This post is about capitalism vs socialism….
We Americans seem to be deathly afraid of the term socialism….why?
Well basically because of the 50s Red Scare and it has just kept growing from those days.
Awhile back I wrote a post….
With that firmly in your mind there is a very good piece written by Nick Licata….
While Wikipedia identifies two dozen different kinds of socialism, two primary approaches support its goal of upholding a society’s welfare. One approach is to realistically regulate the marketplace to ensure it provides everyone in society with their basic needs, allowing them to lead a satisfactory life. The other is pursuing the ideal communal society without a marketplace that forces competition for obtaining basic needs.
Capitalism’s active practice is maintaining a marketplace to exchange goods, services, and access to them through a price system. Money has the greatest exchangeability value because it allows for the acquisition of various types of resources, one of the most critical being political power. However, exchanges can be made through a barter system, in which tangible items, including human labor, can be directly exchanged between seller and buyer. This was the dominant system before the advent of written history.
Capitalism’s belief system is limited to preserving the marketplace because it results in greater accumulation of resources that can be used for many purposes. There is no aspiration to create a new society; rather, it is to protect the current market-based one. It is a continuation of Adam Smith’s philosophy, as presented in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which appeared just as the Industrial Age was dawning in the late 1700s. He believed that individuals pursuing their self-interest in the marketplace would benefit society through increased productivity and wealth.
Socialism as a practice can be seen as a popular response to the marketplace system that replaced the barter system. It aimed to regulate the marketplace so that no concentration of material or social advantages occurred to the extent that it disrupted a community’s cohesion.
Socialism, as a pronounced belief system challenging the marketplace, emerged in the 19th century, when the term “socialist” was introduced. It was first used to describe the effort to create cooperative businesses and communities as an alternative to capitalism’s marketplace economy.
Unfortunately to fully understand is to say that critical thinking needs to be foremost in one’s mind….but sadly those days are gone….that is why I try to give my reader as much information as I can without too much thought.
It is a complex subject that needs more study than one can receive here but at least it is a start.
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