Quote:
Originally Posted by Boon Mee 
Socialism: A progressive political system that takes the power away from wealth creators and gives it to wealth distributors. Wealth distributors are typically a class of highly trained government bureaucrats who are being watched by a class of political commissars, who, in turn, are being watched by a class of secret police, all of whom are banded together by shared progressive morals. Because progressive morals are relative by definition, a certain measure of absolute propaganda is necessary to encourage collectivism and discourage counter revolution. Since such propaganda is delivered through mass media, arts, and schools, a degree of ideological monopoly, uniformity, and censorship is also required in those fields. The resulting mass enthusiasm creates a vibrant state-subsidized culture, leading to great economic successes and technological breakthroughs, e.g., North Korea... |
Shifting the wealth of a nation towards the business community including big corporations may certainly provide economic advantages. However it amounts to modern day economic slavery for the poor masses of blue collar workers. Wages go down, life gets tougher for the working class and profits go up for the business class who become the elite ruling class. There's no doubt this system works financially. It worked for the Romans and Egyptians with their workforce of slaves and it worked in pre-civil war USA.
I doubt most working class Americans realize that their standard of living is not on par with many of the more socialist developed democracies. Wages are low in USA for blue collar workers, social infrastructure for the middle class like health care and education are also low by comparison with other developed democracies. But a large, relatitively low paid workforce, combined with low company taxes and a low level of government social infrastructure does give the country the edge in competitiveness on the world market.
Of course all this is relative. USA only has an edge in business while other developed democracies provide an improved standard of living for the blue collar middle class workers.
However, the world is a changing place. Developing nations have caught onto the capitalist philosophy of wealth creation. The once communist China has embraced the capitalist way and with their workforce of hundreds of millions of peasant workers, China is replacing not only USA , but the rest of the western world in production and GDP growth. The American business principle has served China well. There are many millionaire business owners, just as there are many poor peasants slaving in the factories and living in poverty. Social injustice on a more pronounced scale than USA, but basically the same principle.
Where all this exploitation of the working class comes undone is in the process of democracy where the majority working class are able to elect governments who can at least provide better social infrastructure and quality of life.
USA has reached the end of the road as far as their capitalist philosophy of squeezing the poor and giving handouts to the rich goes. No amount of financial assistance to the wealthy business owners is going to enable USA to compete with manufacturing in developing countries like China today. Certainly developed countries like USA still hold their ground in certain industries like high tech etc..
But overall there is a redistribution of word wealth occurring. Its not surprising that USA is surviving at the moment on increasing debt to places like China.
The bottom line is that USA and many other western countries are going to have to take a cut in living standards as manufacturing jobs and export income shifts to developing countries.
The old way of cutting wages (in real terms) and giving financial assistance to business just isn't going to work anymore in the face of competition that can produce the same items for export at a fraction of the cost.
In the meantime, with increasing unemployment and falling export revenue, who's going to pay for the international debt incurred trying to prop up a failing system?
The only way any government can pay off international debt before the interest burden becomes greater than what they can pay for is to either increase export productivity or to raise taxes. Going with the exhausted philosophy of giving more of the taxpayers money to the rich so they can create more jobs is simply a lost cause and buying into more international debt that someone will have to pay back sooner or later.
USAs capitalist philosophy of taking from the poor to give to the rich in anticipation of creating new jobs and export income is a strategy that may have worked in the past, but its a different world out there now and such a plan will only drive the country deeper into debt and failure.