So what broader lesson can be learned, or inference drawn, from this vast failure of Capitalism on the Ebola front.

[dohboi]

Fishman wrote: $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;Little evidence that there is upward mobility for the working classes, " Please feel free to give an example where a greater number happens in another system.

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', 'A')ll those other countries have socialized medicine.

[dohboi]

Yes, indeed. We spend a lot of money, per capita and by gov, for a pretty shitty (for most people) health care (non-) system.

To say the health care system in the US isn't free-market is something of a tautology, since there isn't any such thing as a pure operating free market anywhere in the world, and there never has been.

Perhaps instead of 'Capitalism' I should have said corporate socialism or something similar. But as noted there's no such thing as pure Capitalism, so all words fail to grasp the full complexity of the real situation.

[dohboi]

More fuel for the fire:

Capitalism Is a Tumor on the Body Politic

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27273 ... lternative

Takeaway line:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Economics drives politics and its legitimating apparatuses have become the great engines of manufactured ignorance.

[IM_Rich]

The Nazis were socialist. That proves socialism is bad.

[Cid_Yama]

The Nazis were not Socialists. Hitler took over the Socialist Worker's Party and turned it to his own aims.

The first people the Nazi's threw into the concentration camps were the Communists and Socialists, followed by the Trade Unionists.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')irst they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out.

[IM_Rich]

The Nazis were socialist. That proves socialism is bad.
Nazi is short for National Socialist. I provided absolute indisputable proof I'm right.

[Cid_Yama]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')itler remained in Vienna until 1913, when he moved to Munich. After serving with bravery in the German army during World War I, he joined the right-wing Bavarian German Workers' Party in 1919. The following year, the party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--NSDAP). Its members were known as Nazis, a term derived from the German pronunciation of "National." In 1921 Hitler assumed leadership of the NSDAP.

As leader of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler reorganized the party and encouraged the assimilation of other radical right-wing groups. Gangs of unemployed demobilized soldiers were gathered under the command of a former army officer, Ernst Roehm, to form the Storm Troops (Sturmabteilung--SA), Hitler's private army. Under Hitler's leadership, the NSDAP joined with others on the right in denouncing the Weimar Republic and the "November criminals" who had signed the Treaty of Versailles. The postwar economic slump won the party a following among unemployed ex-soldiers, the lower middle class, and small farmers; in 1923 membership totaled about 55,000. General Ludendorff supported the former corporal in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 in Munich, an attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government. The putsch failed, and Hitler received a light sentence of five years, of which he served less than one. Incarcerated in relative comfort, he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he set out his long-term political aims.

After the failure of the putsch, Hitler turned to "legal revolution" as the means to power and chose two parallel paths to take the Nazis to that goal. First, the NSDAP would employ propaganda to create a national mass party capable of coming to power through electoral successes. Second, the party would develop a bureaucratic structure and prepare itself to assume roles in government. Beginning in the mid-1920s, Nazi groups sprang up in other parts of Germany. In 1927 the NSDAP organized the first Nuremberg party congress, a mass political rally. By 1928 party membership exceeded 100,000; the Nazis, however, polled only 2.6 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections in May.

A mere splinter party in 1928, the NSDAP became better known the following year when it formed an alliance with the DNVP to launch a plebiscite against the Young Plan on the issue of reparations. The DNVP's leader, Alfred Hugenberg, owner of a large newspaper chain, considered Hitler's spellbinding oratory a useful means of attracting votes. The DNVP-NSDAP union brought the NSDAP within the framework of a socially influential coalition of the antirepublican right. As a result, Hitler's party acquired respectability and access to wealthy contributors.

In times of desperation, voters are ready for extreme solutions, and the NSDAP exploited the situation. Skilled Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels launched an intensive media campaign that ceaselessly expounded a few simple notions until even the dullest voter knew Hitler's basic program. The party's program was broad and general enough to appeal to many unemployed people, farmers, white-collar workers, members of the middle class who had been hurt by the Depression or had lost status since the end of World War I, and young people eager to dedicate themselves to nationalist ideals. If voters were not drawn to some aspects of the party platform, they might agree with others. Like other right-wing groups, the party blamed the Treaty of Versailles and reparations for the developing crisis. Nazi propaganda attacked the Weimar political system, the "November criminals," Marxists, internationalists, and Jews. Besides promising a solution to the economic crisis, the NSDAP offered the German people a sense of national pride and the promise of restored order.

Three elections--in September 1930, in July 1932, and in November 1932--were held between the onset of the Depression and Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. The vote shares of the SPD and the Center Party fluctuated somewhat yet remained much as they had been in 1928, when the SPD held a large plurality of 153 seats in the Reichstag and the Center Party held sixty-one, third after the DNVP's seventy-three seats. The shares of the parties of the extreme left and extreme right, the KPD and the NSDAP, respectively, increased dramatically in this period, KPD holdings almost doubling from fifty-four in 1928 to 100 in November 1932. The NSDAP's success was even greater. Beginning with twelve seats in 1928, the Nazis increased their delegation seats nearly tenfold, to 107 seats in 1930. They doubled their holdings to 230 in the summer of 1932. This made the NSDAP the largest party in the Reichstag, far surpassing the SPD with its 133 seats. The gains of the NSDAP came at the expense of the other right-wing parties.

[dohboi]

Aren't syllogisms fun!

IM_Rich is wealthy (at least that's what his monicker implies);
IM_Rich posts on POForums;
Therefore all who post on these forums are rich!!

Indisputable logic!!!

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', 'I')t made no sense for anyone, private firm or government agency, to develop a vaccine or treatment for Ebola. This says nothing about capitalism per se. Ebola is still a dim blip on the global radar.

Capitalism poses an impediment to climate change response. As do socialist governments. No large institution, private or public, wants to advocate everyone getting poorer, nor would they last long if they did.

Unfortunately, getting poorer is the only thing we can do to mitigate climate change. It will have to be forced by circumstance.