Capitalism is a Problem!

[joebudda]

Using the United States as an example;

The biggest problem I see with society today I feel is capitalism. With capitalism we are encouraging the separation of classes. We continually admire someone who goes and gets rich on the expanse of others and totally ignore how the poor population is growing and keeps getting poorer.

Think of it like this. You have a table with many concave places where water/fluid can collect (concave places represents the population, water represents money). Now we tilt the table so the water starts to empty from most of the concave places and collects in just a few. This is how capitalism works.

We only have so much money and if the rich keep getting richer there is less money for the rest of the population to survive on.

Today we have these huge multi-corporations lying off tens of thousands of workers to outsource jobs to countries where they can pay these new workers pretty much slave wages. Then put out a press release saying how much money they have saved this year.

This causes an absence of working wage jobs so these workers (more times then not) need to get a less paying job to survive. Thereby forcing people who depended on these less paying jobs to get an even lesser paying job. This creates a sort of domino effect. And we encourage this by giving tax cuts to these companies for outsourcing these jobs.

If things keep going the way they are going I see an uprising would be enviable. Using history as an example where the peasants rose up against the ruling powers sitting pretty in their castles because of suppression of their needs.

I could keep going on but I think I made my point.

 

[jon1101]

I believe your water analogy is flawed, mostly due to the apparent misconception that there's a fixed amount of wealth in society. If capitalism has a virtue, it is its ability to stimulate efficient production of wealth. Contrast the working class in the US with some other nations or with the US of the past and it becomes apparent that the sum total of wealth is actually increasing. Of course business leaders who are most responsible for efficient production of wealth feel this increase most immediately--that's the reason capitalism can stimulate such production--but it doesn't just stay at the top. (Note: I'm not particularly interested in arguing that capitalism produces wealth without nasty effects here and there.)

I'm curious though: what, in your view, ought the solution to look like?

-Jon

 

[joebudda]

I believe your water analogy is flawed, mostly due to the apparent misconception that there's a fixed amount of wealth in society. If capitalism has a virtue, it is its ability to stimulate efficient production of wealth. Contrast the working class in the US with some other nations or with the US of the past and it becomes apparent that the sum total of wealth is actually increasing. Of course business leaders who are most responsible for efficient production of wealth feel this increase most immediately--that's the reason capitalism can stimulate such production--but it doesn't just stay at the top. (Note: I'm not particularly interested in arguing that capitalism produces wealth without nasty effects here and there.)

I'm curious though: what, in your view, ought the solution to look like?

-Jon

True our money is based on natural resources.

Today we have the largest trade deficit ever. Thereby emptying our economy of its wealth. I do think that other countries could use some of our excess a bit more then us but the countries that need it most are the ones not getting it.

Maybe the world should adopt the euro or something. This I believe might stabilize some of this fluctuation.

Adam Smith wrote a book called “Wealth of Nations” that sees capitalism in such a way that you describe. In it he said that monopolies should be regulated to promote local economic growth and we do. But I see these huge multi-corporations as slipping through a kind of loop hole. These companies are buying out smaller competitors there by keeping two or three companies in control of these niches, thereby bypassing the monopoly laws.

I don’t know how to solve what I see as a problem under the philosophy we use today.

 

[Inside Edge]

I personally haven't come across any plan or system that works fairly. Maybe it's just a fallacy of humankind, I don't know. But it seems to be that all economic systems in the past eventually get used & abused to create a dangerous inequality of classes.

We look at the Feudal system as a backwards, horrible system. The end result of the feudal system was a minority of wealthy landowners and a huge population of people working the land, be them "free men" or "slaves." Regardless of their political status, they were poor, and slaves to the system because there was, by and large, no way to move out of that poverty class. Performed the work & care while the owner/lord reaped the vast majority of the benefits.

Where has capitalism got us? Farmland (particularly foreign) is often owned by huge companies run by rich exectutives, paying ridiculously small wages (relative to the executives) to those working the land (like the agri-business in South America, etc). Or auto manufacturers in Mexico, or textile companies in South East Asia, and the list goes on.

The end result seems an awful lot like most other economic systems - a few end up hording wealth while the middle class shrinks or is non-existent, leaving princes and paupers.

In the end, I think capitalism has been the best so far - it seems the inequality and corruption takes longer to squeeze the life out of a society, and to its credit, is a system based upon freedom. Thus, it allows the world to be what people make of it.

