About Socialism

Prove it.

 

That doesn't make sense. Our entire economy is funded by the profits of businesses and capitalism.

 

Live collectively to cut costs, never spend a cent unless you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO (ie, no holidays, eating out, cinema, new clothes, fancy phones, new cars, hair styling, new furniture, air conditioning, clothes dryers, vacuum cleaners, power left on overnight, etc etc etc etc), eat 'beans and rice' and do that for a decade, at least.

I know quite a few people who did it that way ... and I'm only one person. In fact, the person I know who started with the least is now very wealthy. She lived in the family home until marrying at 34, because it allowed her to put ALL of her minimum wage into investments. She didn't have kids, or any expensive bad habits. She wouldn't even buy a car, insisting on taking the bus to work. She was also smart enough to marry a (working class) man who was equally responsible and determined, so combined they're multi-millionaires. So, not only did she exceed her origins, she was also able to provide home maintainence, companionship, and care to her elderly widowed mother. Everyone wins.

 

Interesting, impressive story, but individuals like that are extremely rare, and her answer is not a viable solution for everyone.

 

They're not rare at all. I know at least a dozen who've done something similar, and again, that's just ME. When you mix in middle class and above circles and/or live in a 'money' area, you encounter such self-made people all the time.

And her answer is viable for ANYONE who chooses it. She started with nothing more than that which 99% of us have .. access to the family home.

 

I again applaud her & her husband for their rare accomplishment, but I have known many in my life who never even had a "family home" to start with. I didn't. Those who are born & live under real impoverished conditions have very little to work with in terms of seeking wealth. Most people who have even the basic amount allowing them some financial flexibility, don't often understand or relate to the situation faced by the truly poor. I'm not saying it's impossible. I am saying it's close to impossible, and the number who find a way out of poverty is statistically extremely small.

 

I started poor. My husband migrated here as a child from the Third World. I still have distant relatives living hand to mouth in rented accommodation (under or unemployed). My own grandmother never had an inside toilet or hot water until she went into a nursing home in the last year of her life .. and that was only 20 years ago. Trust me when I say I know about First World poverty.

And I would submit that the number of adults who were raised in rented accommodation would be much lower than the number who were raised in privately owned family homes. That's because up until this century, even the poorest could afford to buy a modest home. That's the head start we all had .. assuming we had the motivation and determination to make it work for us. We didn't have MONEY, or EDUCATION, or LUCK. We simply had a modest roof over our heads .. that single factor which massively impacts our ability to stockpile money. Remove rent or mortgage payments from the equation, and split any remaining living costs between several people, and you have an enormous advantage. An advantage which cost nothing more than the self-discipline and frugality of the previous generation in paying down that family home.

Edited to add that the reason so few leave poverty, is because so few are willing to do what it takes. It's not a function of poverty, it's a function of human will.

 

No. I simply identified the fact that your speculation that I must live in a Third World country was a fabrication unrelated to anything I said.

No, only rich ones do.

No, that's just baldly false. You are decades behind the times. The global distribution of wealth and income is no longer bimodal. Large fractions of the populations of poor countries now enjoy higher real standards of living than poor Americans, to say nothing of effectively the ENTIRE populations of other rich countries doing so.

Being homeless is definitely poverty. Not being able to pay the rent that landowners demand just for PERMISSION to have a job is also definitely poverty.

<yawn> That is the same evil, despicable "logic" slave owners used to attack the abolitionists: "You're just jealous because you don't own any slaves. Get a job, save up your money, and buy some slaves of your own. Problem solved!"

Accusing those who oppose injustice of envy for those who profit by it is one of the most evil acts a human being can commit. What's next? If I speak out against the sexual grooming and abuse of young non-Muslim girls by Pakistani Muslim men in Britain, would it be responsive of them to say, "If you don't like having no young girls to rape and abuse, just find some and abuse them. Problem solved!"?

No, because the hard runners are producing but not getting to keep what they produce, while the privileged, parasitic rich are legally entitled to take from production without contributing to it. The parasitic, unproductive poor get an order of magnitude less out of production than the parasitic, unproductive rich (~3% of GDP vs ~30%), while numbering an order of magnitude more (10% vs 1%). So each unproductive rich parasite costs society about 100X as much as each unproductive poor parasite.

I'm not a socialist or communist, and I agree that socialism is even worse than capitalism. But I definitely want to eliminate the outrageous indulgence of capitalism, which is funded by stealing from the productive.

I didn't call you anything. I made an observation about how evil must always be justified, and the only way to justify it is with lies. Maybe you are a little sensitive on the subject.