Quote from: LostDutchman on November 15, 2013, 11:38:29 AM

Quote from: Impaler on November 15, 2013, 05:30:35 AM

I'm sick and tired of people talking about how great Capitalism is when you don't have a clue what it IS.

Capitalism is an economic system based on borrowing money from BANKS at INTEREST to finance investment activity, and more recently consumer spending. THAT IS ALL

It is NOT Entrepreneurship
It is NOT Free-Markets
It is NOT Industrialism

Yes in America we have all four and people have mashed all of them together in their minds into a kind of Monolith which is above reproach. But if you dice it out, you'll see that the benefits have all come from the latter Three causes, while Capitalism has essentially been a parasitic activity siphoning off some of the wealth production from the others.

Well, Comrade, that is certainly a new twist on the accepted definition of the term; one I have seen only in socialist and leftist literature and occasionally shouted from soapboxes in the park, much to the annoyance of passersby.

I would suggest that the following definition of the term is much more accurate and to the point:

"Definition of 'Capitalism'

An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism encourages private investment and business, compared to a government-controlled economy. Investors in these private companies (i.e. shareholders) also own the firms and are known as capitalists.

In such a system, individuals and firms have the right to own and use wealth to earn income and to sell and purchase labor for wages with little or no government control. The function of regulating the economy is then achieved mainly through the operation of market forces where prices and profit dictate where and how resources are used and allocated. The U.S. is a capitalistic system."

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalism.asp

My $.02.

Wink

Oh how trite, my views differ from your views so I am a Communist! In reality I am a Gesellian, an anti-communist AND anti-capitalist philosophy, but enough about me.

Your definition dug up off our modern wiki-fied internet merely crystallizes the misconception that has been around for 50 years that ALL the aspects of the American economy are integral parts of a single monolithic 'thing' called capitalism. But this is a definition that destroys meaning and understanding by creating a kind of black-box from which we are told "all good things come". This is no accident, your inability you understand the society we live is composed of MULTIPLE system which CAN mixed and matched without causing the whole thing to implode serves to keep you complacent and accepting of the present mix

The analogy might be something like a Aztec corn farmer believing that the society he lived in was one monolith of farming, tribal-warfare and human sacrifice. If someone told him that human sacrifice was bad he would defend it on the grounds that it was part of the system to produce corn and corn was obviously necessary for sustenance.

We only need to look closely at your definition to see that it doesn't ever put it's finger on ONE thing to define capitalism. It immediately jumps into the free-market and proceeds to define THAT (open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production). Then it tells us what Capitalism 'encourages' (and here it defines Laissez-faire without calling it such) and tells us the U.S. is capitalist which is about as close as it gets to providing a single concrete definition. So basically your definition translates to "Capitalism is the sum of all the economic paradigms operating in the U.S. today".

Further more dose it seem a bit strange to you that in that whole melange of a definition theirs is NO REFERENCE to capitol itself? If you know your economic jargon then you know capitol means MONEY, so we would really expect their to be some reference to money and how it is supposed to work in capitalism. But your definition is devoid of any reference to the flow of money, banking and interest payments doesn't even seem to exist in your definition. Why do you think such BIG parts of the system are not mentioned? Could it be that the actual productive and useful parts of our economy like Free-Markets are pushed to the rhetorical forefront while the usury that's sucking the life out of it all behind the scenes tries to go as unnoticed as possible. Can you see how the meaning of the word capitalism has been altered to exactly what you've dutifully regurgitated to me. And how your knee-jerk reaction to throwing "communist" at anyone who questions the system serves the banking sector.