 

[Buzz Dixon]

You assumptions are so wrong on so many levels:

#1 -- Capitalism raises everybody's standard of living. As technologies become more and more prevalent, their per unit costs drop, enabling everyone to have them. The wealthy first-wavers make it possible for the impoverished third-wavers to enjoy that technology at affordable prices by paying for the cutting edge research that makes the first generation of anything a high ticket item.

Capitalism produces surpluses of goods that drive prices down, making them affordable for everyone. Socialism -- especially as practiced in the Soviet Union, Red China, and Cuba -- pretty much guaranteed chronic shortages of just about everything. Now that the Russians and Chinese have embraced consumer economies, quantity and quality of goods have been rising while prices have been plummeting.

Castro keeps everybody in Cuba toeing the communist line, so they remain an island of misery and poverty. (There's an easy way to verify this: How many people in Miami are building rafts out of whatever materials they can find to try to make it to Cuba?)

#2 -- Improvements in agriculture have dramatically increased food yields (and this is without taking direct genetic manipulation into account!). Famine is rare in the world and is the result of (1) a natural disaster such as a flood that temporarily eradicates a local food supply -- in which case the government of said area immediately brings in food from the outside in order to prevent people from starving and/or rioting until they can rebuild their own food supply , viz. the current situation in Haiti, or (2) it is used as a political/military weapon of genocide, viz. the situation in Sudan when adherents of the religion of peace are trying to starve to death all the Christians they can't enslave.

#3 -- We are not running out of natural resources. As with manufactured goods, most natural resources have been dropping in price. The current rise in petroleum prices has less to do with a lack of resources and much more to do with speculators playing on geo-political anxieties.

#4 -- Wealth is not finite; you can always create more of it. The average "poor" person in America today lives better than the richiest kings of the 17th century.

#5 -- The overwhelming majority of American millionaires and billionaires are self-made. Quite the opposite of entranched inherited wealth creating an upper class, in American the motto is "from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations" (i.e., from poverty to wealth back to poverty, or John Senior struggles so John Junior can coast on an inheritance that will be squandered by the time John III grows up).

Many of these new millionaires and billionaires are immigrants.

#6 -- Under one name or another, outsourcing always occurs. The problem is not in the owners, who see the wisdom of holding down costs so they may offer their product at a lower price, thus attracting more customers ('cuz if they hike their price, they know their competitors will cut them off at the knees); the problem is a work force that is not aware of the economic realities around them. Savvy folks saw the rust belt coming w-a-a-a-a-y back in the late 60s, but lots of the people working at the Ford and Chevy plants didn't want to believe they'd have to acquire new skills to find new jobs but prefered working on the assumption that nothing would ever change and the demand for American-made automobiles would remain constant.

The smart money is already looking a generation or two down the road. To put it another way, anytime a major news weekly or TV show does a report on something, the real entrepaneurs have already staked out the territory and have it well under development.

(Sidebar: I just got back from a trip up to Mojave to watch Burt Rutan and his boys open the Space Age to private contractors and civilians. Keep this thought in mind: It took less than a decade after Lindbergh flew the Atlantic for regularlly scheduled trans-oceanic airlines to become common place. Less than a decade.)

 

[aeroz19]

Using the United States as an example;

The biggest problem I see with society today I feel is capitalism. With capitalism we are encouraging the separation of classes. We continually admire someone who goes and gets rich on the expanse of others and totally ignore how the poor population is growing and keeps getting poorer.

The number one problem with anti-capitalists is that they assume that those who are rich did something wrong to be rich. They took advantage, they stole, they cheated, etc. This is not true in all cases.

Think of it like this. You have a table with many concave places where water/fluid can collect (concave places represents the population, water represents money). Now we tilt the table so the water starts to empty from most of the concave places and collects in just a few. This is how capitalism works.

No, it's not.

We only have so much money and if the rich keep getting richer there is less money for the rest of the population to survive on.

The money base doesn't have to be finite. It's not a game of tug-of-war between rich and poor. The beauty of capitalism is that your have self-determination of wealth.

Today we have these huge multi-corporations lying off tens of thousands of workers to outsource jobs to countries where they can pay these new workers pretty much slave wages. Then put out a press release saying how much money they have saved this year.

What do you suppose we do? Impose socialism?

This causes an absence of working wage jobs so these workers (more times then not) need to get a less paying job to survive. Thereby forcing people who depended on these less paying jobs to get an even lesser paying job. This creates a sort of domino effect. And we encourage this by giving tax cuts to these companies for outsourcing these jobs.

