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RE: How Profits Make Us Less Humane
It doesn't work like that.
Sure, we all know that. Except the billionaires who keep harping on how hard they worked for their money. They didn't. Stop pretending that the meritocracy exists, and then I'll stop using them as an example to the opposite.
Meritocracy does exists, to a point. Pretending that it does not is foolish.
But, that's just part of the story. Regulatory capture exists as well. Shady dealings, too.
I'm pretty sure that you're using/having one of the services/products that those three put on the market. I'm willing to take that one step further and claim that you're pretty satisfied with their products and services. And I'm 100% sure none of them forced you to hand them your money. You did it gladly.
If you think it's easy (not hard work) to create online Walmart or Windows or iPhone, what are you waiting for? Create something that millions of people are willing to pay you cash money for and you'll be able to use yourself as an example in the posts like the one above.
The reward they got for their contribution is proportional to its value. Its so huge that you can safely say the World before Amazon/Windows/iPhone and the World after A/W?iP. They literally changed the World.
You picked the wrong billionaires to shit on. If you want some better examples take a look at those in finance. Mitt Romney, Paul Singer,... corporate raiders would be better examples. Getting wealthy by destroying companies and lives of their employees.
Sorry bro, but that's nonsense. Having an idea does not create wealth. And in the case of Gates, he didn't even have the idea. There is no other method to create wealth than transforming nature through labor.
Wrong again. There's a world before the internet and one after internet. Internet is created wholly through public funding, with tax dollars. All technologies used in the iPhone were created like that too.
Nope, these will do just fine.
And besides: everything, and I do mean everything you say here only counts 1 kind of "value", which is the biggest problem to begin with. Men get payed more than women because they're the traditional breadwinners. Why? Because the women stayed at home, running the family; dad was able to go out to work because the women had an unpayed job at home. Capitalism has the nasty habit of not counting the wealth that's not measured in dollars. That, in a nutshell, is why you'll never be able to defend capitalism, because it's indefensible.
Sigh... That's exactly how money is made and true wealth is destroyed, and almost all publicly traded companies work this way. Meritocracy does not exist, not in the real world, if it did, housewives would be payed the same as their husbands who simply worked in another location. Now capitalism has forced the mothers, fathers and their education-craving children to do dad's job; there's that destruction of true wealth again.
I won't even grace this with a response and just say that this is the same kind of argument as "if you don't like it here, just move elsewhere"; that's a very poor argument to make.
It's safe to say that we disagree.
Having an idea does not. Implementing that idea and putting it on the market does.
He had the execution. Fun fact - Gates, Allen and Ballmer worked in the same motel used by prostitutes while debugging Basic that they were trying to sell to Atari. Thin walls and all that.
Is there a better system out there? Slavery did it, feudalism did it, communism did it, capitalism does it.
We, as a species, started dirt poor wandering around searching for food. When you look at the historical development, of all the systems we tried - capitalism performed the best.
Your position that everything would be fine if only those dirty billionaires didn't steal all that money for themselves is indefensible. Judging capitalism by some idealistic system that doesn't exist is just not fair.
Try this for a change: Capitalism is bad when compared to X, where X is a system that actually exists (existed) in the real World.
It would be if that were my position. I argue against capitalism, not the people in it.
That's so easy. Capitalism is bad when compared to communism, which has existed for 190,000 of the 200,000 years of the existence of homo sapiens; we just didn't have a name for it back then ;-)
Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are the same, all modes of production in which the owners of the means of production exploit the labor of the working majority, there's no difference between the three in a systemic sense (hence the "wage slave"). The communism you refer to isn't communism at all; it's state-capitalism, again exactly the same model of production in which it's the government minority that owns the means of production. Learn what communism is and don't simply go by what countries like to call themselves; the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is not a democracy, nor a republic and certainly isn't for the people...
But here's a point of agreement though ;-)
I'll take the capitalism of today over that communism all day long.
Not the biggest fan of my wife dying during childbirth or getting my tribe raided by the neighbours.
No, you'll take the technological progression of today over the non existence of technology back then. Defenders of capitalism have this special talent for confusing progress with economy... I'll even take it a step further and claim that capitalism incentivizes a wholly wrong kind of innovation and arrests true progress through silly schemes like "Intellectual Property Rights" and "Patents".
I'm afraid that you made an excellent argument not only for capitalism but for the systems that preceded it as well.
190k years with no visible progress at all. The State emerges and 10k years later - we went to the Moon.
Nah, I'm not that scary...
That's another negative my friend; 10k years later a handful of us went to the moon, the rest of us are still asking "when moon?", "when Lambo?" ;-) I'd hate to go on a chicken-or-egg dispute with you, but I think it's safe to assume that you know as well as I do that technology (the plough first and foremost, which enabled us to mass-produce food) came first, and that afterwards a handful of people appropriated that technology and resources (the land) for themselves. 10k years later nothing has changed: Jobs appropriates all the publicly funded technologies and sells them as if they were his own. We've been stagnant for 10k years, since we went from equal and truly free people to the class divide that has suppressed the masses all that time. It's not that complicated.