Who are you, the ghost of Milton Friedman? There's a lot wrong with your analysis, which isn't surprising because it's basically ripped from Capitalist Apologia 101. But let's frame by frame it:
420 wrote:Population growth is showing no signs of slowing down
Wrong. Population growth is slowing down, and has been slowing down for some time. In fact, most of the population growth of the last decade stems not from births, but from decreased deaths. With access to higher life expectancies, populations continue to rise for some time until they hit the new equilibrium point - but many parts of the world don't even have enough births to hit replacement rate.
For example: Singapore enjoys a birthrate of 1.19 children per couple. Its population is
rising because those children are being born and people aren't dying to make room. But
come on! The number of deaths is 1 per person. A couple is
two people, so if they are having less than 1.2 kids between them... that means that when that generation shuffles off (as it eventually will), we'll be left with a much smaller population base. Now, that's the most extreme case, but it's really extreme. If trends continue, population will continue to rise on inertial grounds and then collapse precipitously as my own generation begins to cack frm old age (in somewhere between 80 and 100 years I hope).
The idea that somehow the need for constantly increasing resources is hardwired into the world and self evident is
complete bullshit. We can very easily perceive the limits of what we need. Heck, we can foresee the limits of what we
want. Demand is essentially finite. The number of mouths to feed is going to drop, not rise.
And the worst part is that the number of mouths to feed who will themselves be making bread will
also fall as a percentage of the populace. The older generations are going to be
bigger than the younger ones. It is literally going to be impossible to sustain a pay as you go system in the extremely near future. The elderly and sick, the
non-workers will outnumber the young and healthy. What then?
The answer is: "Robots and Mass Production Techniques" - but that only solves the question of goods creation. Ultimately an equitable distribution system that allows the old to eat without providing service to the economy at large because
they'll be fvcking old and the young will be feeding them.
because as more people spend more on more products the money supply increases
You got that backwards. The money supply is an abstraction. We add more money to the system in order to allow greater amounts of trade to happen. Sometimes that bites us in the ass (like when Speculators destroy the Thai currency), but generally it seems to work vaguely OK. However, to say that there is any natural process that causes people to decide to print more money and then print it is complete crazy talk.
No way: the best way to be successful if your a capitalist is simply to offer good deals at a fair price.
What? Seriously, do you have
any idea about the history of Standard Oil? The best way to succeed in capitalism has
never been to promote fairness or goodness. The very concept is absurd.
No. The best way to be a success in Capitalism is to run your business into the fvcking ground as hard and fast as you can. Then, because you've looted it for everything it's worth, you
move on and put your money somewhere else. This is the story over and over again. It's the Neo-Liberalism Way, and it's very "successful" by the standards that it judges itself by: which is how much money it can extract from processes.
And that's the basic flaw in your ideal right there. The criteria by which a capitalist enterprise is judged successful or a failure is the amount of profit it generates. That is: the total amount of wealth that are paid for goods and/or services in excess of what those goods and services actually cost to produce. That's the entire point.
And that's why we're going to run out of Fish in the ocean in 2048. The fact is that Capitalists can make money
anywhere. So there's no reason for them to cut profits down by embracing sustainability. If they take all the fish out
now they can make a big pile of money
now. And then... they can stop fishing because the investment money can be placed in any industry at all rather than constantly reinvesting it in fishing.
The reason that peasant farmers save some of their grain to replant is not because they make more money doing it that way - it's because they don't have the option of getting up and doing something else next year. Next year they'll be in the same land and they'll be farming the next crop in the rotation, and so on and so forth. But that's not a "problem" for Capitalists because it's all just theoretical money anyway. They don't literally plant and corn or haul any fish, they just finance projects each year. And there's no reason that they should finance the same project next year when they can just run the project into destruction for a few dollars more and then
do something else.
The new century is going to be prosperous...
...if we don't have the ocean rise up and claim Florida for its own. If we don't kill off the air renewing algae and end up living in the damned Space Balls universe, sure. I'm absolutely ositive that some people will be prosperous. Indeed, less people made more money in 2006 than ever in human history.
And indeed, the life expectancy of people in developing countries has risen by 2 years in the last 10. That's progress. But it's pathetic, and nowhere close to what we could achieve. By contrast, the life expectancy of women was
30 when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, and it was
74 at the height of the Soviet Union's tyranical madness and
powerful planned economy.
Hell, when Russia went Capitalist, their life expectancy dropped five years in five years (from 1989 to 1994). Capitalism can seriously damage your health.
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So yeah, as our knowledge base continues to rise, we gain the ability to do more things. Our medicine, our food production, our hygene, and our transportation are all
potentially better. And if we had a fair distribution system, we could actually get these advances to people almost immediately. And our life expectencies would sky rocket. We'd see a 44 year increase in life expectencies in developing nations in 50 years. We've done it before, it's not an unreasonable idea.
It just requires a planned economy. Capitalism has not, and will not deliver that kind of prosperity. It literally can't. But it can destroy the ozone layer, produce enough greenhouse gasses to melt Greenland, deplete wildlife worldwide at a rate never seen in the Earth's history, and seriously threaten the existence of humanity and life on Earth. It can do that, we know this because it is doing that right now.
-Username17