Well, I don't know about that...

If things keep going the way they are going I see an uprising would be enviable. Using history as an example where the peasants rose up against the ruling powers sitting pretty in their castles because of suppression of their needs.

Well, if we find a better system--one that punishes cheating and rewards hard work better than this one--I'm all for it.

 

[joebudda]

#1 – Capitalism also separates the classes and when someone falls below the poverty line (in our system) they are forced to break the law out of desperation in order to just survive. Then we put them away in jail where we don’t have to look at them anymore. Out of side out of mind.

#2 – today our agriculture system is more of an assembly line more then a farm. There is no way someone can just buy a piece of land and start a farm without a high startup cost and needing to implement such techniques. If anyone saw first hand the conditions and the processes by which they got the meat they eat they might not eat meat anymore.

#3 – I mostly agree. Though because of capitalism the dropping of prices isn’t always a good thing. Lets use Wal-Mart as an example. They come in to communities and put up a “superstore” forcing the smaller mom and pop stores out of business with their “power of price”. In doing so loosing more jobs for the community then making. Thereby strong arming their suppliers to cut prices to where Wal-Mart says it should be in order to put these products on their shelves. In doing so forcing these suppliers to cut local jobs in favor for out of country slave wage jobs just to get their products on the shelves.

#4 – because if someone falls below the poverty line we sweep them up in to jail as explained in reason one.

#5 – Yes on the expense of the poor. Once in a wile you hear of a case where some one escapes the clutches of the poor but the cases are rare. The reality is if someone grew up poor chances are they will always be poor. This poor population keeps continually growing. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

#6 -- The price should be at the cost it takes to supply this demand. When we continually bring down these prices we are forcing ourselves out of local jobs. A big problem in this is that the poor are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they need to find the lowest price in order to make ends meet. In doing this they are only hurting themselves by default. Though many don’t realize it.


We need to focus on higher education and make it more readably available to the lower classes the way many of these other countries do. Today it is very hard for someone from the lower class to afford this higher education the way the system is now. Yes there are the few cases that show it can be done but the cases are few and far between. I think this might be one of the key issues involved. People need to keep up with the demands of the need for education in today’s world or we are just hurting ourselves as a whole.

 

[joebudda]

aeroz19 would it be wrong of me to assume that you have never “been without” the necessities and had to wonder if you were going to be able to eat today or not.

I don’t blame it on the individuals I blame it on the system.

Our system is built on blaming the individuals.

 

[Philosoft]

The number one problem with anti-capitalists is that they assume that those who are rich did something wrong to be rich. They took advantage, they stole, they cheated, etc. This is not true in all cases.

Of course not. The generalized problem, though, is that money is the catalyst for the system that creates or metes out advantages. Thus, or so the argument goes, it's a cycle that perpetuates itself.

The money base doesn't have to be finite. It's not a game of tug-of-war between rich and poor. The beauty of capitalism is that your have self-determination of wealth.

Really, that's more of a platitude - one that isn't give enough critical thought, IMO - than a "beauty." A better characterization would be something like, "All things equal, two people have the same chance to obtain X wealth." Except in this case, "all things" really means all things.

For example, LeBron James can make $30 million or so per year playing pro basketball but I can't - I'm not 6'8 and I'm not very good at basketball in any case. Does that mean I haven't worked as hard as LeBron to get where I am? No, it means that the profession I'm reasonably adept at - teaching - isn't valued as much as elite-level athleticism.

Well, if we find a better system--one that punishes cheating and rewards hard work better than this one--I'm all for it.

I don't think that's necessarily the point. Criticising a system doesn't necessarily mean we want to throw it out wholesale; perhaps there are things we can do to make it more fair.

 

[jon1101]

I personally haven't come across any plan or system that works fairly. Maybe it's just a fallacy of humankind, I don't know.

I suspect this is because people, at bottom, don't often want fairness. Capitalism thrives on selfishness. People choose to do what most benefits them and thus capitalism only requires ethics insofar as is necessary to not turn people off from whatever the marketer is trying to convince people to want.

I suspect that no alternate economic system can compensate for the ethical deficiencies of a people, and that no businessman can successfully frustrate their ethical resolve or withstand their censure. Therefore, don't shop at Wal-Mart.

