It's Not Capitalism That Causes Poverty, It's the Lack of It

"We must go and exploit them as the ruthless, red in tooth and claw, capitalists and free marketeers that we are. Simply because it is the absence of capitalism and markets that allows poverty, their presence that defeats it."

I believe the same argument was made for black slavery.

That black slaves were better off than their African counterparts, therefore slavery is good.

Same logic, different time.

BrainInAJar• 11 years ago

Right, because if you have more capitalism, the poor just die off like they're supposed to. The system works!

joelbm242• 11 years ago

every economy is capitalistic, in that the goal is to produce capital, who owns that capital is where the differentiation lies, in a purely socialist society the government would own it, in a free market society those that produced it would own it and trade it with whomever they saw fit. free being defined as the absence of coercion. a poor person is by definition someone without capital. so if when looking at reasons why that person isn't getting capital through trade or by creating it, one needs to look at the coercive forces preventing them from obtaining it and seeing how in poor countries and even in western countries the most coercive force is the government one could draw the conclusion that the government is causing poverty by preventing people from creating and trading capital in ways that they themselves see fit. to gain any kinda of capital through trade in a free market society one has to convince people that what they have is worth trading, thus any profits are earned through both parties own volition. it's this voluntary relationship that is at the heart of the free market and progress, when you have entities such as the government or institutions that use the coercive nature of the government that's when this system breaks down.

1812Overture• 11 years ago

In a purely "socialist" society the people who produce the capital (the workers) would own it, in a purely "free market" the capital is owned by a "capitalist class" who own the products of their laborers efforts.

I'm generally a free market guy, but words mean stuff. No purely free market or purely socialist system has ever or will ever exist.

intopieces• 11 years ago

Is this article missing a page? It ends without saying anything. It appears to be built around a single fact and extending that fact outward without examining its implications or methods of implementation: that is, just because capitalism doesn't currently exploit the third world in a negative sense says nothing about the potentiality for it to. Instead, the article seems to use this one data point as a smug shield against criticism. A more robust and therefore interesting article would have taken the criticisms (the ways in which capitalism is said to exploit the poor) point by point and explain how it would ultimately be avoided in even a baseline, pragmatic capitalist influence on struggling third world economies.

This article convinces no one and only makes already in-the-tank capitalist apologists feel validated. Is there a word for that?

amai• 11 years ago

"In 2013, The Economist described its countries as "stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies" while also looking for ways to temper capitalism's harsher effects, and declared that the Nordic countries "are probably the best-governed in the world":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

It's Not Capitalism That Causes Poverty, It's the Lack of It

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