Re:Wage inequality may be starting to reverse
by tomhoward on Sunday January 01, 2023 @07:23AM
(#34205761)
These tiresome ideological ping-pong battles, trading the death-counts and respective horrors attributable to simplistic labels of economic systems are useful only to remind less fanatical observers that said horrors are not innate or exclusive to any particular system or label, and that the primary issues are (a) scarcity of resources and (b) the brutality of nature, with everything else just being a case of humans trying desperately to cope with these grim realities.
Everyone can play the game of saying everything horrific in the past or today is directly attributable to the economic system that they oppose and that their opponents advocate, and we can even go further and play tricks like this: "Nazism was really a left-wing system in nature". See, it's great fun.
Ultimately it's pointless though; it doesn't persuade anyone to think differently about anything, and serves only to make the writer feel righteous, without needing to go to the effort of formulating and advocating something genuinely better and workable for the future.
The history of capitalism is rife with famines that have killed millions to tens of millions each, and centuries of death and brutality under the rule of companies like the East India Company and capitalist regimes that bought and sold millions of human beings as assets at a global scale. Many of those "assets" suffered and died through just being traded, and when successfully sold, suffered through generations of brutality and subservience performing as capitalists' "property".
At one point we even had a prominent capitalist celebrate the amazing returns on investment they got from enslaving their slaves' children. That prominent capitalist was Thomas Jefferson:
> What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.
Hell, capitalism under the Nazi regime alone is responsible tens of millions of deaths.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thom...