Thursday, November 12, 2009
a thought on capitalism
People who say that communism failed because workers there lacked the profit motive to succeed are wrong. After a year of recession, it should be obvious that it is not the carrot that drives productivity, but the stick. In this case, the stick is unemployment. Watch productivity numbers, and you will see that productivity goes up whenever unemployment does. This is not only because there are often fewer employees to do the same amount of work, but because the remaining employees are worried about keeping their own jobs. Communists never had to worry about losing their jobs, but we do.
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3 comments:
Nice image.
yeah, where do you find these images, Dave?
Personally I always thought the Marxist variation of communism failed because Karl Marx assumed that the working class good never improve themselves from an educational standpoint. In a similar sense, as long as blue collar workers stay in their economic circle, capitalism will never truly benefit them.
I spend a lot of time on Google Images. A lot of time. I find that good search words are the key.
I'm not sure we've ever seen actual Marxist communism. Certainly not in Russia or China. Those places merely changed the labels and the people wearing them, then continued on pretty much as before. Perhaps in Cuba, where things seem pretty good, considering.
Education is the key to democracy also, not just economic prosperity. In the perpetual battle between labor and management, labor is again losing badly to the Country Club of those who get to run things. Until the balance is tipped a bit more our way, it wont matter much how educated we are. As long as they can simply take away our jobs (and get bonus pay for doing so), we'll be willing to work harder for less.
Plus, it seems that They (you know, Them) are trying their best to make access to learning (and the piece of paper that declares one to be "educated") as difficult as possible. In the 25 years since I first went to school at the University of Texas at Austin, state tuition has gone from $4 an hour for a resident, to around $340 now.
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