Julius_Seizeher said:
You who call yourself a slave to money-you are exactly right.
Your thoughts are those of the typical modern leftist rotter, who lives by pretending that he is a victim and deserves to instead become a vampire on the producers who keep him alive. Sure, you invent a childish and retarded system of half-baked pseudo-philosophy to allegedly support your ridiculous beliefs, but your credibility reads: Account Overdrawn. Every time some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia makes some sweeping spiritual statement, too broad to be held to any standard of truth and too indiscriminate to be bothered by anything so trivial as rational meaning, you swoon like a barmaid and swear that you will never again blame yourself for the conditions of your life. Yours is the psychology of thieves and kidnappers, who use the virtues of another as reason to steal from him. You say, "There is no ego; we are all one" and in the same breath denounce all those who have made your life possible and kept you alive all these years.
You say capitalism is evil because it forces men to compete in order to be their best. Can you imagine a system where men compete in order to be the worst? You already have. In socialism, the winners are the people who do absolutely nothing and have nothing to offer to the world, their needs are held up as crowns of glory and the men of ability are thus enslaved to those "needs". Can you imagine the rotten squalor that would result from a country, or a world, where everyone tried their best to do nothing? You, who would call yourself a slave in a free society, have absolutely no fvcking idea what it would really be like to be a slave.
If you really think that providing for your own means of survival is a burden unjustly posed upon you, or that the conditions of your life are truly the result of offhand decisions made by some unseen tyrant in some corporate boardroom, GROW THE FVCK UP. Stop watching television, the rotter's box, the liberal stink tank and get out and live in the REAL WORLD. It is not a grand conspiracy, it is not a matrix, it is very simple: you do you. You do whatever you can do, to the best of your ability, and live with your reward. If you want more, do more; if you want less, do less. Money is the only exact metric of the value of your life; everything else is arbitrary and melts like butter under the light of objectivity.
Capitalism does an aweful job as a measure of talent.
For example, a talented artist who is poor because he is in the first years of his carreer. In the eyes of the capitalist world he's a loser because he doesn't have enough wealth. But once he gets his lucky break and earns money, he's suddenly seen as a great member of society. So this person,
this very same person was seen as garbage by you while he had no money (based on your argument), but you now see him as a valuable individual because he has acquired wealth, even though HE HIMSELF DID NOT CHANGE, he simply received that break that his talent deserved.
Now do you see why money is not a true measure of talent? This is seen much more often than the other way. YES, even in the USA. Talented individuals live in utter poverty and stupid people get rich all the time (refer to the financial engineers at Bear Stearns, Lehman, etc and all those no talent rich kids who graduated from prestigious schools because they were born from the right families).
The reason why capitalism doesn't work as a measure of talent (or as a measure of anything at all) is because we humans have emotions, and capitalism can not exist in such environment. The law of suppply and demand say that an individual who does not have the means for the expensive product will chose the cheaper product . In reality does this happen even 70% of the time? Have you ever seen a broke person drive a BMW? Yeah, me too. The law of supply says that high supply = low prices. There's currently a surplus of crude, is this reflected in its price? No, because the current price of oil is based on fear of future higher prices.
Capitalism and emotions are not a good mix. When things are good, we get greedy, when things are bad, we get fearful. Economics does not take this into consideration. AND get this, there's never a middle ground, because, as it has been pointed out, the ego (our emoitons) can never be fullfilled. It always wants more. If things are good, they MUST get better!! I agree, this unfullfilling thirst motivates us to do our best, but at the same time, our best can never be achieved, because our ego says we can always do better. Because YOUR EGO WILL NEVER BE SATISFIED with THE PRESENT MOMENT and what it brings. So we are slaves to our ego, and we look to the future to fulfill it. But joke is on us because the future will never satisfy you. WHY? because when the future comes, its the present moment again!
Right now its the future of yesterday, I'm sure yesterday you were looking at the next day for fullfilment, but as you can see the fullfillment hasn't come because, liike i said, the ego can not be fullfilled with the present moment.
Lastly, the history of this western world makes for great evidence to support everything I've said. The USA was a true capitalist country for sometime, but our ego was not satisfied and said "Hey we're doing good but the lets go for more" so they took out the gold standard and started printing money, but it was still not satisfied so they said "Hey capitalism is working so good lets see if we can incorporate a little socialism" and entitlement programs came about. So our ego kept pushing the envelope until voila, the economy imploded.