Capitalism (Pro) vs. Socialism (Con)

REBUTTALDefinitionsI think the definition of Capitalism is a little extreme as essentially every Capitalist country on Earth is a mixed-market type of Capitalism which assumes control of trade and industry is split between government and state and Pro has gone for Capitalism as being defined as purely private owened, but if anything I believe that helps me so I accept these definitions.I will then point out that Pro seems to ignore their own definition for socialism. The given definition for socialism contains no reference point for government control and indeed most forms of socialism nowadays focus more on grassroots democratic control. For instance in my country we have the Co-operative party [1]. A Co-operative is a socialist business type where the business is mutually owned by the employees, not the state. There are examples of large co-operative businesses which exist in a market environment, meaning the employees are motivated by profit - even more-so then in a Capitalist environment as the employeess directly benefit from their labour rather than there having the weak relationship seen in Capitalism where only the investors directly benefit from increaed profits.Despite this, PRO focuses specifically government in his criticism of socialism - something which is not included in the definition of Socialism and which due to the past experience with totalitarian governments most modern day socials are very wary of - focusing on various forms of democratic socialism. [3]Thought ExperimentPro's first argument is based on a thougth experiment.Lets say that there are 400 relevant people rather than 100. The situation reverses with wages of workers lowering due to the glut of talent in comparison to the relative shortage available job vacancies. With people needing to eat and no gaurenteed work, The businesses can pick up workers just as skilled as in pro's example for a fraction of the cost. perhaps $15 an hour, perhaps $10 an hour.Now in the real world there can be a surplus of labour or a shortage. The main takeaway is that this thought experiment is far too simplistic to work as a basis for interpreting the real world. Just one variable completely throws it for a loop. Start adding in others like the limits of supply/demand meaning there is only so high a wage can go before the costs can't be passed on to the consumer, the benefits and limits of training schemes, chronic underemployment, etc and it is total chaos.However, that does bring up another point in my favour. In both our examples the workers are doing exactly the same work. In one they get $25 an hour and in another they get $10 an hour. The factors is a condition beyond the control of the workers, a factor of the markets rather than individual choice, and if you happen to have the bad luck to be in a situation where people with your job skills are saturating the market then you're out of luck. Fluctuations of markts, including job markets, can happen for a lot of reasons that no-one can expect and due to this many workers will find themselves losing out due to reasons totally beyond their control. Although please not this doesn't apply to co-operatives. As the workers are the owners, the incentive to underpay the workers to accrue more profit for the owners is contradictory.IncentivesPro is still incorrect on several points.Firstly, he again focuses on governments when most socialists will be focusing on solutions which include the market such as co-operatives where people work for profit far more directly than they do under Capitalism.Secondly, even governments have incentives for employees to work hard and get paid. Government employees can be fired. They can be promoted. They can get a raise. All of the above are regular occurences for government workers in basically every government on earth.Thirdly, the claim of "the managers of those companies don't have an incentive to make the company perform better because the managers don't get to keep any profits" is completely wrong on two levels. Firstly managers will get reunmeration as part of their salary and agian they can be fired for doing their job poorly, promoted or given raises for doing it well, etc. For the secondld part of why it's wrong, the same criticism, if it were true, would apply to much of Capitalism. Of all the managers in a large Capitalist business (not small run family businesses), how many of them are getting a share of the profits? it will be almost done, only the top level members of the board will recieve a small share of the profits in terms of stock options.Lastly, assuming that pay is the only incentive is very common but also very reductionist and completely wrong. As Cambridge Professor Ha-Joon Chang has explained, money is only one of many motivators for why we work. "The assumption of self-seeking individualism, which is at the heart of free-market economics, has a lot of resonance with our personal experience. We have all been cheated by unscrupulous traders, be it the fruit seller who put some rotten plums at the bottom of the paper bag of the yogurt company that vastly exaggerated the health benefits of its products. We know too many corrupt politicians and lazy bureaucrats to believe that all public servants are solely serving the public.... This is true. However, we also have a lot of evidence - not just anecdotes but true systematic evidence - showing that self-interest is not the only human motivation that matters in our economic life. Self-interest, to be sure, is one of the most important, but we have many other motives - honesty, self-respect, altruism, love, sympathy, faith, sense of duty, solidarity, loyalty, public-spiritedness, patriotism, and so on - that are sometimes even more important than self-seeking as the driver of our behaviours." - 23 Things They Don't Tell you About Capitalism - Ha-Joon Chang Other ClaimPro states "Socialism also restricts the amount of consumer choices, which creates a deficency of money circulating smoothly." I have no idea what to make of this. Pro hasn't explained himself or (in criticism which applies to the rest of his argument) offered any evidence. It seems to be buzzwords.My ArgumentCAPITALISM IS INHERENTLY MURDEROUSThe cost that often isn't counted in Capitalism is the inherent death, with millions of people needlessly dying each year.Unicef, for instance, gives the figure of six mill ion children who die from causes which are not only preventable but preventable at low cost[4]. The World Food Programme cites 3 million children dying each year from malnutrition[5] even though the world currently produces enough food to keep everyone fed[6].The issue is that the goods available are not allocated in an optimised way. It's no conspiracy, it's just a result of Capitalist inventives driving people towards anti-societal goals. Why should a medical research company spend money developing drugs for poor people who can only buy a pittance when they can spend the time and effort developing baldness cures for rich people? Why do food companies spend time and money selling a 38th different variety of chocolate cookie in the USA when there are people starving in Ethiopia? It's not hatred or malice or racism. Their job and their duty to their investors demands that they go with the most profitable option. The Capitalist system sets up a series of inventives and drives which direct companies to produce and allocate good in a fashion, the cumulative effect of which is to cause millions upon millions of children (not even counting adults) to needlessly die each year.While any nation under any ideology can fall prey to a strongman dictator, it is in Capitalism where this is an inherent part of the system. Capitalism has never managed to go a single hour of a single day without the inherent nature of the system killing people en masse. It is immoral and causes massive needless suffering due to its defining feature of pursuing the profit motive. it is therefore not the best economic system.Objective comparisonHypotheticals are hard to study objectively. To do this, we must make a comparison between nations. Such a thing is hard to do as to accurately make a comparison, countries should ideally be identical in every way except for their economic ideology - with similar populations, GDPs, levels of educations, levels of technology, endowments of natural resources, etc. Hence many examples, like comparing the USA to the USSR, don't work because of the many advantages the USA had beyond technology (the USSR started out as a backwards agrarian nation.)Thankfully in his work Hunger and Public Action[7], Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner Professor Amartya Sen made the point that India and China make excellent tools for comparison - so similar were they at the point where they each took a divergent ideological path. As he points out, even compared to the autocratic path China took India is far worse in terms of the indicators looked at such as excess mortality. Indeed when we look at the UN's human development index[8] (Which measures quality of life, we can see that despite their original equal starting point China has overtaken India and has become a country with high human development while India has only reached medium human development.In one of the only actual solid examples we have available to measure different ideologies, even one of the worse examples of Socialism comes out ahead of Capitalism. Therefore Capitalism is not the best economic system.[1] https://www.theguardian.com...[2] https://en.wikipedia.org...[3] https://en.wikipedia.org...[4] hhttp://goo.gl...[5] http://goo.gl...[6] http://goo.gl...[7] http://goo.gl...[8] http://goo.gl...