-Jon

 

[psychedelicist]

I think capitalism might be a great idea, if we weren't such a materialistic race. I think McDonalds has enough money that they could afford to pay their employees more than minumum wage.

Actually in a perfect society socialism would probably be the best. Except for the part about mandatory public schooling... if people got paid the same for whatever job they had, everyone could do what they love for a living, but unfortunately, we are once again too materialistic, and instead of this, we think "I can make the same money being a janitor that I can being a doctor, so I'm gonna be a janitor because its easier, even if I really want to be a doctor."

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

The problem isn't capitalism. The problem is the elite using the government to maintain their position. An example: the cosmetology industry has used licensing laws to prevent poor individuals from starting their own businesses to compete with established businesses.

 

[joebudda]

The problem isn't capitalism. The problem is the elite using the government to maintain their position. An example: the cosmetology industry has used licensing laws to prevent poor individuals from starting their own businesses to compete with established businesses.

I believe this.

I think the real people in control are not the politicians they are the heads of these multi-corps. They pay large sums of money to the politicians to pass whatever to further their own agenda. And we don’t even get to vote for them.

Even the media we rely on to inform us of problems get paid by these multi-corps through advertisements. How many times have you heard someone from the media say "we don’t want to offend our advertisers" in some degree or another?

 

[Seeking...]

Personally - I see capitalism as the best option out there. A person who is focused, determined and prepared to make the proper choices can acheive success (and do so without taking advantage of others). Higher education can be expensive, but it should be earned - not given away. Plenty of people go to local junior colleges & transfer to state schools if they are truly dedicated - a college degree is quite attainable. There is nothing noble about being poor, nor ignoble about being wealthy. I hate to say this, but while people must be treated equitably - we are not created equals in all areas. In any given society you will have people who will do well and some who will not given their choices. Capitalism is like anything else - make good choices and over time you will come out ahead, make bad choices and over time you will lag behind. Children born into poverty often stay in poverty because they aren't taught how to make better choices. Children born into the middle class are taught how to make better choices and certain ideals such as delayed gratification are instilled as values. Maybe we would see more rising from poverty if more educators held higher expectations for their charges and didn't seem to accept poverty as a never ending cycle.

P.S. - Something else that bothers me about posts I see - people do not committ crimes because of poverty - they committ crimes because they lack values.

 

[joebudda]

Personally - I see capitalism as the best option out there. A person who is focused, determined and prepared to make the proper choices can acheive success (and do so without taking advantage of others). Higher education can be expensive, but it should be earned - not given away. Plenty of people go to local junior colleges & transfer to state schools if they are truly dedicated - a college degree is quite attainable. There is nothing noble about being poor, nor ignoble about being wealthy. I hate to say this, but while people must be treated equitably - we are not created equals in all areas. In any given society you will have people who will do well and some who will not given their choices. Capitalism is like anything else - make good choices and over time you will come out ahead, make bad choices and over time you will lag behind. Children born into poverty often stay in poverty because they aren't taught how to make better choices. Children born into the middle class are taught how to make better choices and certain ideals such as delayed gratification are instilled as values. Maybe we would see more rising from poverty if more educators held higher expectations for their charges and didn't seem to accept poverty as a never ending cycle.

It is easy to blame the individual isn’t it?

It couldn’t possibility be the system.
Then you have your Enron’s and WorldCom’s. But that is also the fault of the individuals it couldn’t be the system that allows this to happen. Right?

How do you earn getting a higher education?

How can someone in the fields picking your food making barely enough to feed themselves have any extra money to get a higher education? Yes there are grants and such but there is a lot more people that need the education then there are alternative methods of funding an education. As I said you do hear about a case now and again when it does happen but it isn’t the norm.

It isn’t about being lazy because the poor work much harder then the majority. I know you didn’t say anything about laziness.

P.S. - Something else that bothers me about posts I see - people do not committ crimes because of poverty - they committ crimes because they lack values.

So you believe that people are sitting around thinking, I really want to go break a law and go to jail?

The majority of crimes are done out of acts of desperation.

Corporate crime isn’t though. But we also don’t punish corporate crime even though it does much more harm to much more people.

 

[Buzz Dixon]

#1 – Capitalism also separates the classes and when someone falls below the poverty line (in our system) they are forced to break the law out of desperation in order to just survive. Then we put them away in jail where we don’t have to look at them anymore. Out of side out of mind.

You mean like Martha Stewart? Poverty drove her to crime?

