Capitalism

Good luck to my opponent and I hope we have a good debate. Now let's get started.I will be arguing that a system of true capitalism would be a very bad thing for this world. Contention 1: Capitalism is unsustainable Capitalism is growth based. "It has to run to stand" "It has to grow bigger" says David Kitching, renewable energy consultant at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. Kitching highlights many different reasons as to why Capitalism is unsustainable in his article is 'sustainable capitalism' an oxymoron. It's like building a house of cards. It's gonna get bigger and bigger until it all comes crashing down. In growth based Capitalism there is an everincreasing supply and production. This is done because as corporations and companies make more money they increase production and grow their business in order to increase profits. This causes competitors to need to grow in order to keep up.Growth is also simply what the investors want. They want the company to grow so their stocks become worth more and they make more money as well.With everincreasing production that means everincreasing resource consumption. When these corporations are so caught up consuming resources they lose sight of the very source of how many resources there actually are. They forget how available said resources really are. Eventually the resources will either be ran dry, or they will be inaccessible for extraction in a profitable manner. When that point is reached it will result in economic collapse, the very foundation of what the economy is built on will disapear.And, I'm not the only one who sees this. Writer Minqi Li writes about this in his book Minqi The End of the “End of History”: The Structural Crisis of Capitalism and the Fate of Humanity. Li is a proffessor of economics at the University of Utah, so he is clearly a fairly reliable source.Li states that soon "its massive demand for energy and materials can no longer be sustained." Energy is a more specific example of how Capitalism is unsustainable, but it will happen much sooner than many of the other causes.Contention 2: Unregulated Capitalism is a one way ticket to serious harm or destruction of the planet.Resource depletion isn't the only harm of increased consumption of resources. A big issue is how we get the resources and how our methods and actions impact the world around us. Capitalism will often ignore this issue in the name of profit.Let's take author Ted Trainer's writing "Towards a sustainable economy". To quote the man "Our resource-affluent way of life also causes many serious environmental problems. We are destroying vital ecological systems. Consider, for example, the greenhouse problem, acid rain, the destruction of forests, the spread of deserts and the loss of plant and animal species. At the present rate, more than a million species will disappear in the next 25 years, because the expansion of human economic activity is destroying habitats"One of the most serious problems that we have capitalist expansion to thank is our farming methods depleting soil of nutrients and just moving on. To quote Trainer "One of the most unsustainable aspects of our society is the way we continually take large quantities of nutrients from the soil, eat them and then throw them away. We are depleting our soils at a rapid rate."To take another quote: "Most of these ecological problems are direct consequences of the sheer amount of producing and consuming going on" As I proved in my last contention that this is because of growth based Capitalism.So then there's the important question of why this happens and if Capitalism can be blamed. Well let me tell you why Capitalism can be blamed for this and true Capitalism would only make the situation worse.The methods that cause the most issues are usually the cheapest methods. Capitalists will almost always work for short term profit instead of focusing on the future. Why? Because, they are so distracted and caught up in the never ending journey to make more and more money they become blind to the effects of their own actions. In a system of true capitalism no one will be able to change this. No one will be able to stop corporations from only using the cheapest and most destructive methods. The only change will come once their methods no longer work and by then the damage done will be beyond irreversible. So then there's the question. What's the alternative? Government intervention. Governement control and regulation. The government needs to force corporations to use methods that are not the most profitable, but instead the most sustainable and the least invasive to the planet.Contention 3: War Capitalism is a driving force for war. Under Capitalism a nation will be willing to go to a war or escalate a conflict for the simple purpose of attemptng to maintain corporations' resource supply. This can be seen with intervention in the Iran-Iraq war.To quote Vishnu Bhagwat, former chief of naval staff of India "corporate driven military might unleashes pre-emptive wars, invasions and occupations "corporate driven military might unleashes pre-emptive wars, invasions and occupations"."The unlimited quest for establishing monopoly over the planet earth’s resources and markets , has led the world to witness unending wars"Bhagwat claims that Capitalism is "accelerating the death and destruction that we have witnessed , all across the globe be it in Angola , Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan , Iraq , Palestine , Central and Latin America , Yugoslavia , Lebanon , Gaza and earlier in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia"Contention 4: Capitalism is immoralFor Capitalism to exist and function there has to be a division of people by classes. With globalizations this function has done a good job to expand across the world. The lowest class in the American system of Capitalism is insanely different from the lowest class in the global system of Capitalism.Under the system of true Capitalism the low classes are not helped. They are exploited and trapped in place, because they are needed to do the systems manual labor. They are needed to produce resources and manufacture them in sweatshops. Because Capitalism makes this process as cheap as humanly possible these jobs are dangerous, ridiculously low wage, and mindnumbing long hours of work.The richest corporations are raking in billions off the backs of the starving and the desperate. Sure it's easy to just pretend this issue is'nt there for us in the 1st world countries and just reap the benefits of the labour, but it's just not moral. Something needs to be done and first things first the problem and the reason for this injustice is Capitalism.You know what one of the worst things about it is? Most of them aren't out there making MRIs or vaccines or medication. No, they're out there making Iphones. Their out there working for Niki making the next coolest shoes, or they're out their mining blood diamonds for our Capitalist society because we tell ourselves that for a man to tell a woman he wants to spend his life with her he has to spend thousands on a diamond mined by starving African child. These waged slaves and sometimes legitimate slaves are out there giving their lives and getting worked to death to make corporations money and make our lives slightly more convenient.We can not morally sit here and do nothing about this. Next to quote the author Laura Kerr "during the best of times capitalism’s dependency on social hierarchies — coupled with its unpredictable cycles of growth and retraction — raises anxiety, sometimes to the level of traumatic stress""capitalism creates a state similar to the psychological domination when people are held in captivity"Capitalism works workers so hard and throws them into a cycle of constant anxiety and soulcrushing work their condition is so bad it's similar to those held in captivity.sources in comments