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stellauk -> RE: Don't waste your time watching the 10/16 'debate'... (10/16/2012 5:10:10 PM)
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
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ORIGINAL: stellauk
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
Don't you understand that actually allowing free trade helps everyone out? It increases competition....
...which creates unemployment, promotes wage enslavement, exploitation of workers and traps people in poverty.
How does it do any of those things?
It starts with culture. Both the United States and Britain are part of English language culture - this is a culture the whole world wants to share and be a part of. People all over the world know who Elvis Presley is, the Beatles, you can buy Coca Cola pretty much all over the world.
Yet visit any major city in the US or UK and you will find people sleeping on the street, you will find people who are destitute, you will find people who are malnourished, people who are trapped in poverty for generations. You will find people with different levels of impairment, both physical and mental who are either waiting for treatment (in the UK) or unable to pay their medical bills (in the US).
Some twenty years ago out of every four dollars spent in the world, one dollar went back to the US. Today the United States has a national debt of $16 trillion.
Now you can - if you adhere to a belief in the free market ideology - claim that some people don't aspire like others. This is why people on welfare are stigmatized - they don't aspire, and they don't produce. But this isn't about people per se, it's about opportunities. That is what all this is about - some people either cannot make use of existing opportunities or the opportunities simply don't exist. This applies just as much to the trading floor on Wall Street or the Stock Exchange as it does to people at the very bottom of society.
Competition invariably involves a denial of opportunity for someone. What works better is cooperation. This is why the free market economy and free trade arguments are inherently flawed. There's the assumption that people are operating under the same or similar values, which isn't the case.
Some degree of free trade is necessary in certain fields, but not as the basis to run an economy or society.
We have just had a global economic crisis. Here we have austerity measures and yet have to bail out banks and pay ever increasing subsidies for our railways.
Between the period 1990 and 2005 I lived in Eastern Europe, and spent the most important years in Polish history living in Poland. I saw the transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall from the early stages to what it is now. When everyone was celebrating the collapse of communism I was predicting a similar collapse of the free market economy.
Many people have laughed at me for my predictions and opinions.
Now take a look around you and tell me what you see. That global economic crisis to me if anything was the collapse of the free market economy.
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The problem with free trade and competition is that there's always someone bigger than you with more money and more control and at the other end people left with nothing bar welfare.
The people in the middle, i.e. the middle class are always going to get squeezed.
And, the solution would be....?
Ouch that's a dangerous question, as I'm somewhat of an evolved Marxist.
However... picking up the pieces would be a great start.
What can you do? What do you enjoy doing? Where are you going in life? these are three of the most important questions in life. Everybody asks themselves these questions, and we devote our lives to finding the answers.
I feel we need to work towards more of a needs based economy where people have free access to opportunities - not equal opportunities, but free access to opportunities. We have to pay a lot more attention to cultural development, giving people opportunities to develop their creativity and share it with others.
Business isn't really about money, it's about ideas. But then again if you look at it a certain way business has got much more to do with cooperation than it has with competition.
I very much adhere to the Marxist principle of the worker owning the means of their production so that they can support themselves through sustainable occupation. Sure, having millions of people out of work doesn't affect the annual figures of the corporations or their profit margins but it sure hurts society.
We have got to rediscover a sense of responsibility for our communities and society. Expecting other people (the mythical 'someone else') or politicians to shoulder that responsibility doesn't work, neither does blaming them.
We fail at poverty and welfare because we don't do enough. Giving people money because they have no other income isn't enough. It doesn't address the issue of the lack of opportunities or why that person is unable to make use of existing opportunities. We have to accept that some people cannot and should not work but generally speaking we all need to have a sense of responsibility towards the community or society we live in.
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