I've been spectacularly broke many a time, and I've never turned to crime nor has any member of my family. In fact, the only criminals I know personally are stock fraud con artists and an art thief.

Not exactly starving, if you catch my drift.

#2 – today our agriculture system is more of an assembly line more then a farm. There is no way someone can just buy a piece of land and start a farm without a high startup cost and needing to implement such techniques. If anyone saw first hand the conditions and the processes by which they got the meat they eat they might not eat meat anymore.

Not true. People are buying family farms all over the place.

Now, family farming is a tough way to make a living; I grew up in the rural South and I knew enough farmers to know I'd rather find a less demanding way of making a living, thank you very much. But it can be done and it is being done by millions of people in this country and around the world.

Yeah, if you're squeamish about how your protein gets to you, don't eat meat. Oh the other hand, I love veal.

#3 – I mostly agree. Though because of capitalism the dropping of prices isn’t always a good thing. Lets use Wal-Mart as an example. They come in to communities and put up a “superstore” forcing the smaller mom and pop stores out of business with their “power of price”. In doing so loosing more jobs for the community then making. Thereby strong arming their suppliers to cut prices to where Wal-Mart says it should be in order to put these products on their shelves. In doing so forcing these suppliers to cut local jobs in favor for out of country slave wage jobs just to get their products on the shelves.

In any marketing category you've got room for one or two big guys at the top, usually one guy in the middle, then scores of smaller guys all making a living supplying niche markets.

The way to compete against Wal-Mart is to provide something Wal-mart can't. Wal-Mart can't provide the sort of in-depth customer service a mom & pop can. For example, Wal-Mart can undersell any greenhouse or nursery when it comes to rakes and hoes and graden variety fertilizers. But you want the specialty fertilizers, the exotic house plants, the cheerful courteous staff who knows everything there is to know about gardening (as opposed to Manny from automotive who's just fiulling in today), you go to the moms & pops who specialize in that.

Serious recommendation here: There's a guy named Al Ries who's written a number of really good books and articles on marketing, and you'll be able to find some of his essays online by doing a google search. This guy is a marketing guru and can better explain consumer market dynamics than any college professor. I'm not recommending him 'cuz I'm trying to convert you; I just think you'll be astonished at the myriad levels of complexity in even the simplest of businesses.

#4 – because if someone falls below the poverty line we sweep them up in to jail as explained in reason one.

No, we throw them in jail for breaking laws and murdering, raping, stealing, setting fire to stuff, etc. Our jails are so crowded that judges are looking for any excuse to keep from packing more bodies in.

Here's how to keep people out of jail:
See to it they grow up in a stable family where the biological father is married to the biological mother and both parents have high school diplomas. Doesn't matter what their economic level is, married biological parents with high school diplomas = extreme likelihood of stable, well-adjusted, non-substance dependent, law-abiding citizens.

#5 – Yes on the expense of the poor. Once in a wile you hear of a case where some one escapes the clutches of the poor but the cases are rare. The reality is if someone grew up poor chances are they will always be poor. This poor population keeps continually growing. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

How do we define "poor?" If the bottom ten percent of any population is "poor," then if 80% of the people make a million dollars a year, and 10% make a million and one, and 10% make only nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine, the the second group is "rich" and the last group is "poor."

Look at all the "poor" people today with color TVs, cars, cable.satellite links, cell phones, stero systems, dishwashers, etc., etc., and of course, etc. Most "poor" people in this country would be fabulously wealthy in 2/3rds of the world.

We're the only nation where obesity is a serious problem for welfare and food stamp recipients. Go figure.

"Poor" people are getting richer all the time in terms of material possessions. Their income levels keep rising. Their numbers increase only because everybody's numbers are increasing.

As for the derelict street people, the sad truth is many of them flat out refuse to make any effort to change their situation, even when it's offered to them. Yes, plenty of them do turn their lives around, and yes, we should always try to help those who can be helped, but many of them prefer their existence on the street to any sort of stable environment.

#6 -- The price should be at the cost it takes to supply this demand. When we continually bring down these prices we are forcing ourselves out of local jobs. A big problem in this is that the poor are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they need to find the lowest price in order to make ends meet. In doing this they are only hurting themselves by default. Though many don’t realize it.

Or they could educate themselves to what is happening in the world around them and adjust accordingly.

The old paradigm (sorry to hafta use that word, but it's apt here) of the guy who worked at the mill 50 years to retire with a gold watch and a pension has shifted to the guy who has two or three radically different jobs in his lifetime and manages his own retirement plan.

