Free Market Capitalism vs Socialism

The gap between poor and rich countries has never been as great as it is today, Warren Buffet's had an estimated net worth of $62 billion in 2008 (1), this while one in seven people on earth goes to bed hungry every night and 6.5 million children die of starvation and malnutrition every year ( 2). This absurd inequality between wages is because of capitalism, since the capitalist's only aim is to generate profit there is no reason to keep anything other than a minimum wage for the workers. In a globalized world, devloped countries can outsource industries to developing countries where workers will not expect a high wage. The lower the wages the capitalist can pay to the laborers, the more profit can be generated. The capitalist does not care whether his laborers' living standards are good, acceptable or bad ( he does want to maintain a level where the laborers will not die or rebel), as long as they deliver the work for the lowest wage (3). Therefore the capitalist can gain an absurd amount of money since he reaps all the profit appropriated from all his laborers while the workers lowest in the hierarchy earns hardly enough to survive. The ordinary worker does not have a free choice whether he wants to work or not since he is at such an inferior bargaining position that he has to accept the capitalist's offer for survival. Such inequality is appalling , it can by no means be justifiable that an ordinary laborer who works equally as hard, or harder than a CEO should struggle for his survival while the CEO lives in ludicrous luxury. In socialism, production and wages are directed to human needs, there is consequently no need to maximize profit and thus gross inequality wouldn't exist. (4) Capitalism always acts on the cost of nature and its ecological balance in it's never ending hunt for new markets . With its imperative to constantly expand profitability, it exposes ecosystems to destabilizing pollutants, fragments habitats that have evolved over time to allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders resources, and reduces nature to the exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital. Socialism requires self-determination, community, and a meaningful existence. Capital reduces the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power while discarding much of the remainder as useless. The present capitalist system cannot regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set into motion. It cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation of capital A truly "free market" , would destroy our species as well as the environment. It's well known among economist that markets are inefficient say I am buying a car from you we only think about whats good for us the harms the car produces are considered an externality. The market actually limits choice, lets say I wanna get home at night from work, the market offers a choice I can have a Ford or Volkswagen etc. it does not offer me the subway system, what I want, whats good for me,whats good for the environment and whats good for my (possible) future children markets only offer individual consumption. Markets are supposed to be informed consumers acting rationally the P.R industry's job is to undermine markets to make uninformed consumers and the corporations keep the useful bits of market theory for profits. 1 The World?s Billionaires: #1 Warren Buffett. (2008, March). Forbes. 2 Hunger. (2011). World Food Programme. Retrieved June 7, 2011 3 Engels, Frederick. (2005). The principles of Communism. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved June 7, 2011 4 Marx, K. (n.d.). Critique of the Gotha Programme: I. Marxist Internet Archive.