Capitalism is better than Socialism

REBUTTALRE: Peter Ferrara's quotePeter Ferrara is best known as an advocate for dismantling Social Security. He has fewer ideas about how to feed and house people after they become too old or disabled to work. Peter Ferrara should be better known, however, for his participation in the Jack Abramoff scandal during the Bush Administration. As Chief Council for Americans for Tax Reform, Ferrara served as Abramoff's personal hack. Abramoff took millions of dollars to lobby for groups of people like Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Indonesians, etc. He stood, after all, at the crossroads of Republican politics. Abramoff was buddies with George Bush, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed and was an important part of the synthesis between the Religious Right and the Corporate Right. Unfortunately, although he took their money and spoke for those people in public, in private he worked against their interests and treated his clients with contempt. Famously, he continuously referred to his Native Americans as monkeys in emails and laughed at their naivety. During Abramoff's corruption trial, it was revealed that Ferrara was one of the recipients of these e-mails. Although Ferrara pretended to be an journalist and independent thinker, he was in fact taking kickbacks from Abramoff to express whatever political opinion Abramoff had been paid to endorse. Bluntly, Ferrara has whored out his credentials to the highest bidder and his opinion on any subject must be regarded as potentially corrupt. [1][2]RE:A Capitalist society, is one where hard - work is rewarded.Not necessarily. The late 18th and early 19th century is correctly viewed as the high-water mark of Capitalism the United States. It was also the high-water mark for American Slavery. The free market, for all of its advantages, is soulless and does not care if hard work is rewarded. Where slavery is legal, Capitalism is happy to trade in humans as a commodity. The most effective capitalists are those who have no respect for just compensation. So what if a person has worked in a factory for 25 years? The Capitalist impulse is to move that job to China (supply and demand) or declare bankruptcy on the pension funds. Does Capitalism care whether that hard worker ever finds another job or can even even put food on the table? Capitalism has no opinion on the subject. Capitalism values labor when labor is expensive. Once markets can be found where labor is cheap, Capitalism buys labor there. How hard a laborer works is often a secondary consideration.RE: Where as a Socialist society entitles the equality of wealth, ( or equal distribution)Pro and Ferrara are working with a different definition of Socialism than standard (such as the definition Con provided above). There is a pretty large chasm between community ownership of production and equal distribution of wealth. Most economists would consider Germany a state with a high degree of wealth invested in Social Welfare, for example, but nobody would claim that income in Germany is distributed equally. Yes, there is some wealth redistribution as higher incomes are taxed at higher rates than lower incomes, and lower incomes share in some of the same benefits for essentially a lower price. However, employers also gain certain disproportional advantages. The German people are better educated and healthier than Americans, so they are easier to train and keep employed. The wealthier are more likely to benefit from govt investments in transportation infrastructure, for example.RE: For instance the creation of the Windows software or Apple Computer, both engineered by todays leading teach savvy's ( Bill gates and Steve Jobs ).Pro offers classic examples of the role the community plays in developing wealth. Bill Gates started out as a BASIC programmer, writing in a computer language developed by National Science Foundation grants offered to grad students. In the early 60's, there wasn't a lot of corporate money available to pay young students to invent new programming languages. These innovations were dependent on the foresight of the US Govt. to invest in technologies for which real profits were 10 or 20 years down the line.When Steve Jobs was starting out, there was no home market for his product. Jobs wisely made a deal with the State of California to provide several hundred early Apples to public schools in exchange for massive tax breaks. The Government's investment paid off on both sides of the deal. As more and more students had their first computer experience on an Apple, demand from the schools increased. The demand from schools kept Apple afloat in the '80's while Microsoft commanded the home market. By 1995, 60% of all school computers were Apples, setting the stage for that product's popular embrace by the younger demographic in the 2000's.Without a degree of government investment, neither Microsoft or Apple would have developed the way they did. We haven't even considered the US Govt' s development of the Internet or its massive investment in computer education or its role as the primary customer of computing companies for the first 40 years of the computer's history.RE: Where do the millions of dollars that are used for Cancer Research and Alternative Energy come from? The profits from the capitalist corporations. If not for them we would not have the knowledge of that we have now of cancer or any other sorts of diseases.False. Most funding for cancer research comes from taxpayers and charities, rather than from profit-making businesses. In the US, less than 30% of all cancer research is funded by commercial researchers such as pharmaceutical companies.[3] And alternative energy? There's really no comparison between paltry corporate investments and government spending in energy. Who built the massive hydro-electric projects of the 1930s? Who invented atomic energy and harnessed it in power plants, originally for submarines? Who invented the photo-voltaic cell to capture solar energy? You, me, and our United States Government did. Show me a corporation that's demonstrated even one percent of the innovative output of the US Govt in the field of alternative energy.But it should not be an excuse to for the need to punish the hard-working entrepreneurs that put their blood and sweat together to watch their company succeed.We should remember that the corporation itself is an invention of government. Corporations were companies who were offered contracts to perform missions for the public benefit, building a bridge or a school, for example. In exchange, those companies were provided special protection from litigation and liability. As the concept progressed, governments discovered that more widespread and general protections allowed corporations to take risks that excelerated economic growth. Sure, business will always resist tax and prefer profit to any specific public benefit. Nevertheless, all companies exist to a greater or lesser extent for the public benefit and at the public's discretion. People were around long before there were companies and will be around long after the current constructs of business and corporations outlive their usefulness. At the end of the day, the public benefit should and will take priority.[1]http://www.businessweek.com...[2]http://markschmitt.typepad.com...[3]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...