Jobs are constantly being created, lost, and shifted around; it's just happening at a faster pace than it has in the past.

We need to focus on higher education and make it more readably available to the lower classes the way many of these other countries do. Today it is very hard for someone from the lower class to afford this higher education the way the system is now. Yes there are the few cases that show it can be done but the cases are few and far between. I think this might be one of the key issues involved. People need to keep up with the demands of the need for education in today’s world or we are just hurting ourselves as a whole.

We just oughta return teaching standards to what they were in 1900. A high school graduate then could past most college level classes today.

I've met and dealt with a lotta highly educated people. Let's just say most higher education is wasted and leave it at that.

 

[Seeking...]

It is easy to blame the individual isn’t it?

It couldn’t possibility be the system.
Then you have your Enron’s and WorldCom’s. But that is also the fault of the individuals it couldn’t be the system that allows this to happen. Right?

How do you earn getting a higher education?

How can someone in the fields picking your food making barely enough to feed themselves have any extra money to get a higher education? Yes there are grants and such but there is a lot more people that need the education then there are alternative methods of funding an education. As I said you do hear about a case now and again when it does happen but it isn’t the norm.

It isn’t about being lazy because the poor work much harder then the majority. I know you didn’t say anything about laziness.


So you believe that people are sitting around thinking, I really want to go break a law and go to jail?

The majority of crimes are done out of acts of desperation.

Corporate crime isn’t though. But we also don’t punish corporate crime even though it does much more harm to much more people.

Individuals are generally somewhat responsible for their own position in life.

The Enron and Worldcom fiascoes (sp?) didn't prevent people from working their ways out of poverty.

You earn a higher education by working/creating a way to pay for it.

Provided that someone in the fields has the basic education of K-12, then they should go to a library on their day off. There are numerous grants and scholarships that are not applied for on a regular basis. A librarian could aid them in their search for funds. Do you want to know how many I received for college (and I didn't even play a sport!)?

Please show statistics to show that crimes are committed out of acts of desperation. Please define desperation. I've known my share of crimminals and often they choose what they do because they don't like the alternative of working honestly for less pay. Sometimes they feel they are better than the jobs available to them. Sometimes they feel they deserve more than they are getting. Sometimes the crime is simply more attractive and no one thinks they are going to jail when they commit the crime.

 

[Lifesaver]

The biggest problem I see with society today I feel is capitalism.

It really depends on what you mean by the term, Joebudda. If you say "capitalism" as to mean the love of money, greed and consumerism of today's society, coupled with the notion that the economy should be separated from morality, I agree.
If you say "capitalism" as to mean the right of private property and freedom of initiative (anyone can use their property how they wish, work at anything they want to when they want to, and sell and buy what they have), then I strongly disagree. It is these rights and the guarantee of market freedom that makes it so that enables the world population to live much better (the whole population) than it ever could in any other system.

With capitalism we are encouraging the separation of classes. We continually admire someone who goes and gets rich on the expanse of others and totally ignore how the poor population is growing and keeps getting poorer.

Here you are confusing the esteem wich rich people get for being rich, which I agree is completely wrong, and a wrong fact: that poor people are getting poorer, which is completely absurd.
If you compare the standard of living, or the real income, of almost any country over the last decades, you'll see they've got richer.
The population is buying more products every time. If they are buying more, it means they are richer.

Think of it like this. You have a table with many concave places where water/fluid can collect (concave places represents the population, water represents money). Now we tilt the table so the water starts to empty from most of the concave places and collects in just a few. This is how capitalism works.

No, this is not an apt analogy at all. "Tilting" the table would be subsidies, trade barriers, excessive taxes and labour laws, etc, which a group at the expense of society.

We only have so much money and if the rich keep getting richer there is less money for the rest of the population to survive on.

This is not true.
First: production generates wealth.

Second: whenever two people engage in a free exchange, both win (if both of them have enough knowledge, that is). It is a very easy thing to prove beyond all doubt that two people who trade have more than they ever could have if they produced everything they needed.

Today we have these huge multi-corporations lying off tens of thousands of workers to outsource jobs to countries where they can pay these new workers pretty much slave wages. Then put out a press release saying how much money they have saved this year.

