mass killings were done because those people literally were traitors of humanity. they thought that despotism (capitalism) with its democracy is a great thing without understanding that these capitalists wanted to enslave the Russians. the poor decided that it is about time that life is in favor of not just 5%, but the whole country. they brought the revolution. But, then, every now and then some idiots would hear or see a life in america in some forbidden magazine and were corrupted by the idea of capitalism without realizing how truly bad it is. they started saying and spreading that life is great on the other side and got imprisoned or killed for it.
Napoleone, Hitler, Uncle Sam - all have one thing in common. All of them wanted to conquer Russia. Napoleone and Hitler did it by force. US has been trying it by covert force and and with financial force. So far - no one successful. Although, US did extract lots of capital and done way more damage than anyone in the world.
Hitler wanted to conquer the whole Europe and was financed by american, english, and german banks. if he would've conquer Russia - life could've been totally different today. US-Russian relations never been good after the WWII just because Russian knew who was sponsoring Hitler and for what purposes - conquer Russia either by force or by purchase.
But the worst thing is that those Nazi's that were brought to USA were brought because someone here said: "if we don't get those nazi's - russians will get them. and then, russia will be too dangerous"
yeah, right - Stalin would execute those criminals on the spot with his own hands. for hitler's joint venture sponsored by western globalists russia paid with 20,000,000 lives.
not one american today is thankful for what Russia did once for the whole world.
Dude, Stalin had people killed for fantastic reasons like the fact that they were taller than him. In addition, haven't you ever heard, "never be the first one to stop clapping?"
Think about what you're advocating: You like the idea of
imprisoning, torturing, and killing people for merely having different ideas from yours. Do you not see how psychotic that is? How immoral it is? How evil it is? In your world, are the extremes of cruelty and oppression perfectly okay just so long as there's no such thing as money? The country of your dreams is not a utopia. It is an inconceivably hellish nightmare on earth where nobody's inherent human rights are recognized or protected. I am not sure exactly where my breaking point is, but a despotic Communist government is light years past it. I would fight to the death with everything I can against such brutal tyranny. People who advocate the free market are not traitors to humanity. In reality, they're just...smarter than you are.
However, people who condone killing other people for dissent ARE traitors to humanity. Seriously, how much of your life did you spend in the USSR and Russia? I thought the ordinary American sheep were brainwashed and indoctrinated, but your sociopathic opinions are simply off the charts.
Although my own understanding of economics is amateurish at best, yours is completely backwards. Allow me to cure your appalling ignorance by explaining in excruciating detail WHY our current system results in the abuses it does. First of all, I want to clarify three things:
- There's no such thing as a debate between "Capitalism and Communism," because no economic system exists that is not capitalistic. Capital merely refers to wealth. As such, communism is a form of capitalism - the difference is that capital - or wealth - is owned and controlled "collectively" (i.e. by the state) rather than by individuals, as it is in a totally free market. Under systems like socialism and national socialism, it's a mixed bag of both (and differences arise between ownership and control over capital).
- On wealth redistribution in general: Wealth redistribution implies that you can keep only what the government LETS you keep - in other words, the government becomes your master rather than your servant, and this is unacceptable. The easiest way to subjugate the people is to put them at the mercy of the state economically...everything else follows by itself.
- Once again, aside from despotism and human rights abuses, Communism results in abject poverty for the entire society. This is because, even if a central economic planner is brilliant, it's impossible to plan the production and distribution of goods in a way that can account for the inherent complexities of a large-scale economy. Capital is inevitably mismanaged, misallocated, etc. Efficiency suffers from this, and it also suffers from the fact that some people will do the least amount of work necessary to not get in trouble. Other than not being tortured or killed, there's no selfish incentive to work harder. Sure, some people will work hard because they care about everyone else in the commune, but the inefficiency and shortages inherent in Communism create an environment of low morale, which destroys the camaradarie and team spirit the system tries to instill in the people. Besides, it's inherently wrong to force people to be a part of a system they don't want to be a part of. Coercion is evil. This is a huge reason why I advocate a government that leaves you the hell alone and doesn't steal your wealth - that way, people who want to participate in the free market can, and people with Communist ideals can form their own insulated communities where they own everything collectively and ignore the free market in other communities.
