On Balance, Capitalism Is Superior to Communism

I will now proceed to criticize capitalism, and attempt to refute my opponent initial arguments. I"m going to borrow a bit of your structure. 1. Capitalism in theory Capitalism is based on the idea that greed is the ideal motivator for humans. It encourages the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few who have a disproportionate amount of power over the economy, and by extension the lives of ordinary people. Capitalists claim the economy is run by the free market, but this term is itself a paradox, as the market itself can never be "free". Traditionally the idea of a "free market" is described as one without government intervention, "When I say "capitalism," I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism- with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. " [2] The paradox here is that even if the state is not involved the market shall always be distorted by concentration of wealth. In a system purely driven by money and profit, those with the most money who make the best profits naturally gain the ability to decide how the system is driven. In the most recent crash in 2008, it was not (directly) the negligence of the state, but rather wealthy Wall Street aristocrats, who caused the recession. The argument that the Market will purify itself of these people for their business practices was also proven false because these very people who caused the problems generally made huge amounts of money, and at best received negligible (compared to their wealth) fines providing no real reason for someone not to do the same thing again. Now you might say, well why not just meet in the middle, regulate the market a little but let it function mostly on its own. Well firstly this still does not guarantee a fair system for the common people, only makes it harder for the rich to crash the economy. And the profit motive means that after its been long enough for people to forget why the regulations were there in the first place, the businesses start to pull them down again. It is very likely that there will soon be another recession, as the holes in the system which caused the last recession have not been plugged, the investors just haven"t re-discovered their courage to invest mindlessly yet. [3] Historically Speaking My opponent has been quick to use the history of "communism" to try and prove that it cannot be done. I will not attack my opponents most recent post yet because that would be unfair, but I would like to address his reference to North Korea in the first post. Firstly, North Korea is not really communist. The very idea that you would pass leadership to your son is the antithesis of everything Marxists think should be the basis of a just political system, that is democracy and grassroots involvement in the political system. Besides that, I would point out that until the 60"s North Korea had a better standard of living than South Korea. (South Korea's GDP is higher, but North Korea had less than half as many people so GDPc was higher in the North. ) North Korea began to slow because the second Kim thought it was worth while to run the economy into the ground and let programs like the national food system, which was responsible for feeding the population, to fall into ruin so that he could obtain nuclear weapons. As for South Korea, it is playing through the stages of capitalism like all capitalist countries do. It grew rapidly when there were plentiful opportunities for investment, then began to slump as the opportunity for rapid investment disappeared. It has temporarily regained its good growth rate by moving towards automation, but this will ultimately cause problems for the capitalist system as it will begin to run out of ways to employ people. I would also say that Cuba is an unfair example as the embargo makes it hard to judge how the system would perform objectively, however this chart shows that up till the point where it lost the only people willing to trade with it on a large scale, it was doing the best out of the caribbean nations. Finally, none of these systems were actually communist. They were all deviations of Stalinism, which, while it claims to be communist, abandons many of the aspects which are key to a successful socialist system. Perhaps the most important are democracy and accountability, which were completely absent in the Soviet and other 20th century "communist" systems. As I explained above, without these things, the system becomes overly centralized and stagnation and failure are sure to follow. My opponent"s previous points Subutai claims that Supply and demand in the marketplace are alone are enough to prevent shortages, assign a fair price and ensure the most efficient allocation of goods. But on the contrary the system is often very inefficient because companies may not produce to meet demand, but rather to create profit. What that means is that rather than trying to produce a quota which will provide the goods in question to everyone who needs them, a company will make a better profit by producing less than demand. The less it produces the more demand inflates the prices they can charge. A good example is diamonds. Diamonds are quite expensive thanks to corporate marketing campaigns to increase demand, but in reality they are quite common. [4] This also ties back to my point that wealthy businesses can distort the market just as much as a corporation. The same can be said of many other businesses to, it is pretty common knowledge that most of our clothing is produced for and worth much less than we pay for it. Many businesses employed in the making of our food cut corners to make more profits (recall the "pink slime" and "horse meat" scandals). [6] In the medical industry as well, where pharmaceutical companies go out of their way to try and get doctors to prescribe their over priced and not necessarily more effective drugs. [5] The fact is that supply (businesses) has become quite adept at manipulating demand (consumers), and often unfairly. . http://en.wikipedia.org... . http://en.wikipedia.org... . http://capitalism.org...[2] . http://www.pbs.org...[3] . http://blog.priceonomics.com... [4] . http://www.scu.edu...[5] . http://www.npr.org...[6]