I would like to ask all the staunchest defenders of Laissez-faire and neo-liberism, why they think socialism is a bad idea.
But also defenders of Socialism and Marxism can express their take and strengthen or correct the OP.
Also from a spiritual point of view.
I think that we live in a over-exploited world. And Capitalism has pushed people to over-exploit the planet, so we need to re-think of ourselves as co-workers of social justice.
And not makers of inequality and injustice.
This ephemeral life is meaningless if it's all dedicated to over-exploitation of resources, which is fomented by greed.
Thank yous for your answers
Depends what you mean by "socialism". I have come to understand that it means different things to different people.
To some, it means North Korea style communism. To others, it just means a general policy of solidarity and governmental programs like universal healtcare, wellfare, paid sick leave, minimum wage, minimum paid leave, etc.
Personally I consider myself as being a "socialist regulation capitalist".
Socialist in the sense that I think worker rights are important. This to avoid exploitation of the workforce (minimum wage, minimum paid leave, paid sick leave, etc).
Socialist in the solidarity sense (universal health care, government funded education, etc).
Capitalist in the "free market of ideas and enterprise" sense. Anybody, assuming a minimum of qualifications (like notions of accounting etc), can start up a company based on whatever idea they have and as long as the practices are within the confines of the law. They are also free to make as much money as they like with that, with no obligation at all to "redistribute" their earned wealth.
"regulation capitalism" in the sense that they can't just do whatever they want and that they are heald accountable for consequences of their business. This usually only becomes a problem once they become big enough. With great wealth comes great power. And there, I see capitalism failing today. Take the facebooks and googles as examples. Their practices concerning privacy etc are extremely worrying. Their entire business model, or for the most part at least, is literally based on at least the very grey area of privacy laws and in many cases it is blatantly in violation with it. The problem is that they are so filthy rich that even monster fines don't really hurt them. Some of them have received fines of over a
billion dollars. This doesn't even dent them. They have reservers of several 10s of billions. They earn it back in a single quarter with ease. The authorities should have more means to deal with these companies. But that takes political cohones and those are very much lacking most of the times.
It's a very hard problem to solve though. It's an extremely thin line between having enough power for proper regulation without it crossing over into having enough power for oppression or restriction of basic (capitalist) freedoms.
Another problem is also that once these problems become big enough that they require being dealt with, these huge conglomerates are so intertwined with the overal economy that actually dealing with them could potentially have extreme impact on the economy as a whole.
Imagine if proper privacy laws were voted and enforced. Both google and facebook's core business model would be rendered illegal overnight. Imagine the devastating hit this would deal to wallstreet and the ripple effect that would cause throughout the entire trading economy.
Plenty of businesses literally depend on the services provided by these companies...
