Five poor countries in the world

Your “you should be happy that you are at least better off than you were when you lived in your non-capitalist country.” view sounds a bit Disneyfied.

Thanks for the link. Hope you enjoy this one.

scribd.com/doc/29555/Uncontr … -Failed-Us

You probably wanted to say “than you were”? :wink:

Definitely.

Hi Neverland,

You make it sound as if capitalism can make you rich while socialism prevents you from becoming rich. Neither capitalism nor socialism can do anything, you can only do it yourself. Any person can be rich by creating value for others. You can start this process instead of waiting for the CCP to relinquish power. You need to understand that words like ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’ are very vague terms to describe the way a society chooses to live. Nobody will come and change the Chinese society, you can only start changing it yourselves.

Of course it is much easier to create value in a society like the US where the majority of people have agreed to follow certain principles that allow the individual to prosper and live in freedom. It will take the Chinese several generations to build a country that can even remotely be compared to the US.[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEFL listening lectures: Which fact is true of Edward O. Wilson?[YSaerTTEW443543]

And any person can become rich by exploiting others. That IS happening in many places in China. Is that an OK way to get rich, IYO?

In the long run, nobody can become rich by exploiting others, at least not in a country like the US. You can only get rich if you create value for others. The more value you create the richer you become. This law is stronger than any laws created by human beings. In countries like China, many people still think that the only way to become rich is to exploit others. In the US many people know for a fact that the only way to become rich is to render useful service to others.[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEFL listening lectures: A university lecture by a professor of History[YSaerTTEW443543]

Like cigarettes, right?

A website for you?

heritage.org/

Where did I say that anybody needs to be satisfied with his present situation? If that were true, then capitalism wouldn’t work either, because nobody would be motivated to improve anything. No matter what your situation is, there’s always the possibility of improvement.

As I have said before, in the US you are free to make your own decisions. If you decide that smoking cigarettes is good for you, you can smoke them in private places. It’s up to you to decide whether or not cigarettes are a useful product. Many Americans understand that smoking is not good for their health so they decide to spend their money on more useful things.[YSaerTTEW443543]

TOEFL listening lectures: A university lecture on agriculture[YSaerTTEW443543]

Socialism can prevent people from becoming rich by creating confiscatory tax policies and forcing too much state regulation on your business. I’m not only thinking about Marxist countries where independent business is illegal, but also of countries in Scandinavia where it’s possible to owe 103% or more of your annual income in taxes.

So you think the cigarette industry characterizes all of capitalism?

I have never met a person who did not start smoking voluntarily, and it’s possible for people to stop smoking, so, bizarre as it sounds, people who smoke find some value in it. I don’t know what it is, but they do.

Secondly, in most places, the state is the biggest exploiter of people’s smoking addiction, because of the heavy taxes they place on tobacco. This tax is a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, who are the most likely to smoke. Thus, as in many situations, the state is a bigger exploiter of the poor than any corporation is.

So you think there is no exploitaion of so called “weaker minds” there, do you? Capitalism is innocent of all wrongdoings, right, friend?

That you don’t know, is telling.

I have lived in a place where I got to witness the transformation of a society from Marxism to capitalism at street level.

Entrepreneurs who believed the Marxist delusion that people become rich by exploiting others (a misconception that really has its origins in old agrarian societies) generally spun their wheels and couldn’t make progress. People are smart, and they don’t like to be exploited, so they never go to that kind of business person twice, and they tell other people about the experience.

The people who were really visibly prospering were the ones who were giving consumers something that they wanted or needed, were honest about it, kept their promises and never swindled or exploited anybody. Customers came back to them again and again, and they talked the person’s business up to other people, so that the person prospered exponentially.

The sad thing was that the business people who still had that Marxist “capitalism = exploitation” mentality were so convinced of it that they couldn’t see that honesty, ethics and customer service were what was attracting people to their competitors. These business people would get angrier and angrier, thinking that their competitors had simply thought up a more efficient way of “stealing”. They would redouble their efforts to exploit people, and their businesses would do even worse.

I have lived in a place where I got to witness the transformation of a society from Marxism to capitalism at street level.

Really? Was that at the same time as you witnessed no sexual harrassment?

Now we really are in the realms of Disney.

Mind you, it’s worked with you. You seem have been indoctrinated by the likes of The Heritage Foundation, so I guess they’ll stay in business.

Once you start claiming that others have “weaker minds”, you’re starting to get into a totalitarian mentality. Just because someone’s choices are not understandable to you, it doesn’t mean that the person is defective or soft in the head. It just means that you don’t understand what they do or why. Not understanding someone’s choices is not justification for forcing state control on him.

Once you start claiming that others have “weaker minds”, you’re starting to get into a totalitarian mentality.

Or a psychiatric nurse mentality.

I understand that there are people who are duped into their “choices”. I understand that many people suffer from depression, for example, and are at that time weak. I understand that many of such people get into debt in the hope of alleviating that depression. Do you think credit card companies are also aware of that fact?

Maquiladora and NAFTA?

You really like to take people’s words and distort them, don’t you?

I didn’t say that I’d witnessed “no sexual harassment”. I said that in the corporate environments where I had worked, real incidences of sexual harassment were less common than false, malicious charges of sexual harassment. I said that this was probably because sexual harassment is punished and false accusations of sexual harassment are not.

You also won’t like what I also saw: Women who were sexually harassed appeared to be just as likely or unlikely to file a sexual harassment complaint as women who had not. I saw a couple of incidences where some man grabbed a woman’s breasts, and I encouraged the woman to file a complaint. Even thought the harasser had no power in the company, and the woman had nothing to lose, she didn’t report the incident, because she didn’t want to punish the man. Meanwhile, another woman DID file a sexual harassment complaint against a man because he did not sign his approval to documents he had not been allowed to examine adequately. That second incident had nothing to do with sex at all, but because the woman wanted the man punished and had no grounds for accusing him of anything, she concocted a sexual harassment charge.

That sounds like blackmailing ! She was trying to con him into signing the documents.

What’s good for the goose…

Give us a break, St Jamie.

It was punishment, not blackmail. She didn’t want to take the blame if the documents had typos, so she tried to get him to approve them in just a couple of minutes. She made no threats, but he refused to sign them, and a few days later he was notified that he’d “sexually harassed” her. He was lucky that there was another woman in the room who testified that no harassment had occurred.