Good morning. I hope this is the best work week ever for you and your loved ones. Make each day the best it can be. Do not be discouraged and there is surely a rainbow after the storm. Stay the course.
With that said I would like to share with you what my daughter and I did yesterday. We went to the cinema, and we saw Michael Moore's "Capitalism, A Love Story."
Now it is a Sunday custom for my daughter and I to go the cinema. But what made this Sunday different was this movie. I had been anxiously awaiting its opening. Why?
Because "Capitalism" is something that I have been fed all of my life and made to believe is what's best for America. I have never challenged this belief. I never gave it a second thought. I just believed what I was taught. But did I really understand what Capitalism is? The unequivocal answer is NO. Let us scrutinize.
Capitalism-an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.
So who are the "owners" of the wealth in the United States and why should it be a concern to us all?
The top 1% of people and corporations own the majority of wealth in the U.S. Below is an except that I have extracted from an interview of Edward Wolff. Mr. Wolff is an economic professor at New York University. He is also the author of "Top Heavy".
"MM: Apart from the absolute level of wealth of people at the bottom of the spectrum, why should inequality itself be a matter of concern?
Wolff: I think there are two rationales. The first is basically a moral or ethical position. A lot of people think it is morally bad for there to be wide gaps, wide disparities in well being in a society.
If that is not convincing to a person, the second reason is that inequality is actually harmful to the well-being of a society. There is now a lot of evidence, based on cross-national comparisons of inequality and economic growth, that more unequal societies actually have lower rates of economic growth. The divisiveness that comes out of large disparities in income and wealth, is actually reflected in poorer economic performance of a country.
Typically when countries are more equal, educational achievement and benefits are more equally distributed in the country. In a country like the United States, there are still huge disparities in resources going to education, so quality of schooling and schooling performance are unequal. If you have a society with large concentrations of poor families, average school achievement is usually a lot lower than where you have a much more homogenous middle class population, as you find in most Western European countries. So schooling suffers in this country, and, as a result, you get a labor force that is less well educated on average than in a country like the Netherlands, Germany or even France. So the high level of inequality results in less human capital being developed in this country, which ultimately affects economic performance." (End of quote)
What has happened in our country, is something we all should be very concerned about. The rich is getting richer and the middle class is getting poorer. We (the tax payors) have bailed out large corporations to the sum of 800 billion dollars.
I ask you...is this what capitalism is all about? I believe each of us need to educate ourselves and our family about our economic system here in America. We need to make sure that "those" that are paid to represent us are in fact representing our views and NOT their personal views.
I am encouraging my daughter to reach out to our representatives and let our concerns be known, and I suggest you do likewise. The "people" need to understand that we have the power, through organizing and our votes. The people in Congress work for us but it appears sometimes from the outset, that we work for them. Most people DO NOT know who their representatives are. We the People have become complacent.
Power to the People.
Have a great work week.
L. for Love
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I ask you, what is Moore's proposed "fix" for our socioeconomic system? Marxism--a system by which (whether communist or socialist) the means of production are owned either largely or wholly by the government and overseen by the government elite. Tools like Michael Moore do not realize that they would not be among the elite: Moore would likely be working in a factory stamping low-quality machine parts--as was much of the general populace under the USSR. At least in a capitalist society a moron like Moore is able to rise from nothing to construct a multimillion-dollar movie enterprise; in a Marxist society he would've had no such luxury. One last thought: if Moore does not "believe" in capitalism, then why is it that he lives so well?
ReplyDeleteI leave you with a quote from Ayn Rand which sums up the evils of redistribiutive economic systems:
"If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as 'the right to enslave.'"