Quote from: forevernoob on October 11, 2014, 01:41:34 AM

Most people work and can buy all of those things. And those who can't will get assistance from either their families or charitable organizations.

According to the World Health Organization, hunger is the single gravest threat to the world's public health. The WHO also states that malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases.
Undernutrition is a contributory factor in the death of 3.1 million children under five every year. Capitalism wastes 5/9ths of all food produced annually, and 3 million children die as a result every year.

Somehow I don't think charity is cutting it. I also don't think there's any ethical or intellectually honest way to defend this horrid system.

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"The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, because they prevented the core of the system from being realized by those who suffered from it and understood by those who contemplated it. Charity degrades and demoralizes.
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. Nice as its sounds, this kind of 'trade with the rich' is not a solution."
-Slavoj Zizek

Moving on:

Quote from: shawshankinmate37927 on October 11, 2014, 02:21:00 AM

Bullshit: Capitalism is the only economic system that can succeed without fraud or initiating the use of force.

Capitalism without force? Capitalism without fraud? Bullshit indeed! Thank you for prefacing your statement with that honest qualifier!

Please tell me when and where in history EITHER of those two scenarios has existed anywhere other than your imagination. I'd sure love to hear about this mythical capitalist utopia... Maybe I can visit?

Quote from: polynesia on October 11, 2014, 08:06:15 AM

If it is so bad, I wonder why it is the only surviving system. Grin

The same reason fiat central banking was the only surviving system until Bitcoin arrived - organized capitalists can and will do horrible violence and sabotage to suppress any competition for their profits.

Now, imagine for a moment just how many self-assured aristocrats throughout history have said the same of their own society's temporary political-economic design.

Looks like we need to get back to basics:

Quote from: Beliathon on September 03, 2014, 03:00:16 PM

"Before capitalism, there were other ways. Feudalism was what existed in Europe for a thousand years before we had modern capitalism. And before that, slavery - yet another system - another way of organizing who does the work and who gets the profits and so on. And the interesting thing is that every other system that we have a record of in the human race, was born, evolved over time, and eventually passed away. What always has intrigued me, is the need for those people living in capitalism today, to think it's going to be the great exception. It was born, basically in England 300 years ago, it has evolved over the last three centuries. But when you say, "yes, but that means it will also pass away and give rise to another system", people get all kinds of strange worries because they don't want to think about that.

And so they begin to imagine that this system will be forever, in a way no other system in history has proved itself to be."
-Dr. Wolff

"And our resistance to any challenge to capitalism is ferocious in the United States. I mean the essence of the Cold War in our lifetimes is not the Soviets were intrinsically evil, it was that the Soviets practice an economic system called Communism, and that represents an existential threat to the United States, to our way of life, and to everything that we hold dear and believe to be true. And so it was really a battle over an economic system."
-Thom Hartmann

"Absolutely, I think the important things to remember are these. Before World War II, that is before the cold war that started after '45 got going, Americans were able to discuss capitalism as a system, socialism and communism as some of the various alternatives and so on. It didn't seem to threaten our society at least for large numbers of our people, to have a conversation, to assess the strengths and weaknesses of different systems. To be kind of rational adults talking about this question. And even after 1945 in places like France or Germany or Italy or many other countries that we are close to, socialist parties thrived. The French government today is a socialist government. Socialists are part of governments in many European countries, didn't seem to fall apart in Europe. It was something rational people could talk about.

But here in the United States, it became a taboo. Since 1945, what you did is you shut down the debate. You made it no longer a question of discussing systems, trying to see if we could do better than capitalism in part - all of that became impossible. To question capitalism, let alone to explore the alternatives took on the aura of an act of disloyalty. It was wonderful for the capitalists, because it basically proscribed any kind of debate or discussion or criticism as beyond the pale. We are only NOW, fifty years into the taboo, finally coming out of the kind of funk that we were in as a nation. Now that we see how poorly the capitalist system serves the majority of people in the US, slowly we are emerging back to the place we should never have left - which is an open honest debate and discussion about the alternatives systems past, present, and future - that will shape how we live as a people."
-Dr. Wolff

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This is precisely what I mean when I use the term "economic fundamentalism". You can see the logical leaps a person must make to believe capitalism is the be-all end-all of economics. This is what makes it a close cousin to religious fundamentalism.

Conversations with Great Minds part 1 - Dr. Richard Wolff with Thom Hartmann

Conversations with Great Minds part 2

To that, I will add this:

"Garry Leech, an author who had previously penned a book on the FARC insurgency in Colombia (2011), has assembled a forceful denunciation of the status quo with Capitalism: A Structural Genocide.

In essence, he argues cogently in this work that the devastating structural violence experienced by societies subjected to the rule of capital since its historical emergence - and that particularly felt by the world's presently impoverished social majorities - is, instead of being an aberration or distortion of market imperatives, central and inherent to the division of society along class lines and the enthronement of private property. Even a cursory examination of the depth of human suffering perpetuated historically and contemporarily by the hegemony of capital should lead disinterested observers to agree with Leech that the catastrophic scale of violence for which this system is responsible can be considered nothing less than genocidal, however shocking such a conclusion might prove to be."

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16887-the-structural-genocide-that-is-capitalism