We do indeed have a terrible pattern of wealth and business consolidation in this country. The more big businesses merge, consolidate, and crush small competition, the less free market competition we have. Under our current system, costs of market entry are insanely high, keeping out new competitors to replace the ones lost. When there are fewer companies competing, that means there are fewer companies competing for both consumers AND workers. Therefore, prices rise, wages fall, temporary profits rise, and more and more wealth gravitates towards the few remaining megacorporations - but gradually, the impoverishment of the general population works to slow down the economy and economic activity in general starts to depreciate at an accelerating rate.
Before leading into the true sources of our pattern of consolidation and monopolism, it's important to note that there are other factors directly impoverishing the middle class. Most obviously, the income tax steals wealth from individual citizens to pay for unnecessary warfarism and welfarism. More importantly, our monetary policy centers around the issuance of credit-based inflationary fiat money. When money is lent, it is created out of thin air, and vice versa. This process happens when people take out a loan for a house, when megacorporations take out massive loans for acquisitions, and when the government takes out loans to cover its outrageous spending deficits. When loans are repaid, this created credit is extinguished. The government is "special" here in that it routinely gets away with taking out more loans to pay its old ones off. As such, rather than the money supply expanding and contracting in a regular cycle or staying relatively constant (assuming stable levels of borrowing), the money supply continues to expand at an accelerating rate. Obviously, monetary inflation is directly tied to subsequent price inflation once the economy takes note of the debased money supply, although this almost perfect correlation can be masked by fiddling with the way price inflation is calculated and by exporting our dollars overseas (which we do en masse...these extra dollars are not currently effecting prices so much in the domestic market, but they will eventually come to bite us in the ass and come flooding back in once other countries lose their faith in the dollar). Before price inflation occurs and the money loses its value though, the borrowers get to spend their money. Obviously, the amount of money that government and large corporations spend is several orders of magnitude larger than the amount of money that home-buyers and middle-class debtors spend, so they get the greatest benefit here. Large, government-favored corporations benefit doubly, since a lot of the money spent by the government is spent doing business with them. As the new money circulates through the economy, demand for goods and services begins to greatly exceed the natural rate of increase in production potential, and this leads to shortages. These shortages are not exactly severe, but they're large enough that the pricing mechanism gets a whiff of what's going on. The economy as a whole therefore realizes that the currency has become debased, so prices increase to compensate for the flood of paper and credit. By the time the money reaches the poorest in society, it has less buying power than it did when it was first created. Even worse, every dollar ordinary people store in savings loses value similarly. Today's rate of monetary inflation is somewhere shy of 15% annually, meaning people's savings are worth almost 15% less every single year. That adds up quickly! At the same time ordinary citizens are having their life savings stolen from them, huge corporations are making acquisitions and such with the borrowed money, which they can pay back later in cheaper dollars! While they quickly buy up real wealth (businesses, property, etc.), they're quickly handing off the borrowed money, and it depreciates in value in someone else's hands. The situation is even worse for those living on fixed nominal income, like many senior citizens. While their income stays fixed, their cost of living skyrockets.
As you can see, our monetary policy destroys the savings of the poor and middle classes by redistributing their wealth and buying power in an overwhelmingly upward direction. However, that's unfortunately not all. Under inflationary pressure, both prices and wages rise - but prices rise faster than wages (for reasons which I won't go into here, partially because I'm not confident enough in my understanding of them to explain why - let it suffice to say that this phenomenon occurs). In other words, inflation not only steals the wealth you currently own - it also creates a trend where your costs of living start to increase faster than your wages can keep up!
