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graciew
Guest
Code:
What for?
How can one understand poverty under these lists ?
Where of all these have you lived in or really know for some reason?
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
Authoritarianism fails. That has been the story of mankind.
Communism collapsed.
People FLEE from Communism and authoritarian regimes.
Capitalism WORKS!
Capitalism has raised a billion people out of poverty … just in a few short years.
Look at the example of North Korea and South Korea. Side by side comparisons.
For example:
Bono: ‘Capitalism Takes More People Out of Poverty Than Aid’
By Michael W. Chapman | March 26, 2015 | 3:30 PM EDT
U2 frontman Bono, who is also an investor, philanthropist, and Christian told students at Georgetown University that real economic growth, not government aid, is what lifts people and countries out of poverty long-term, emphasizing that “entrepreneurial capitalism” is the key to prosperity.
“Some of Africa is rising, and some of Africa is stuck," said Bono while speaking at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business to about 700 students. “The question is whether the rising bit will pull the rest of Africa up, or whether the other Africa will weigh the continent down. Which will it be? The stakes here aren’t just about them.”
“Imagine for a second this last global recession [in 2007-2009] but without the economic growth of China and India, without the hundreds of millions of newly minted middle class folks who now buy American and European goods – imagine that,” said Bono. “Think about the last 5 years.”
Then, holding his forehead with his right hand, Bono, who has an estimated wealth of $600 million, said, “Rock star preaches capitalism—wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just cannot believe it.”
“But commerce is real,” he said. "That’s what you’re about here. It’s real. Aid is just a stop-gap. Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid – of course, we know that.”
Bono made those remarks on Nov. 12, 2012, but they were not widely reported by the so-called mainstream press, which is largely liberal, pro-big government, and anti-capitalist.
[Link doesn’t work. Sorry.]
Communism collapsed.
People FLEE from Communism and authoritarian regimes.
Capitalism WORKS!
Capitalism has raised a billion people out of poverty … just in a few short years.
Look at the example of North Korea and South Korea. Side by side comparisons.
For example:
Bono: ‘Capitalism Takes More People Out of Poverty Than Aid’
By Michael W. Chapman | March 26, 2015 | 3:30 PM EDT
U2 frontman Bono, who is also an investor, philanthropist, and Christian told students at Georgetown University that real economic growth, not government aid, is what lifts people and countries out of poverty long-term, emphasizing that “entrepreneurial capitalism” is the key to prosperity.
“Some of Africa is rising, and some of Africa is stuck," said Bono while speaking at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business to about 700 students. “The question is whether the rising bit will pull the rest of Africa up, or whether the other Africa will weigh the continent down. Which will it be? The stakes here aren’t just about them.”
“Imagine for a second this last global recession [in 2007-2009] but without the economic growth of China and India, without the hundreds of millions of newly minted middle class folks who now buy American and European goods – imagine that,” said Bono. “Think about the last 5 years.”
Then, holding his forehead with his right hand, Bono, who has an estimated wealth of $600 million, said, “Rock star preaches capitalism—wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just cannot believe it.”
“But commerce is real,” he said. "That’s what you’re about here. It’s real. Aid is just a stop-gap. Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid – of course, we know that.”
Bono made those remarks on Nov. 12, 2012, but they were not widely reported by the so-called mainstream press, which is largely liberal, pro-big government, and anti-capitalist.
[Link doesn’t work. Sorry.]
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
You are NOT chained to your desk!It is definitely a form of slavery. We are chained to our desks and work like robots for rich people disguised as corporations . Also they exploit Mexicans to do all the unskilled labor in this country, because Americans, who have known better wages, don’t want to work for these capitalist slave drivers. And look at what you end up with. A lousy social security payment when we grow old, horrible mandatory medical care, and with this we are supposed to be satisfied.
Get up and leave!
Go find a better job!
Start your own business!
Do both!
Go to school and learn better skills.
And look at what you end up with. A lousy social security payment when we grow old, horrible mandatory medical care, and with this we are supposed to be satisfied
These are government solutions. These are not Capitalist solutions!
At one time, Social Security law allowed people to set up competing better systems … but they sure stopped allowing that. For example, Galveston County, Texas set up a system that pays out three times better than the Federal Social Security system.
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graciew
Guest
Monte,is this the answer to my question?
