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.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/31/a-rational-view-of-capitalism-vs-socialism-in-america-and-history

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.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

Educate, Agitate

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

cogito ergo agito

You damn right he is a f**king disease!

Like a nagging pain that will not go away, like a boil that keeps on giving…..

Since his entry into the political sphere I have heard many people call him a disease especially with hatred and sexist bullshit….but is he really the disease or just a symptom of what is happening in this country?

Robert Reich tries to explain what the Hell is happening in this country.

The system is out of whack. It needs fundamental change.

If you want to understand why the American system has become so dysfunctional, and what you might do to help it to meet the needs of average people, you need to reassess many of your likely assumptions about it.

1. First, forget politics as you’ve come to see it as electoral contests between Democrats and Republicans. Think power. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system, and the vast majority who have little or none.

2. Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the “free market” and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.

3. For the same reason, don’t try to separate economics from politics. They’re two sides of the same issue. (Be suspicious of anyone who tries to separate them.)

4. Forget the standard economic goals of higher growth and greater efficiency. The issue is who benefits from more growth and efficiency.

5. Don’t be dazzled by “corporate social responsibility.” Most of it is public relations. Corporations won’t voluntarily sacrifice shareholder returns unless laws require them to. Even then, be skeptical of laws unless they’re enforced and backed by big penalties. Large corporations and the super-rich ignore laws when the penalties for violating them are small relative to the gains for breaking them. Fines are then simply very manageable costs of doing business.

6. Don’t assume that we’re locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism — for the very rich. Most Americans are subject to harsh capitalism.

7. Don’t define “national competitiveness” as the profitability of large American corporations. Those corporations are now global, with no allegiance to America. Real national competitiveness lies in the productivity of the American people — which depends on their education, their health, and the infrastructure linking them together.

8. You can also forget the ups and downs of the business cycle. Focus instead on systemic changes that have caused the wealth and power of a few to dramatically increase during the last 40 years at the expense of the many.

9. Forget the old idea that corporations succeed by becoming better, cheaper, or faster than their competitors. They now succeed mainly by increasing their monopoly power.

10. Forget any traditional definition of finance. Think instead of a giant gambling casino in which bets are made on large flows of money, and bets are made on those bets (called derivatives). The biggest winners have better inside-information than anyone else.

11. Don’t assume the system is stable. It moves through vicious spirals and virtuous cycles. We are now in a vicious spiral. The challenge is to turn the vicious into the virtuous.

12. Don’t believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone’s future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they’re born into.

13. Don’t separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides.

14. Think systemically. Most people’s incomes haven’t risen for four decades, and they are becoming less economically secure. Meanwhile, climate change is intensifying competition for arable land and potable water around the world, generating larger flows of refugees and immigrants. Together they allow demagogues to fuel bigotry by blaming immigrants for the stagnant incomes and economic insecurity.

15. Don’t confuse attractive policy proposals with changes in the system as a whole. Even if enacted, such proposals at most mitigate systemic problems. Solving those systemic problems requires altering the allocation of power.

16. Most importantly, you need to understand the nature of power — who possesses it and why, how it is wielded, and for what purposes.

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, power is the capacity to set the public agenda — to frame big choices, to influence legislators, and to get laws enacted or prevent them from being enacted, to assert one’s will on the world.

This disease has a cure the problem is that people are afraid of the cure more than they fear the disease.

Progressivism can bring about a cure….it is not an instant cure but a cure nonetheless.

Learn stuff then go take the cure.

Educate, Agitate

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cogito ergo agito