Dota says:
I think Roger Hill is onto something here. Robert mistakes capitalism for opportunism and sociopathic behavior in general. As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve seen exploitation in non-capitalist societies during various periods of history. Feudalism and Caste immediately come to mind.
Lee Kwan Yew once said that in order to spread the wealth around, a society must first create it. Capitalism is a good engine for wealth creation. Historically, its egalitarian societies that have been expansionist. The Arabs and Mongols come to mind. They were expansionist because they failed to create any wealth for themselves. Once they acquired wealth through conquest, they divided it amongst themselves equally (more or less).
It’s obvious that the Rockerfellers/Fords etc. represent a ‘capitalism’ that is alien to Smith’s wealth of nations. Capitalism is merely privately owned factors of production. The elites mentioned above represent plutocratic sociopathic insanity at its highest degree.
Under capitalism, all manner and degrees of opportunism, corruption, lying, cheating, stealing and sociopathic behavior becomes positively epidemic.
That is because in pursuit of money, humans will do just about anything: lie, cheat, steal, become opportunists or corrupt, and behave sociopathically in every manner and degree possible. They will also commit tons of crime and will tend to abuse women in all sorts of ways.
We saw much less of this behavior in the socialist societies of the last century. When these socieites such as Eastern Europe, the USSR and China went to capitalism, the crime rate went through the roof, entire nations became corrupt to the core, and the abuse of women increased dramatically. In fact, some socieites were almost completely taken over by organized crime. Russia to this day is significantly controlled by Organized Crime. Organized crime elements run Russia and rule it via the state.
In the past century, the most egalitarian societies committed little aggression, started few wars and committed few acts of conquest in order to obtain more land and acquire new markets and resources. On the contrary, almost all aggression in the past century was committed by unequal capitalist (and imperialist) countries trying to conquer new lands and peoples for new markets and to steal their resources for the capitalists.
In fact a world regime of capitalism virtually guarantees almost continuous wars among capitalist countries over dividing markets and resources. Capitalist countries will always fight each other over markets and resources. This is almost guaranteed under capitalism, and there does not seem to be any way around it. A world of capitalism is a world of constant war with no way out.
Under more socialist systems, crime, corruption, abuse of women, wars of aggression, homelessness, hunger and preventive disease are dramatically reduced, as is all manner of egoistic sociopathic behavior.
As those societies transition to a capitalist model, crime, corruption, abuse of women, aggressive (imperialist) wars, homelessness, hunger and deaths due to preventive disease often skyrocket.
Bottom line is capitalism is bad for your health.