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| ▲ | nwsm a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Do we have an estimate on the number of people capitalism has killed? Serious question. Include deaths due to poverty and lack of affordable healthcare under capitalism, overworking and dangerous working conditions, and all wars and counter-insurgency waged on alternative economic systems globally. | | |
| ▲ | thesuitonym a day ago | parent | next [-] | | No, people who die as a direct result of capitalist economics are not counted because that would be inconvenient and wouldn't fit the CIA's narrative. | |
| ▲ | carefree-bob a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You'd need a definition of capitalism first. Since for most people, it's just the default mode of living -- e.g. the very term "capital" comes from "head", as in "head of an ox", as early cattle culture practiced capitalism, so it predates the agricultural revolution and was practiced by nomadic groups. A lot of the language, for example "interest" comes from cattle culture. If you think about it, a cow produces other cows, so it bears interest. You can eat the cow (consume capital) or let the cow produce a stream of milk. Ownership of cows gave you great power. So asking "the number of people killed by capitalism" is like asking "how many people were killed by everything that's not communism", which is pretty inane, since the point of communism is that it is an ideology, and mass killing for an ideology (that's not religion) is a part of the modern world, not the traditional world of cows and capital. The first ideological genocide was the slaughter of the Vendee peasants by the French revolutionaries, but it was merely the first of many times that urban ideologues slaughtered rural farmers. |
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| ▲ | wing-_-nuts a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Man I always love the straw men you guys stand up to fight this. More taxes = socialism, and not nordic socialism, no, actually, communism. Therefore mass death / genocide. Ok. Sure jan. | | |
| ▲ | philipallstar a day ago | parent [-] | | Nordics are not socialist[0]. Socialism is central planning and control, sometimes created out of mass killings[1] [2], and often creating many deaths just from incompetent central mismanagement[2] [3] or grisly bureacratic rules[4]. [0] https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge [3] https://historyincharts.com/chinese-death-totals-great-leap-... [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-34667551 | | |
| ▲ | ValueTheory a day ago | parent [-] | | What does taxing unrealized gains have to do with "central planning and control"? | | |
| ▲ | wing-_-nuts a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Nothing, hence my point about it being a straw man :^) | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you tax unrealised gains, say Elon Musk's SpaceX shares, all that means in practice is the government takes a certain percentage ownership stake in SpaceX every year until he has nothing left to tax, or he sells it to someone else and pays tax on that sum (but who would buy anything if it's going to be taxed away?) | | |
| ▲ | wing-_-nuts 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | What a nonsensical argument. Yes, that's why we're all living in government owned housing, because if you tax something, it inevitably gets taken away, and nobody wants to buy houses, cause the government is just gonna take it away...what? | | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | If your wealth is 100% ownership of Tesla, say, and the government imposes a 5% wealth tax, you have to sell 5% each year of your ownership stake (because the lie of all this is it isn't wealth being taxed, it's ownership) and give it to the government. Until you don't own it any more. And if you think "well, it doesn't have to go to the government", who else will take it? Who would buy something that they would have to sell 5% of each year? The government, being the only thing that wouldn't be affected by a wealth tax, would become the de facto buyer. |
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| ▲ | tancop a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Communism is not socialism. What Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung did was wrong because they did basically the exact opposite of a socialist policy, centralizing power out of workers hands and taking all surplus value into the central government instead of distributing it. They all turned into paranoid dictators who did everything they could to stay in power, except for Mao who got lied to by other party leaders and regretted it in his final years. None of them represent what socialism really is. Tankies who worship them are a small minority. | | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | You've got spot the pattern though, right? Someone says they're going to make everything equal and they just need enough power to do it. Trouble is, that requires all the power, and a) the halfwits who end up in power are nowhere near as good as the people doing the work and taking the risks at deciding what to do and how to do it and b) the people who want all the power can just say that and the credulous believe them. |
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