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CONTRA PRO-CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY
Pro-Capitalism
Pro-Capitalism
Work in progress, hoped to be split up into more specific sections down the road
1. “Capitalism meets human needs better than socialism.”
- Navarro 1992
- “the evidence presented in this article shows that the historical experience of socialism has not been one of failure. To the contrary: it has been, for the most part, more successful than capitalism in improving the health conditions of the world’s populations”
- Providence College, Department of Sociology: Lena et al. 1993
- “In general, high levels of democracy and strong left-wing regimes are associated with positive health outcomes, and strong right-wing regimes have populations with lower life expectancies and higher levels of various measures of mortality.“
- American Journal of Public Health: McCartney, et al. 10
- Neoliberal restructuring seems to be associated with increased health inequalities and higher income inequality with lower self-rated health and higher mortality.
- Social democratic welfare states, higher public spending, fair trade policies, extensions to compulsory education provision, microfinance initiatives in low-income countries, health and safety policy, improved access to health care, and high-quality affordable housing have positive impacts on population health.
- These showed that income inequality was detrimental for health, especially where the Gini coefficient (an indicator of income inequality where 1 represents all income going to 1 person and zero complete equality) is greater than 0.3,
- United Nations: Chang et al. 07
- Markets are powerful mechanisms to promote economic development, but they often fail to produce the economic dynamism and the social justice that a sustainable economic development requires
- 20 times more money is spent on research on slimming drugs than on research on malaria, a disease that kills more than a million people every year.
- Profit-seeking firms in industries that provide basic goods and services may refuse to serve less profitable customers, such as poor people or people living in remote areas.
- But state owned enterprises get bailed out! You can make the argument that any firm large and significant enough to the country will get bailed out:
- In the late 1970s, the bankrupt Swedish shipbuilding industry was rescued through nationalization by the country’s first right-wing government in 44 years, despite the fact that the government came to power with a pledge to reduce the size of the state
- In the early 1980s,, the troubled US carmaker Chrysler was rescued by the Reagan administration which was at the vanguard of neoliberal market reforms at the time.
- Chile was plunged into a financial crisis in 1982, following its premature and ill-designed financial liberalization in the late 1970s. Faced with the crisis, the Pinochet government which had come to power in the name of defending free markets, rescued the entire banking sector with public money
- In Greece, the SOE sector is filled with former inefficient private firms, which were nationalized, thus bailed out, because of their political importance. It is no surprise that the Greek SOE sector has performed poorly
- Whatabout-ism aside, it can be argued that even if state owned enterprises suffer from bailouts,
- United Nations 20
- Food insecurity has increased from 2014 to 2018 from 23.2% to 26.4%
- Click on “Progress and Info” for this quote: “An estimated 26.4 per cent of the world population, about 2 billion persons, were affected by moderate or severe food insecurity in 2018, an increase from 23.2 per cent in 2014”
- That UN page doesn’t mention climate change as a factor, but the 2020 Hunger Report certainly does. https://hungerreport.org/2020/
- “Since 2015, the global hunger rate has been on the rise, and it is clear that climate change is a factor.”
- “Globally, one person in three has at least one form of malnutrition, and based on current trends, by 2030 it is expected to rise to one in two.”
- “The effects of climate change each year push tens of millions of people in dozens of countries into hunger.”
- “Under a business-as-usual scenario, greenhouse gas emissions from the crop and livestock sectors are expected to increase 30 to 40 percent by 2050.”10
2. “Capitalism is democratic.”
- https://www.hamptonthink.org/s/parenti_democracy_for_the_few.pdf
- Your Democracy is a Sham and Here’s Why:
- Economic decisions are made privately by business owners then imposed onto employees. Employees do not have a say in these decisions.
- This results in a dictatorship of the capitalist class. The interests of capitalists are disproportionately represented and ensures that the state ultimately reflects capitalist interest, REGARDLESS of the working class’ needs
- This is why an overwhelming majority can support a policy and not have it passed
- Political participation outside of voting itself is only possible if you own massive amounts of money, which can only result from being a part of the capitalist class or playing with the interests of the capitalist class since you are offered a life of abundance if you do
- The capitalist class is able to use lobbying to ensure that the state exists to fulfill the needs of the bourgeoisie class
- Achieving economic democracy through existing electoralism will only result in the capitalist class doing everything in its power to remove socialist leaders from power, either by removing funding from the leader or by military action
- Economic decisions are made privately by business owners then imposed onto employees. Employees do not have a say in these decisions.
3. “Capitalism is eliminating global poverty.”
- https://braveneweurope.com/jason-hickel-a-letter-to-steven-pinker-and-bill-gates-for-that-matter-about-global-poverty
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal
- https://www.academia.edu/21593862/The_True_Extent_of_Global_Poverty_and_Hunger_Questioning_the_Good_News_Narrative_of_the_Millennium_Development_Goals
- http://wer.worldeconomicsassociation.org/files/WEA-WER-4-Woodward.pdf
- https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/8/21/exposing-the-great-poverty-reduction-lie/ lotta links included
- https://bunkerchan.xyz/.media/c0d12dac8a1d5404d8d22537996ed986-applicationpdf.pdf Article debunking the Millennium Development Goals of the UN and how global poverty has actually gotten worse and the only places that poverty has really gone down is in East Asia, particularly in China.