Obviously, this monetary system encourages an economic culture of "borrow and spend," and it prohibitively discourages savings. The dollar is like the "hot potato," and everyone's trying to get rid of it as quickly as possible before it loses value. Most people aren't perceptive enough to think this way on a conscious level, but the spending culture molds their subconscious anyway. In case you haven't noticed, since money is created as debt, banks are at the center of our economy. Rather than entrepreneurs, banks are the movers and shakers. You cannot slowly accumulate wealth by saving it the way you could under an honest system (with a stable money supply based on wealth rather than debt). Since people cannot accumulate wealth from savings, they cannot use this saved wealth to start up a company, either. Other than recruiting private investors (which means giving up a huge portion of your business to a rich person), the only way the average person can start up a business is to borrow money - and the less capital you have to put up for collateral, the smaller your loan and the smaller the company you can start. When the only way to finance a business is through borrowing, huge and established corporations have an inherent advantage over smaller businesses in that they can borrow excessive amounts of money and buy real wealth with it, the proceeds of which will pay for the loan. Of course, under a savings-based system larger corporations would also be able to save and accumulate money quicker, but there's another HUGE difference: Under our current system, you have the "Wal-Mart effect." Whenever Wal-Mart comes into a town, banks loan tons of money out to it, and they cease loaning any money to its smaller competitors, anticipating that the competitors will soon be driven out of business and unable to repay their loans. Because of some other terrible policies we have, this is possibly true anyway, but our monetary policy makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, under our system, companies are entirely dependent on banks, and this greatly favors big business over small business. In other words, our monetary policy not only directly impoverishes people - it is also one of the major reasons behind our trend of consolidation.
There are other extremely important reasons why businesses America are merger, acquisition, and consolidation-happy as well:
- Corporations exist in the first place. This is a huge problem, because corporations are actually ALIEN to free-market capitalism based on contracts. They're government constructs - government is what gives them privileges and immunities that ordinary citizens do not have. Government created the "corporate veil."
- Corporate taxes are high. Only larger companies can afford the overhead of hiring teams of lawyers to find every possible loophole and exemption. Meanwhile, small companies get raped. Of course, the funny thing is, due to corruption inherent in any centralized government, corporations are practically the ones writing these loopholes.
- Regulations and red tape are excessive. Complying with them creates so much additional overhead (including legal work) that they significantly increase the barriers to market entry, thereby increasing the minimum size a company must be to compete. Of course, even worse, the corruption inherent in any centralized government means that big corporations are essentially writing loopholes for themselves through their representatives in government. In other words, people cheering about regulations think that they just "stuck it" to Wal-Mart, but really, they just stuck it to mom and pop shops and drove them out of business.
- Corporate welfare is rampant. The larger your corporation is, the better it can lobby for a government contract, or even better, a handout. This gives an obviously unfair competitive advantage to the recipients of government largesse.
Why do mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations occur? They occur because the barriers to competitive market entry are extremely high right now, for the reasons I listed above.
The only real argument for wealth redistribution is if you claim that free market capitalism inherently results in consolidation rather than competition. Hopefully, I've adequately dispelled the myth that perpetual consolidation is inherent in a free market by briefly explaining its ties to overtaxation, overregulation, corporate welfare, etc., and giving a detailed explanation on our monetary system's role. However, let's assume for the sake of argument that the factors I listed do not account for the whole story. If so, this would be tied to the fact that capital is often accrued through inheritance rather than through merit, and money works to make more money (both through investments and through the ability to create businesses and surpass the market's financial entry barriers). However, the important thing to understand is that the
only competitive advantage rich people have is their ability to overcome market entry barriers. Once you're wealthy enough (or can acquire enough venture capital) to overcome these barriers and compete, you're on equal ground. In other words, the optimal size of a company is not "as big as possible" in free market capitalism, like the case is now (to overcome artificial hurdles) - rather, it's "big enough to overcome entry barriers, and everything after that is a matter of who does the best job."
