Quote from: Beliathon on June 02, 2014, 03:11:50 PM

On the contrary, the modern United States is the purest distillation of capitalist society since the gilded age.

Ho-ho-ho. Contemporary USA is closer to fascism than to capitalism. (Many people accuse Obama of having socialist policies but the truth is that "big government in cahoots with big business covered by a lot of propaganda" is actually the fascist economic model, not the socialist one. The socialist model is "the government owns everything and you own nothing".) Free market capitalism died in the USA pretty much with the creation of the Federal Reserve. Free market capitalism requires a free market in everything and you can't have a free market if one entity has a monopoly on fixing the prices of credit.

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Quote from: Vessko on June 02, 2014, 11:39:55 AM

To begin with, he confuses return on invested capital with the growth rate of capital of corporate profits - a mistake that is unforgivable even for a 1st year graduate student of economics.

If this is confusing and frustrating to you, it's because you don't understand that economics is a pseudo-science. It exists solely to support and uphold the cult of capitalism.

Nonsense. Clearly, you are one of those who doesn't know things even a first-grader is supposed to know. Economics is no more "pseudo-science" than history, sociology, psychology, etc. It is not an exact science, yes - but this doesn't mean that it is not a science. It is a social science instead.

I bet you don't know the difference between the two, either. In exact sciences you start from the facts, postulate a theory, conduct a reproducible experiment and from its results establish the validity of the theory. You can't use this approach in social sciences, because they study the behavior of humans and that is not-reproducible. We can't repeat the Great Depression, in order to verify our theories about it - and even if we could, the exact outcome is likely to be different the second time. That's why in social sciences you start from the theory. Then you check how well it explains the existing facts and whether its predictions turn true in the future.

There isn't just "one" economic theory, either. There are at least five or six - fascist, socialist, monetarist, marginalist, keynesian, Austrian... Each one of them explains how society works economically in different ways. By far not all of them support capitalism, either. Most people who have bothered studying all of them and whose salary does not depend on not understanding them see that the Austrian school is the "most correct" one - in the sense that it most adequately explains the observed reality and its predictions most often come true...