We are given the opportunity to create our own safety net and thrive within the system.

That being said there are many government programs that exist to supplement shortcomings in people’s lives.

There are obviously situations where people don’t have the ability to thrive, like disabilities. I don’t think that is enough of an issue to disrupt the entire system to cater to a very small minority.

So yea, I am absolutely claiming laziness is a huge factor in this conversation. Personal accountability is a huge problem in the United States.

This post was edited by WickedDarkJuggalos on Nov 14 2021 12:11am

Damn this many lazy people we should get some sort of mental healthcare life coach system in place.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html

I wish there was a way to measure drive as a statistic.

But just showing the statistic for people under the poverty line proves nothing but that many people made about $12,000 or less that year. That doesn’t break it down by any factors.

One very small example is this. How many of these people have roommates or live with their significant other? Put just two people at that $12,000 mark in the same household, both contributing but technically living separate lives and they are a-okay. One person living in public housing pays virtually nothing for rent, while people who are above the poverty line are paying for everything out of pocket. So how many of these individuals are supplemented by government benefits?

I am well above the poverty line but I pay about $11,000 a year in taxes on my property. This is before any utility, all paid out of my pocket. That is not even a factor in the poverty statistic.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Lol have you began your manifesto yet?

What I am saying is that you can use exactly this line of thinking to claim that all the deaths caused by regimes such as the USSR and China are not related to communism.

You're drawing a false equivalence.

Capitalist regimes are guilty of all sorts of crimes, and yet they've still found time to lift billions out of poverty, and their crimes are not remotely on the same scale. The Great Leap Forward directly led to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. Collectivization in the Ukraine led directly to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians. We count these things against communists because they aren't accidents or byproducts, they are the natural consequence of communist policy in action. And the scale is extraordinary. Mao killed upwards of 50 million people in four years. Pol Pot eliminated a quarter of the Cambodian population. Stalin killed a million Ukrainians per year over the course of a decade. It took 400 years for the mercantilists who started the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to enslave and import ~10-15 million Africans. Terrible, to be sure, but eclipsed by either Stalin or Mao acting on their own in the span of a few short years. Communism in North Korea has kept a nation of 25 million enslaved in destitute poverty for the past three quarters of a century. Their capitalist neighbors are now a first-world state.

"Mercantalists did all the bad stuff, but capitalists did all the good stuff". Dude, capitalism is why the trans-atlantic slave trade was so massive. It was happening but the bulk of it was at the end when enslaving humans became an industry, to the point that a major part of the industry was literally breeding slaves like livestock which pushes the number well above 15 million. The genocide of American natives also happened to clear arible farm land for capitalist endeavors.

Humans were already getting brought out of poverty in massive numbers before capitalism. Technological innovations did not happen because of capitalism, they have been happening for all of humanity. In fact, there's a significant argument to be made that capitalism did not have anything to do with the most substantial advances in technology. Newton's classical mechanics and Maxwell's equations were the true catalysts for modern technological advancement, and they were completely divorced from capitalist incentives. Like, yeah, capitalism incentivizes production, but advances have always been made. The "evil communists" beat our asses to space, and into orbit, and we only won on the moon because we kept moving the goalposts and that was never their real goal.

You are literally drawing an arbitrary line where the bad stuff of capitalism "isn't capitalism's fault because it's human nature" and the good stuff "is capitalism directly taking people out of poverty", and that's what I'm highlighting.

Let me guess. When Leopold II enslaved the entirety of Congo and killed 10 million people for fun, this was not in any way due to capitalism, am I right?

Nope. Because thats always happened.

LALALALALA CAPITALISM IS FLAWLESS LALALALALAL