RE: How Profits Make Us Less Humane
It's safe to say that we disagree.
Sorry bro, but that's nonsense. Having an idea does not create wealth. And in the case of Gates, he didn't even have the idea.
Having an idea does not. Implementing that idea and putting it on the market does.
And in the case of Gates, he didn't even have the idea.
He had the execution. Fun fact - Gates, Allen and Ballmer worked in the same motel used by prostitutes while debugging Basic that they were trying to sell to Atari. Thin walls and all that.
Now capitalism has forced the mothers, fathers and their education-craving children to do dad's job; there's that destruction of true wealth again.
Is there a better system out there? Slavery did it, feudalism did it, communism did it, capitalism does it.
We, as a species, started dirt poor wandering around searching for food. When you look at the historical development, of all the systems we tried - capitalism performed the best.
Your position that everything would be fine if only those dirty billionaires didn't steal all that money for themselves is indefensible. Judging capitalism by some idealistic system that doesn't exist is just not fair.
Try this for a change: Capitalism is bad when compared to X, where X is a system that actually exists (existed) in the real World.
It would be if that were my position. I argue against capitalism, not the people in it.
That's so easy. Capitalism is bad when compared to communism, which has existed for 190,000 of the 200,000 years of the existence of homo sapiens; we just didn't have a name for it back then ;-)
Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are the same, all modes of production in which the owners of the means of production exploit the labor of the working majority, there's no difference between the three in a systemic sense (hence the "wage slave"). The communism you refer to isn't communism at all; it's state-capitalism, again exactly the same model of production in which it's the government minority that owns the means of production. Learn what communism is and don't simply go by what countries like to call themselves; the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not a democracy, nor a republic and certainly isn't for the people...
But here's a point of agreement though ;-)
I'll take the capitalism of today over that communism all day long.
Not the biggest fan of my wife dying during childbirth or getting my tribe raided by the neighbours.
No, you'll take the technological progression of today over the non existence of technology back then. Defenders of capitalism have this special talent for confusing progress with economy... I'll even take it a step further and claim that capitalism incentivizes a wholly wrong kind of innovation and arrests true progress through silly schemes like "Intellectual Property Rights" and "Patents".
I'm afraid that you made an excellent argument not only for capitalism but for the systems that preceded it as well.
190k years with no visible progress at all. The State emerges and 10k years later - we went to the Moon.
Nah, I'm not that scary...
That's another negative my friend; 10k years later a handful of us went to the moon, the rest of us are still asking "when moon?", "when Lambo?" ;-) I'd hate to go on a chicken-or-egg dispute with you, but I think it's safe to assume that you know as well as I do that technology (the plough first and foremost, which enabled us to mass-produce food) came first, and that afterwards a handful of people appropriated that technology and resources (the land) for themselves. 10k years later nothing has changed: Jobs appropriates all the publicly funded technologies and sells them as if they were his own. We've been stagnant for 10k years, since we went from equal and truly free people to the class divide that has suppressed the masses all that time. It's not that complicated.
You're ignoring the existence of chieftains, little monarchs, that ruled over us during that period. Are the archaeologist of today finding the ordinary graves of ordinary humans or that of the rulers? Even then some animals were more equal than others.
Fair enough. But 10k years later you've got two of us arguing on the blockchain-powered website instead of worrying whether or not we'll please the local warlord ;-)
Those didn't exist before we stopped being nomadic tribes; those existed after the invention of the aforementioned plough, before we settled down in towns, cities, city-states, states and nations eventually. You're making my point here, for which I'm grateful :-)
Warlords are indeed local, and always on the prowl for additional localities. With that I refer to the previous point ;-)