If choosing to paint with a broad brush,as you have,and you had asked me…all the countries you have compared and tossed somewhere over there with no apparent relation,may have another explanation for the choice of immigration before political or economical and from a mere human survival perspective : safety.
No matter how rich or poor,left,right,here or there, life is priority one.
But since I really have never been to Rusia,Nigeria,Somalia and Cuba nor have actually experienced life there personally,I can only just speculate based on safety indexes and probably my basic instinct .
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Robert_Sock
Guest
Capitalism seems to work because when a country becomes capitalistic they receive all sorts of government aid from the capitalistic nations, in addition to high tech knowledge.
Again, capitalism was paramount during the industrial era, but a new day is dawning where capitalism will vanish. Not in our lifetime, but eventually.
I also predict that “spiritual rewards” will abound sometime in the future and act as a supernatural motivation to work, with nobody knowing how much other people are earning. This, I believe, is already underway in certain sectors of our society. Under the right conditions, even a homeless person could experience great spiritual joy!
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
… horrible mandatory medical care … is only a few years old. The essence of a socialist system.It is definitely a form of slavery. We are chained to our desks and work like robots for rich people disguised as corporations . Also they exploit Mexicans to do all the unskilled labor in this country, because Americans, who have known better wages, don’t want to work for these capitalist slave drivers. And look at what you end up with. A lousy social security payment when we grow old, horrible mandatory medical care, and with this we are supposed to be satisfied.
Before that, you could choose your own doctor.
But that is no longer permitted.
You used to be able to search out your own payment system … my preference was HSA and high deductible catastrophic. These were free market voluntary solutions. Capitalist systems. GONE!
Poor people had options, as well. GONE!
But I am now forced into a one size fits all [and very expensive] government system.
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
One. Capitalism is not just good at producing wealth. It is not merely superior at producing wealth. It is, in fact, the sole way of producing wealth. The sole means of raising the standard of living of all is the intelligent application of capital into the process of production.
Two. Socialism is not good at distributing wealth. Rather it is good at achieving political power for the distributors. It is vote farming on a large scale, and it has a corrosive effect on society.
The progressive Blue Model now (as of 2011, the year of the Census report) provides welfare benefits to 23.1 percent of American residents and benefits of all types to 49.2 percent of us. According to the Census Bureau, 99 percent of families below the poverty level own a refrigerator. Following the 1980 Census, only 84 percent of solidly middle-class families owned a refrigerator. The “poor” now are substantially better off materially than the middle class of only thirty years ago, and yet welfare benefits are now reaching the largest percentage of Americans ever.
In addition to 151 million people who receive government benefits, 30 million have jobs in the public sector paid by taxpayers. That’s 181 million paid or supported by government out of a total population of 307 million! Are we, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the earth, really that needy, or is this just power politics?
Three. How society can benefit from the best of both models is to dump socialism and return to our original way of dispensing welfare. Capitalism is the private-sector component of free enterprise. But free enterprise also has a civil-sector component, one that we would be smart to return to, as I’ll get to shortly.
It is important to note that capitalism does 97 percent of the job of distributing wealth. How? Businesses are simply spending machines constantly cutting payroll checks, checks to landlords, to suppliers, to vendors, to service providers, for equipment leases, for advertising, for car payments and on and on. If you somehow are not on the receiving end of that, you probably are benefiting on the flip side, as a consumer. That’s because businesses are also innovating machines, constantly figuring out how to provide a better product at a lower price.
You almost have to prefer a hermit existence or have profound health issues not to be directly benefiting from capitalism. That’s where the free enterprise in the civil sector comes in. We are all free to be social entrepreneurs, to start or to contribute to or to work or volunteer for charities, churches, foundations, social and fraternal organizations and similar. Unlike the bureaucracies of the Blue Model, these organizations offer real compassion. They can offer custom solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. And they can change to meet the changing needs of their communities; indeed, if the need ceases to be evident, they will begin to have difficulty raising money (unlike government services). Finally, those in need have their choice of local organizations to approach.
Were we to simply get government back to its proper scope, return education and health care to the private and civil sectors where they belong, unburden private-sector free enterprise from excess regulation and return civil-sector free enterprise to robustness, we could generate far more wealth and distribute it much better.
Two. Socialism is not good at distributing wealth. Rather it is good at achieving political power for the distributors. It is vote farming on a large scale, and it has a corrosive effect on society.
