You People Don’t Even Know What Capitalism And Socialism Are

Spoiler Alert: America Is No Longer “Capitalist,” Liberals Aren’t Really “Socialist,” And Just Shut Up About Venezuela

Marilyn Monroe when she hears people talking about capitalism and socialism.

According to conservative memes circulating around the internet, Bernie Sanders is hell-bent on turning America into the next Venezuela — the alleged embodiment of liberal failure.

Nevermind the fact that the only “socialist” policies Sanders is proposing are universal healthcare and, less aggressively, tuition-free public university. Universal healthcare, like that found in countries such as Canada, Japan, Norway, Germany, Algeria, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, Kuwait, Netherlands, Denmark, France, South Korea, and dozens of other nations that are in no way comparable to Venezuela.

Venezuela, which actually is a full-on socialist country with government controlled food production, distribution, energy, and aspects of society that even the die-hard fringe commies in America have no interest seeing implemented here. Venezuela, which is in a full-on meltdown, not because of socialism itself, but because of greedy leaders fucking it up for everyone.

These people’s understanding of capitalism is no better.

For all the touting of the gospel of free markets, you’d think people would be more aware of how multi-national conglomerates maintain their dominance. Spoiler alert: it’s not necesarilly because they are running their businesses better than everyone else. There’s nothing “free market” about what’s happening in our economy.

From documented wage suppression to a massive lobbying budget (read: bribery), some of the most successful companies in the world no longer actually have to compete in a free market where they live or die by the quality of their products and services — they simply suppress competition with tax codes, policies and other forms of government favoritism. Not to mention the media matrix.

Want some examples?

Well, in a free market economy, when Wall Street went bankrupt and nearly destroyed the entire global commerce network, the companies involved would have, as bankrupt companies do, been dissolved and been replaced by competing financial institutions that operated competently and ethically. Instead, these bloated failures got propped up by hundreds of billions in tax dollars. Many of the Wall Street luminaires directly involved in the recession were awarded multi-million dollar bonuses for a job well done, and banks like Chase literally devoured some of their less well-connected competitors and became bigger than they’ve ever been before.

This debate over vaccines is another example. We don’t need to talk about the science here (and in terms of economics, it doesn’t even matter), but here’s some food for thought: if this is a free market economy, and there is apparently a significant population of consumers who don’t want to buy vaccines, where are the entrepreneurs rising up to meet the demands for a non-controversial solution to this problem? In a free market economy, there would be a gold rush of aspiring tycoons trying to create a non-vaccine solution to the problems of measles, mumps, rubella and the rest. Instead, we have pharmaceutical corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising, marketing and social media campaigns to shut these hippie moms up.

Make no mistake, regardless of the validity of the science and speculation both for and against vaccines, the reason this debate is so goddamn intense is because it’s cheaper for big pharma to defend their current revenue streams than it is for them to R&D new products.

This graph is meaningless. Like your flawed understanding of economics.

So no, we do not have a purely free market economy. We’re not the working-man’s idea of pure capitalism that so hypnotizes them to vote Republican, where rugged entrepreneurs try to do good work lest their company be taken down by better competitors. Of course that exists in more cases than not, but when we’re talking about the top dogs of the top dogs—those involved with things like secretly negotiating the TPP, it’s almost the exact opposite. Our economy is somewhere between a plutocracy and corporatocracy, where many of those who are doing the best remain at the very top because they’ve found a way to keep everyone else from getting there.

But let’s not waste any more time blaming them or shaming them or debating any of this. Because the truth is, these dominators, these suppressors, have done what they have done because they were incentivized to do so.

Let’s remove those incentives to attain wealth and power through control and domination, and put in place incentives to attain wealth and power through the greater good.

There’s always going to be people who have more and those who have less. This alleged shift toward “socialism” is not about changing that. It’s a response to the fact that many who have so much have gotten it by restricting those who have less.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the fact that the Walton family has a net worth of nearly $150 billion. What is wrong, however, is that at least some of that massive amount of money they have comes from the fact that $6.2 billion dollars of their employees wages per year are subsidized by tax payers.

Incentivize the Waltons to pay their employees more and that problem goes away. And they’ll still be rich as fuck.

In a previous article, I discussed how America’s prosperity was actually built on the practice of dodging taxes, and we could recreate that abundance if we incentivized companies to lower their AGIs by paying better wages instead of stashing their profits in the Cayman Islands.

Please stop talking about capitalism and socialism and their diametric opposition. It’s great that we’re actually discussing things other than celebrities and gossip, but unfortunately the majority of people are blind to the fact that America isn’t really all that capitalist anymore, and these damn “socialist liberals” are simply pushing for policies found in the blatantly non-Communist nations of Canada or Japan.

Just stop fighting and let’s get these changes made.

Hell, if we adopted the tax system outlined in my previous article, we could probably get so much money flowing through the economy we wouldn’t even need universal healthcare.