How Is Capitalism Good When It Creates Higher and Lower Classes?

found online by Raymond

 
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Capitalism doesn’t create classes. It eliminates them, by establishing a government that equally protects every individual’s freedom based on individual rights.

Only statism/collectivism creates classes, or castes: e.g., legally enforced group status like aristocrats and peasants, masters and slaves, etc., from which no one can escape. Under capitalism, no one can stop any individual from rising or falling based on his own efforts, so long as his efforts involve only voluntary, non-rights violating agreement, association, and trade with others. (Economic inequality is not classism under capitalism. It is merely a reflection of the individuality and diversity of human nature.)

Today, capitalism doesn’t exist in unadulterated form.

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3 thoughts on “How Is Capitalism Good When It Creates Higher and Lower Classes?”

  1. “But only capitalism establishes a truly classless society, on principle: that is, a society that banishes rigid social stratification based on wealth, heredity, custom, religion, or other criteria sanctioned and enforced by law and regulation.”

    He really needs to go back to school and learn how to construct an argument. Preceding this statement at the end of his response he provided no evidence, sources, or actual points that support this statement. Another typical rambling with a scattershot of “Randian” codewords.

    Merriam-Webster definition: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a Free Market

    Literally a system that creates, at MINIMUM, two classes of people. Those that have (They win the competition) and those that do not have (Those that lose the competition). And he says that it creates a classless society. This is what happens when you’re intellectually stunted and cowardly and you argue based on belief rather than actual facts or understanding or knowledge or thought.

  2. Thinking only of the hypothetical individual instead of the actual group allows one to ignore unpleasant truths like the fact that only so many people can actually be rich, there are many more jobs with low pay that must be filled than there are jobs with high pay that must be filled, gainful employment can depend on factors outside the individual’s control, some of us start with money and connections while others do not, having money to begin with makes it easier to make money, etc.

    Whether or not any of that is sufficient reason to switch to a different system is a separate matter, but LaFerrara is just giving us more of the same: “Capitalism cannot fail us; we can only fail capitalism.”

  3. “Economic inequality is not classism under capitalism. It is merely a reflection of the individuality and diversity of human nature.”

    OK. Let me play this one out.

    Economic inequality is not classism under socialism. It is merely a reflection of the individuality and diversity of human nature.

    And:

    Economic inequality is not classism under fascism. It is merely a reflection of the individuality and diversity of human nature.

    And:

    Economic inequality is not classism under communism. It is merely a reflection of the individuality and diversity of human nature.

    And how about this one?

    Economic inequality is not classism under Scientology. It is merely a reflection of the individuality and diversity of human nature.

    Hmm.

    Maybe economic inequality IS classism? But what do I know?

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