The progressive Blue Model now (as of 2011, the year of the Census report) provides welfare benefits to 23.1 percent of American residents and benefits of all types to 49.2 percent of us. According to the Census Bureau, 99 percent of families below the poverty level own a refrigerator. Following the 1980 Census, only 84 percent of solidly middle-class families owned a refrigerator. The “poor” now are substantially better off materially than the middle class of only thirty years ago, and yet welfare benefits are now reaching the largest percentage of Americans ever.
In addition to 151 million people who receive government benefits, 30 million have jobs in the public sector paid by taxpayers. That’s 181 million paid or supported by government out of a total population of 307 million! Are we, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the earth, really that needy, or is this just power politics?
Three. How society can benefit from the best of both models is to dump socialism and return to our original way of dispensing welfare. Capitalism is the private-sector component of free enterprise. But free enterprise also has a civil-sector component, one that we would be smart to return to, as I’ll get to shortly.
It is important to note that capitalism does 97 percent of the job of distributing wealth. How? Businesses are simply spending machines constantly cutting payroll checks, checks to landlords, to suppliers, to vendors, to service providers, for equipment leases, for advertising, for car payments and on and on. If you somehow are not on the receiving end of that, you probably are benefiting on the flip side, as a consumer. That’s because businesses are also innovating machines, constantly figuring out how to provide a better product at a lower price.
You almost have to prefer a hermit existence or have profound health issues not to be directly benefiting from capitalism. That’s where the free enterprise in the civil sector comes in. We are all free to be social entrepreneurs, to start or to contribute to or to work or volunteer for charities, churches, foundations, social and fraternal organizations and similar. Unlike the bureaucracies of the Blue Model, these organizations offer real compassion. They can offer custom solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. And they can change to meet the changing needs of their communities; indeed, if the need ceases to be evident, they will begin to have difficulty raising money (unlike government services). Finally, those in need have their choice of local organizations to approach.
Were we to simply get government back to its proper scope, return education and health care to the private and civil sectors where they belong, unburden private-sector free enterprise from excess regulation and return civil-sector free enterprise to robustness, we could generate far more wealth and distribute it much better.
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
I don’t understand why people object to voluntary free exchanges.
If I walk into a coffee shop and they hand me a cup of coffee and I hand them two dollars and they say thank you and I say thank you, that seems like a perfect voluntary free exchange.
What’s the difference whether I spend the day helping them and they give me some money in return and we’re both happy with the deal?
Why do I need some outsider yelling at me that it’s a bad deal?
If “I” think it’s a bad deal, I won’t go back.
If I save up my money and buy a share of stock in a company and buy more shares and they pay me dividends, based on their selling a lot of coffee, seems like a good deal to me.
Or, I could buy shares in an electric company or in a company that makes computers .
Seems to me that these voluntary associations are the essence of Capitalism.
Would I buy shares in a government run utility? No!
Why?
Because government run “enterprises” are notoriously poorly operated … I look at all the scandals with wind power and solar power!
If a private company was poorly run, it would go out of business.
But generally, government run things do not go out of business.
If I walk into a coffee shop and they hand me a cup of coffee and I hand them two dollars and they say thank you and I say thank you, that seems like a perfect voluntary free exchange.
What’s the difference whether I spend the day helping them and they give me some money in return and we’re both happy with the deal?
Why do I need some outsider yelling at me that it’s a bad deal?
If “I” think it’s a bad deal, I won’t go back.
If I save up my money and buy a share of stock in a company and buy more shares and they pay me dividends, based on their selling a lot of coffee, seems like a good deal to me.
Or, I could buy shares in an electric company or in a company that makes computers .
Seems to me that these voluntary associations are the essence of Capitalism.
Would I buy shares in a government run utility? No!
Why?
Because government run “enterprises” are notoriously poorly operated … I look at all the scandals with wind power and solar power!
If a private company was poorly run, it would go out of business.
But generally, government run things do not go out of business.
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
That seems a very nice cosy arrangement, where both you and the coffee shop are in agreement. Now stand in front of the children and labourers and say I am happy paying two dollars for a cup of coffee, are you happy to work all day for two dollars producing my coffee? You certainly would not put yourself in that kind of slavery, why would you expect someone else to?
Good for you, but the harvesters trapped into producing your coffee don’t have that same cosy choice, there is probably no other employment around for them
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
When the beans are being shipped, commodity traders buy and sell the beans,making tens and hundreds of thousands in a very short time. They are the most useless people in the chain of people involved in the coffee business, give me a couple of good reasons why they are even necessary.