If the workers in poorer countries are getting wages which do not allow them to survive frugally, then the companies are indeed doing something wrong.
However, if these foreign workers get a livable wage, you have nothing to complain about; the products of these companies, given the lower salaries they pay now, become a lot cheaper, and that is good for the whole American society.
By spending less on their goods, there is more money in the USA to start new business and generate more jobs.

I like to cite this emblematic example of "job saving" policy, which shows what an absurd thing it is:
In Mexico City's airport the passengers are not allowed to get luggage carts to carry their bags. If they want help, they need to hire one of the baggage carriers (who have their own carts) who walk around the airport.
This happens because the Mexican government has agreed with the union of baggage carriers to organize the airport in this way; if the carts were available to the passengers, these baggage carriers would lose their jobs.

But it is obvious that these men must lose their jobs. Their service is completely useless, and people just pay for it because the government forbids them to get it done on their own.

Likewise, the jobs in many American companies right now are as useless as the Mexico airport luggage carriers, but since companies are not allowed to get them elsewhere, they have to stick with these more expensive and less efficient workers. And who pays the bill? The American society as a whole, which has to pay more for the same things.
If the firms are allowed to get jobs where jobs are more efficient, not only this helps to push the social indicators of poorer countries up, it is good for USA itself.
Wasting resources on unnecessary services is one good way to stunt growth, and therefore generate poverty.

If the government prohibitted personal cars, and only allowed cab drivers to have them, this would generate a lot of jobs. However, people would waste a lot of money. They would buy less of other things (since more of their income goes to taxi fees), causing many firms to sack workers too.

In short, every policy which seeks to protect the jobs of a certain class ends up giving this class privileges at the expense of the whole population.

This causes an absence of working wage jobs so these workers (more times then not) need to get a less paying job to survive. Thereby forcing people who depended on these less paying jobs to get an even lesser paying job. This creates a sort of domino effect. And we encourage this by giving tax cuts to these companies for outsourcing these jobs.

But you did know that the American economy is growing as we speak, don't you? And jobs are being generated.
Yes, part of this is due to the natural recovering from the recession, but it is also due to the fact that firms are finding ways to produce more, and sell more cheaply.
When a firm receives a tax cut, they sell their goods more cheaply. And this doesn't happen because the company is feeling charitable; not at all. It is also easy to prove that, when they receive a tax cut, the firm will make more profit if they decrease their prices.
And by making more profit, they grow, and hire more people. And the population gets richer, and buys more.

If your criticism of society is based on our disordered love of money and consumption, on our disregard for morality in economic life, and respecting people more just because they are rich, I wholeheartedly agree.
However, if you want to go down the old and long ago proved wrong line of denying market freedom and imposing barriers to protect some people, we are on opposite sides.

 

[Lifesaver]

To blame crime on poverty is completely wrong. There are a lot of honest poor people, and it is even insulting to say their situation inevitably leads to crime.

Not to mention all the middle-class and rich criminals who exist as well...

The cause of crime is the choice to do what is wrong. Only a stronger morality and faith can really help to bring that down.

 

[CaDan]

Down deep under stuff, your man CaDan has a degree in Economics.

What has beeen defended in this thread is free market economies. What has NOT been defended is the post-industrial capitalism those of us in the West live under. What has NOT been defended is the separation of ownership of an enterprise and liability.

Here's my view:

Capitalism is a powerful tool. Capitalist economies can create more consumer goods more efficiently than any other economic system humans have tried so far. These sorts of economies can react quickly to changes in prices and costs. They have minimal dead weight loss due to inefficiency.

Here's the problem: Capitalist economies create inequality. Capitalist economies need a certain level of unemployment to work at peak efficiency. While a society AS A WHOLE benefits from this sort of economic system, SOME will be harmed by the system.

Here's the solution: Democratic government. The mass of the people can use their power simply as a mass of people (not a mass of economic units) to take the edge off of capitalism. Some of that efficiency can be traded for equality. We can fight about how to make those trades, but very few would argue we should not make those trades at all.

Even the democratic government solution isn't perfect, but it is pretty good. At least as good as anything humans have tried so far. Maybe we will find something better for organizing the economic activity of millions of people; maybe we won't.

Of course, the morality of individual Christians is much different than this. We value things differently. A person who is useless to the economic system is valuable to God AND MUST BE VALUED BY FOLLOWERS OF JESUS.

I can assent to an economic system that is, at its core, based on greed and usury , as long as some of the benefits of that system are redistributed. I view it sort of like meat offered to idols . . . .