Capitalism Cannibalizing Itself-Part 2

Capitalism Cannibalizing Itself-Part 2

We hear “left” and “right” a lot, but since these terms are slightly vague, and have a bit of differing interpretations that purposely get blurred together, I think it’s important to give a bit of a definition before we start.

There is a “left” and “right” for social issues, as well as for economic ones. First lets discuss social issues, on the left of the spectrum you have things like equal rights for marginalized groups, like folk in the LBGTQ+ community. In the past, this also included movements for equal voting rights for African Americans and women. On the right, obviously you have conservatives wanting to keep the status quo.

Then you have the economic “left” and “right”. In this category the “left” wants a more equitable share of wealth spread out for the good of all, and the right is more for a winner-take-all approach, or as they see it a “survival of the fittest”. They feel that the “free market” will correct things and bring about a better outcome for all through myths such as “trickle-down economics”. The issue with this theory of course is that inherited wealth makes someone way more likely to succeed in any of their endeavors, and many of them just invest their money or sit on it while it gains interest in a bank (possibly offshore). In this scenario you end up with generational poverty on the other end of the spectrum. They are very quick to use anyone who grew up poor and became wealthy as a poster child of success in this system. Alternatively, they skew the history of someone who maybe only had a “small loan” of a million dollars given to them by their daddy, or ignore some that were given hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a startup that succeeded, and is now putting businesses out of business all around the country with insanely fast “prime deliveries”.

The U.S.’s system has a lot of loopholes that the very wealthy use to escape paying their share of taxes. Yes, the upper echelons of society already pay more total taxes than the rest, but they still don’t pay their percentage, and this has often been blamed for the reason the U.S. doesn’t have better education funding, universal healthcare, etc. At this point I don’t even believe that, and on one hand actually agree with some on the right that tax is basically theft in the U.S.

I say in the U.S., because other countries actually supply their citizens with value for the taxes they pay.

All the U.S. seems to fund is an insane military budget (more than the next 7 nations combined, and increasing on average about 50bn per year, agreed upon bilaterally) that “keeps us safe”, which I will detail in more depth, but for quick examples we only need to look at the twenty or so years spent killing people in Afghanistan and Iraq. This culminated in the eventual peace deal made with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and basically surrender of Iraq to the newly formed ISIS. So in the end we handed control back over to the people who already had control in the first place, and destabilized a state and handed it over to a newly formed religious extremist group. Maybe we should rewind back to Vietnam? Oh wait, that country is currently a communist state and seems to be doing alright. A lot better than they were when we were bombing them and dumping Agent Orange everywhere, although they still deal with unspent munitions exploding from time to time, as well as children still being born generations later with health defects related to Agent Orange.