Capitalism

Arguments against capitalismFor argument number 1, I won't provide any sources for most of what I say because most should be common knowledge. Everything I am going to state I learned from history classes, so I believe none of it needs be cited. I can provide sources later if my opponent challenges any of it. If there is something that is not common knowledge nor derived from through logic, I will cite a source.1) I would like to point out that there is basically no purely capitalist country today. Free market capitalism is basically extinct, as most governments are taking active roles in the economy in some form. Whether it's by providing social programs, bailing companies out when they need to be, setting regulations on business, etc. Capitalism was tried in the 1800s, and it resulted in poorly paid workers, terrible working conditions, growing wealth inequality, a recession every generation or so, and eventually a great depression in 1929. Ever since the great depression, pure capitalism has been dead. It's basically an accepted fact by every government in the world that pure capitalism is a terrible idea, even the most marketly free country, Hong Kong, does not rank as a perfect "10" on the scale of economic freedom [9]2) Capitalism is immoral because it has an unncessary position which takes money away from people who could be earning it instead. Under capitalism, it requires the private ownership of a company, which means there is/are a sole or just a few business owners. The bussines owner is an unnecessary position and they take a percentage of the profits based on what the workers do. That profit could be distributed amongst the workers if the business owner was not there and the employees owned the business. The fact that cooperatives do exist, show that a business owner is not necessary. While someone could argue that since there are so few cooperatives, this shows that a business owner is necessary in order to have success in a company, this is proven false with the facts I showed about cooperatives in the previous debate round. While cooperatives are so few and far between, the primary reason is because the system is constructed in such a way the favors capitalist companies. For one, banks rarely loan out to cooperatives[10](despite the fact that the ones that do exist are generally more successful than their capitalist counterparts as established in the previous round), the government only ever bails out traditional businesses and never cooperatives, cooperatives are not generally set-up to out-compete other companies either[10], and finally cooperatives are at a disadvantage since the vast majority(89%) of people can't even define what a cooperative is[11], I personally didn't even know what a cooperative was until I was 20, but I could give you a basic idea of what a capitalist business was before I was 10. I think I can safely assume that a vast majority of people have heard of and can define what a traditional/capitalist business is like, so most people shop at those and people looking to create a business probably never thought about making it a cooperative since most don't even know what one is. 3) I could provide numerous examples of countries that did terribly under capitalism, in fact Bolivia did, and they did much better once they had socialism, as you can see if you look at my previous round. Pretty much all Latin-American, African, and Asian countries do terribly under capitalism. Just look at their GDP per capita in comparison to other nations. Capitalism clearly as produced results where a select few countries do very well, while others do terribly. Socialism has traditionally helped these nations when they turned to it. I'll point to several other examples of that in the next section of my argument.Arguments for SocialismMost of the socialist countries that we have had in the world today, unfortunately, were systems I do not agree with, but I will use them as examples for this debate. The only one that I provide below that I agree with is Revolutionary Catalonia, and they are the only country with a form of socialism I agree with that we have any sort of economic data on that I know of(I would also agree with the Free Territory of Ukraine in the Russian Civil war, but I found no evidence for how their economy was). Socialism can be implemented in many ways.4) Socialism has helped the poorest countries. A) As I pointed to before, Bolivia did much better under socialism than under capitalism. B) In addition to them, Venezuela did better under socialism as well. Before Venezuela became more socialist in the early 2000s, their GDP per capita was declining rapidly. After doing so, it raised from under $10,000 to $13,000 where it stands today[12]. While Venezuela did have a recent economic crash, this wasn't so much due to socialism but due to three primary reasons: Venezuela was largely dependent on oil, and the declining price in oil turned to be bad for their economy; their huge dependence on hydro-electric power, which they've lately been having a drought thus being bad for providing electricity; and how recently one part of their government now has an opposing party in power that was not interested in solving the problems, and instead focused on partisan issues.[13] Each of these problems would have existed even if Venezuela was capitalist and this economic crisis would have still happened, and maybe have been even worse since when they were capitalist, the GDP/capita was going down and being socialist reversed this. Over all, their GDP/capita has improved since 2000, even with accounting for the economic crisis they are going through. C) Vietnam has had tremendous GDP growth since the 1980s, where they used to have $400 dollars per person, to over $1600 dollars today.[15] That is a quadrupling over a 40 year period. While there GDP is still small in comparison to other nations, this is still tremendous improvement. D) Laos has also had tremendous GDP Growth, quadrupling in the same amount of time as Vietnam[17]5) Socialism also helps better-off countries. A) In the Spanish Civil war, Revolutionary Catalonia had the standard of living of the average worker go up significantly after implementing socialist ideas [17]. I can't find anything else about other indicators of economic improvement for Catalonia unfortunately, such as GDP growth. This is likely because they existed for such a short period of time, as they were eventually taken over by the Fascists and Franco. The fact the standard of living went up though, we should be able to assume the GDP did as well.B) I won't provide any sources for this since it should be common knowledge. Russia turned into a super-power only once they embraced a form of socialism. They were able to compete with the United States for many decades. While they did fall eventually, largely due to that they had the whole rest of the world against them basically, the fact remains that they did very well under socialism. I would like to point out that Socialism is also more moral than capitalism, however I'm running out of characters to be able to post. I touched on this before when I pointed out how capitalism is immoral though, I suppose. So since socialism gets rid of those problems, it's more moral. Sources:[9] https://en.wikipedia.org...[10] [11] http://www.geo.coop...;[12] http://www.tradingeconomics.com...;[13] http://borgenproject.org...;[14] http://disjointedthinking.jeffhughes.ca...;[15] http://www.tradingeconomics.com...;[16] http://www.tradingeconomics.com...;[17] http://econfaculty.gmu.edu...;