This has been quite the enjoyable thread to peruse and to ponder. Many of you have given examples and documents to prove your points, which I can say exceeds any argument I could make by light-years.
However, while economics (or any subject dealing with numbers) is hardly my area of even novice familiarity, human nature is another question.
Capitalism has many benefits under which many of us prosper. Under its influence, we are able to advance our social standing, and in the process enhance our living standards, our medical options, and our thirst for material posessions; in other words, it allows us to live a better life if we work for it.
As far as Marx is concerned I have nothing against him. The man created his philosophies out of concern for those who were oppressed by imperialist governments. The poor man was only trying to help by creating a theoretical system where all the things that people fight and exploit over were left in the hands of a capable government that could be trusted instead of the people who could not.
Unfortunately, capitalism and Marxism are only limited ideas. They were the best that human minds could develop to regulate the workings of the human existence. But the ideas are only very detailed linear calculations that are cannot compete with the abstract perceptions of the human mind.
Capitalism gives us massive gains in personal growth, but often at the expense of others. The competition aspect of it DOES indeed allow those who work hard, but as we have seen with the scandals of late and the lengthy list of foreign exploitation, that competition grows into a frenzy, creating a hunger and thirst that cannot be quelled. The foundations that compete against one another continually increase the ante to overwhelm the other and begin to dig into other people's backyards for resources. The capitalist system has no clause to keep the competition in check, and a result on human psychology turns "hard-working folks" into a political right that takes its perception of purity and transforms it into entitlement for itself, and aggression against the "slacker" element.
Marxs' system was taken from him and was twisted into an "iron" government where those in power exercise their appetites at the expense of the people who serve it; it also allowed the pettiness within the working class to oppress the people further. AUGUST SPIES and the others were very thorough in their evidence, so I shall not revisit them. We all know what happend in the past and why communism does not work.
As it is, this entire thread reveals that HUMANS are the ones to blame for why neither of these systems work entirely. No matter what philosopy comes our way, the human mind adapts to its environment and then attempts to evolve beyond it. The ideologies on the other hand, cannot evolve and become strangled by their own structure. I would say the problem is PEOPLE; PEOPLE are the scourge of the world.
I have no loyalties to either side, I only weigh which perspective helps in any given situation to improve my life; it's all I can do.
Would I suggest anything to help? Not much. The only thing that I have noticed is that while ideas and technologies become more advanced, our basic mindset stays the same (the world, not just America). We still use the same methods of that have helped us communally for millennia: CULTURE, RELIGION, MORALITY, TRADITION, etc. We CEREMONIALIZE our interaction with each other and the way we live.
Perhaps we should examine these aspects of human existence and decide whether we really need them all anymore, or whether the ones we keep should be revised as time requires. I only say this because it hasn't been tried yet (at least not in a civil fashion - The French Revolution wasn't handled quite as well as it could have been), and since altering all the new elements in global societies like censorship technology and surveillance technology doesn't seem to work, this one just might.
After all, why are the majority of those who react negatively to altruistic forms of progress usually the fundamentalist/ traditionalist groups? Why are people unable or unwilling to move forward without taking the heaviest baggage with them?
Questions and observations I will now leave to you as I return to my Realm of Lurk.
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