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To: Antoninus
What I said was that you can't divorce the system from the participants. When the participants are immoral scoundrels, capitalism breeds only misery because those corrupt individuals will do everything in their power to rig the system in their favor (sound familiar?).

Capitalism doesn't breed anything. It is an economic system, not a moral code. Someone can be an immoral scoundrel in any economic system. The economic system didn't make them corrupt. You sound like an OWS Marxist ascribing capitalism in and of itself as sinister.

"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer."

Karl Marx

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.

NOAM CHOMSKY, Language and Freedom

233 posted on 01/13/2012 11:36:24 PM PST by kabar
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To: kabar
You sound like an OWS Marxist ascribing capitalism in and of itself as sinister.

Nice try. You hear my comments that way because you have raised an economic system to be your deity and can not tolerate even a whiff of criticism.

I view capitalism as the natural order of a man's commercial interactions with others. Compare that to the family which is the natural order of man's private life. There are basic rules of duty, trust and care that govern both systems, however, and when these rules are transgressed with regularity, harm takes place.

When immorality is introduced into the family, the family itself becomes a breeding ground for all sorts of evils--domestic abuse, addiction, sloth, poverty, mental illness, etc. The members of the family become miserable and eventually, when the corruption becomes too great, the family is destroyed.

Notice, by saying this, I am not condemning the family as an institution in any way. I am condemning the corruption of the family.

Similarly, with capitalism, when corruption is introduced into the system and allowed to flourish, it will breed misery and the eventual destruction of the system.

Again, this is not a difficult concept to grasp. In the cases of both the family and the capitalist system, they function best when the participants are good, upstanding, and moral people. And in my opinion, the best ethical system for regulating both the family and capitalism is traditional Christianity.
247 posted on 01/13/2012 11:59:27 PM PST by Antoninus (Mitt Romney -- attempting to execute a hostile take-over of the Republican Party.)
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