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
Somehow, someone needs to arrange a transaction.
That’s what brokers do.
Middlemen.
What currency do you use?
What is everybody’s time schedule?
What size bags work best?
How do you grade the beans?
How many kilos so as not to overwhelm the transportation mechanism?
Who works out all the details?
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
Are you absolutely certain about how much coffee pickers get paid and that they REALLY TRULY are slaves?
Maybe if you went to one of the coffee bean countries and paid more than two dollars you could revolutionize the coffee industry. Seriously. Show them the right way to do it.
I just now opened a solicitation for a donation to Haiti.
The U.S. Congress has provided hundreds of millions in aid already with promises of much more. You can do a search here at CAF. AND the various churches have provided huge amounts. There have been assertions that the aid has been misapplied.
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
If you visit one of the coffee countries, and stop at a local restaurant, how much would they charge you for a cup of coffee?
Maybe you could open your own coffee business there.
Maybe you could open your own coffee business there.
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stinkcat_14
Guest
In my experience, around 50 cents. But that is at the nicer places in the area.
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stinkcat_14
Guest
The problem is, capitalism does not really exist in a pure form. The US has not been a capitalist country for about 100 years or so. We are really a mix of socialism and capitalism. The most conservative governments never make the country more capitalist, they just slow the growth of socialism. Yet we still create wealth, even in the presence of socialism.
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
Do a Google search, workers are paid a pittance, they are forced into debt and slavery, their children are then forced to work long hours also, this explains how it works.
Coffee workers should be paid a living wage, they should not have to depend on charity.
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Eric_Hyom
Guest
Commodity traders seem to just speculate on price fluctuations.
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GEddie
Guest
And that’s not a bad thing.
One hundred years ago, the economy still had robber barons, monopolization, and lack of consumer quality or natural resource protection. Dead cats in hotdogs and burning rivers, anybody?
If you are calling all forms of business regulation by government “socialism”, then socialism is, to an extent, necessary.
ICXC NIKA
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petra22
Guest
I never was good at economics, but I am enjoying this banter!!!
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
I did do a Google search.
I read up on what the articles said about both the coffee workers and the banana workers.
Both sets of articles said basically the same thing … that the workers are grossly underpaid. And that they live in horrible conditions.
The problem is that I know for a fact that the articles about the banana workers are presenting false information.
From several years of work in the banana field, I KNOW that the banana workers are well paid. And that the companies make sure that the workers live well. Why? Because if the bananas are not handled properly AND gently, that defects will not show up until the bananas are ripened and arrive at the store. All an employee needs to do is to rub a green banana and there will be no sign of it until much later at the store when the rub marks show up as black scars. Unhappy employees can easily sabotage the product and NO ONE wil know. But they don’t damage the product. We know that from looking at the bananas at the stores. AND they put their labels on the banana, brand name bananas, so you know which banana to buy in future.
And when the bananas are harvested the workers need to know which bunches to pick because of the growing cycle. AND the plants must be tended carefully.
chiquita.com/The-Chiquita-Difference/Improving-Lives/Wages-Benefits.aspx
chiquitabananas.com/banana-information/find-banana-farm-map.aspx
I also know … I was there … that a public speaker denounced the banana companies because they “monopolized” the railroad … which is false … the banana company BUILT the railroad which ran from the farms which they built to the shipping pier, which they also built. The farms were in areas where no one lived because they needed certain soils and water conditions. And people did not like living in those places. But the speaker spoke specifically against the banana companies.
So, I can tell you that the information on Google about banana companies and their employees is false. I have been there.
I can only judge that the information about the coffee companies and coffee workers is similarly false.
What I would suggest is that you personally visit a banana growing country and a coffee growing country. They are all over the world. Visit and spend some time and see for yourself. Google is fun but sometimes provides false information.
In addition, before you judge others, may I suggest you view this video. I came across it this morning and found it to be very informative.
youtube.com/watch?v=rffJJndOw4c&ebc=ANyPxKp8fkAaIiDV3xb8B9bJx0p-0wWM9SSWpmBuzeIGQARwNGSlWHNawSjFftts-NbmOPoRspNmeHHa5HhEElnfdWoICXjjBQ&nohtml5=False
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