Several other points logically follow from this. The most important one is that, although companies do consolidate to achieve a minimum competitive size, this process isn't perpetual (to the point of monopoly) in all industries of a free market. Instead, free market consolidation rests at a near-equilibrium with the point of viable market entry. There are five major types of business models I can think of at the moment, and they each have their own natural costs of entry. From the most expensive to the least expensive:
- Utilities and other industries relying on massive physical infrastructure. The ultimate example is roads...which is why roads are public property in almost every society. Privatizing them might make for a fun experiment, but only in a limited jurisdiction. (Such experimentation is part of what makes decentralization of policy great, though!)
- Non-physical empires based on copyrighted or patented technological infrastructure, where other businesses create their products to fit in with a specific copyrighted platform (i.e. Microsoft).
- Production of manufactured goods
- Agriculture
- Services
Obviously, you have to be a big company to compete as, say, a utility (thankfully, there's a natural countermeasure that I'll explain below). However, the key point here is that redistributing wealth does NOT fix that. No amount of downward redistribution from the "big boys" will give middle class people the amount of capital necessary to create a startup in high-entry-cost industries. Regulating the market and raising the bar of entry even further doesn't fix it, either (in fact, it makes those costs much WORSE!). You're always going to have to be big for some kinds of markets, but if we react by preventing companies from getting big enough, the industry simply won't exist, rather than falling to smaller companies. Because of that, wealth redistribution for the purpose of increasing competition in such industries is futile. That's completely aside from the moral argument that it is theft (and therefore wrong) and the additional practical argument that the inherent and inevitable corruption of government results in a phenomenon where all meaningful wealth redistribution goes
upwards.
However, under a sound monetary system, there are mitigating factors that help the general public maintain wealth in the presence of the "big boys." For instance, the bigger a company is, the greater the odds it's publicly owned, so anyone can get a piece of the action. As far as wages go, huge companies are particularly susceptible to the negotiative demands of unions, so [non-coercive] unions level the playing field in that category. As far as meaningfully lowering costs of entry to promote competition, there are in fact free-market solutions to costs of entry in production, such as cooperative buying groups.
On the subject of cartels and monopolies:
Coercive cartels and monopolies are sometimes effective in markets with high costs of entry, but they're utterly ineffective in markets with reasonable costs of entry (because another competitor will just come in and ruin their parade). There are thankfully some natural countermeasures that people can take in the events of cartels and monopolies, however:
- In infrastructure-based models, private companies frequently thumb their noses at people because "Haha, our infrastructure is our private property, and you have to acquiesce to our terms to use it!" However, except in the case of cell phone companies, they forget: They must run their infrastructure through PUBLIC property (i.e. roads
) if they want to have an infrastructure at all. This is not their right - this is a privilege, and it means that these companies have to bow to the terms and conditions "we the people" impose on their use of that privilege. The property rights argument swings both ways. 
- In copyright-based business models, we'd do well to remember that copyrights, patents, and trademarks are government constructs used to promote the progress of the arts and sciences. Such grants of exclusivity are useful, but like all government-granted privileges, they can be abused coercively. The simple solution to monopolistic practices in such markets is to revoke a monopoly's exclusive privilege to such "intellectual property" (a term I loathe). Personally, I think copyright laws would work better if they were decentralized and each state competed in the strictness of their composition and enforcement - that would lead to the minimal restriction of competition necessary to provide a financial incentive for progress - but that's another discussion entirely.
- In terms of the production of manufactured goods and to a lesser extent, agriculture, cartels are sometimes effective under our current system, but it remains to be seen how bad they'd be with all of the above problems with our economy resolved. I don't imagine natural monopolies would occur here, but if they do, state-level antitrust laws would be more than sufficient to handle them.
- In the services sector, cartels are pretty nonexistent.
Wow, that took forever to write. Thankfully, I don't live in cageybee's "happy Communist world," because I'm sure he'd love to see me drawn and quartered for espousing such "dangerous" ideas.