- “In 2010 (the final year of the MDGs’ real data), the total poverty headcount excluding China was exactly the same as it was in 1981, at just over one billion people. In other words, while the MDGs lead us to believe that poverty has been decreasing around the world, in reality the only place this holds true is in China and East Asia. This is an important point, because China and East Asia are some of the only places in the developing world that were not forcibly liberalised by the World Bank and the IMF. Everywhere else, poverty has been stagnant or getting worse, in aggregate.” (Page 5)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6VqV1T4uYs hakim video hakim video
4. “Capitalism has a better quality of life than socialism.”
See this section.
5. “Only capitalism can make major innovations, thanks to free market competition.”
- It’s good to have mentioned competition, as that’s the main driver of innovation here, not capitalism. The world wars and cold war brought about a lot of new innovation, not just in the military but also in various other fields - many of those innovations could be applied in other fields, e.g. nuclear bomb tech being refitted for power plants.
- Some innovations require lots of resources and few restrictions (e.g. making a profit), which is something which small businesses and many large firms aren’t incentived to do. For example, the development of nuclear tech, rocket technology, and the US interstate highway system all revolutionized aspects of american life but would not have been possible with a profit motive restricting incentives and the lack of resources which is accessible only truly by a large state apparatus, like the US government.
- Capitalism can easily discourage innovation by forcing firms to stick to safe trends rather than innovate which tends to be a much higher financial risk
- https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/entrepreneurs-or-the-state-innovation-comes-from-public-investment.html might also be useful, haven’t looked into it yet
- The iPhone wouldn’t exist in its modern form had it not been for essential public-sector innovations, research, and funding (e.g. U.S. Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, NASA and more). All giving the iPhone it’s famous multi-touch sensitive screen technology, its lithium ion battery, its voice recognition software known as Siri, the internet and cellular network it uses, its display, its GPS, and much more.
- A study from Health Affairs, a leading peer reviewed journal on health policy and research, looked at all patents approved by the FDA between 1988 and 2005, and finds that “direct government funding is more important in the development of “priority-review” drugs—sometimes described as the most innovative new drugs—than it is for “standard-review” drugs.” They also find that “Government funding has played an indirect role by funding basic underlying research that is built on in the drug discovery process—in almost half of the drugs approved and in almost two-thirds (66%) of priority-review (the most innovative) drugs.” In addition, “In all cases, the public-sector influence was much greater on priority-review drugs than on those receiving a standard review.”
- A study from The New England Journal of Medicine finds that through the past 40 years, 153 new FDA drugs that were approved came from public sector research institutions and that more than half of these drugs are used for the treatment or prevention of cancer or infectious diseases and that “PSRI-discovered drugs are expected to have a disproportionately large therapeutic effect”.
- Hernandez et al. 19 (Relevant articles) “In this retrospective study of pharmaceutical pricing data for 2005–16, we found that increases in the costs of specialty and generic drugs were driven by the entry of new drug products, but rising costs of brand-name drugs were largely due to inflation in existing medication prices.”
- https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2009.178491
6. “Capitalism is the only system that forces you to care about the needs of others.”
How is this not true for other systems? Under feudalism, you were forced to care about those above you in the hierarchy, and to fulfill their needs. In the case of government, you usually need to satisfy the needs of your constituents at least to some extent if you don’t want to be overthrown. In ancient hunter-gatherer tribes, if you didn’t contribute to the group as a whole you were considered a lot less useful and more likely to be dumped. Why can’t altruism not be considered a key component of all functional societies rather than just of capitalist societies specifically?
7. “Capitalism is voluntary.”
8. “Capitalism is embedded in human nature/has existed forever”
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhE5-zBlmcw
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AumVF0JV_dZrTSiW5z5L2oj9fj3pCLRcZTiqYyG-4bo/edit This one mostly focuses on inherent/underestimated altruism. The best counter to this sort of thing would be a “selfish altruism” sort of argument but that sort of stuff is next to unfalsifiable and often rests more on assumption than proof, plus that doesn’t actually do anything to demonstrate that humans aren’t altruistic.
- https://medium.com/arc-digital/socialism-and-human-nature-8e3640fdd775 piece by Ben Burgis, addressing the arg specifically after breaking it down into 3 segments:
- 1) Humans are inherently selfish.
- 2) ???
- 3) Socialism inevitably doesn’t work
9. “As the rich get richer, the poor also get richer. Wealth essentially trickles down from the capitalist class to the common worker.”
10. “Marxism/socialism/communism seeks total equality, which is impossible because total equality between individuals is impossible.”
11. “Capitalism is the most efficient system we have.”
Social Democracy
Social Democracy
The welfare state of a social democratic society is only sustainable by imperialism.
- Moguldom Nation: Pedronicelli 19
- France continues to stall francophone Africa’s economic development by holding 50 percent of the foreign reserves of 12 countries in its central bank, enriching itself with Africa’s wealth.
- The African countries using the CFA franc have no say in deciding key monetary policies that affect their people, as these are determined by European countries as part of the European Union
- The CFA franc is considered by some to be a barrier to industrialization and economic development and does not stimulate trade integration between fellow francophone nations or allow banks to provide adequate credit for their economies.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/f7g3dj/paying_one_half_of_the_poor_to_kill_the_other/
- https://africasacountry.com/2019/07/confronting-monetary-imperialism-in-francophone-africa