Friday, January 21, 2011

500 Days of Capitalism

500 Days of Capitalism

I was going to go with Capitalism: A Love Story, but that's been used and you'd probably think I was just talking about a Michael Moore film.

But you see, we owe a lot to capitalism. It's literally the best thing possible! Never mind what the poor people starving in the cold winter weather have to say about it. Capitalism - Literally the cause of everything awesome in life...



I mean, I keep shoving money into my baby's mouth but it keeps crying. What the fuck, Capitalism. Maybe I should just take it to the store. I hear that food is very abundant there thanks to the wonderful nature of capitalism.

But don't you see!? Literally everything in this video is true. The capitalist mode of production is wonderful, but it has inherent contradictions which must be resolved by executing that narrator.

CapitalismIsLife posted a video "Capitalism = Longer Life" which proves that capitalism only cares about perpetuating itself. Look, look, I just made a big sloppy mess all of your argument. Keep the change.

Don't you realize that without capitalism, that baby wouldn't live a better life than babies of color. Indeed, this is in the proper location on Youtube as marked by the whole EDUCATION. Though I do have to say that they're actually sort of right. The socialist in me hates to admit it, but maybe they're on to something here..

Here is the current life expectancy in nations where capitalism has significant presence (abbreviated list)
82 -- Australia
78 -- United States
82 -- Japan
81 -- Israel
80 -- Italy

Current life expectancy in nations where capitalism has only modest presence (abbreviated list)
71 -- Philippines
66 -- Russia
70 -- Honduras
65 -- Pakistan
59 -- Senegal

Current life expectancy in nations where capitalism has little or no presence (abbreviated list)
30 -- Haiti
47 -- Nigeria
45 -- Afghanistan
40 -- Zimbabwe
64 -- North Korea



You see, Capitalism ended this nightmare of a short life for Western Europeans. In a historical blink of an eye, it virtually wiped out poverty, countless diseases, hunger, child mortality, human misery and the need for child labor. It also ushered in, for hundreds of millions of people, unprecedented levels of wealth, health, and abundance. Life expectancy in Western Europe, as a result, more than doubled to at least the age of 75.

Though, I'm pretty sure governments were responsible for most of those things. By instituting national healthcare systems and labor laws. Capitalism is like that guy who runs a pyramid scheme. For the majority of the time you trusted him things were going very well and you thought his system worked out perfectly. That is until your investment drops rises drops drastically because of him yet you continue to do as he asks of you because you are told things will get better if you just hold out while still supporting him.. then bam!

I would also like to take a moment to point out that longer doesn't necessarily mean better. If anything, capitalism can be summed up with the opening to Soylant Green...

In communism you would get to own everything! Capitalism is like the last 3 weeks of summer when its rainy out and maybe your friends are out of town and you're bored and you wish school would just start already.

Just in case that you want to have a further discussion of how capitalism was a tremendous improvement over feudalism, please refer to the works of Karl Marx. Just don't fear, the more they talk about capitalism, the further we will slide back into feudalism.
Capitalism is basically an improvement on feudalism and has coincided with growth. Marx wrote about this, as bizzarofry pointed out. This doesn't mean it's the only system that could have accomplished that growth or that we should continue on with it. I mean, if we do stick with it we end up with more of this sort of shit.



So I guess the question is how much you value your ability to buy whatever you want and most of all, are you one of the upper crust who actually can live out your dreams of capitalistic involvement?

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