World Population: 6,973,738,433 World land mass: 148,000,000 sq kms Habitable ( arguably) 100,000,000 sq kms Which works out at roughly 1/4 acre per person In 2011: Gross world product was 79.4 trillion, $US 11,200 for each human on the planet, for one year The Value of world equity markets 212 trillion, $30,400 per human An estimated 8 trillion in circulating currency, $1,150 per human So if averaged out, each human would have 1/4 acre, $11k in income, $30K in equity besides land(not inc residential buildings), $1k in cash At 2011, 11 miliion of the worlds richest people owned 42 trillion in wealth: Averaging 3.8 million each. 1 billion earning less than $746 per year. *taken from Capgemini and Wikipaedia
Actually earning about $34k a year puts you in the worlds richest 5%, so anyone that describes is a greedy capitalist pig and should stop whining their government doesnt do enough for them as it all really comes from the 6 1/2 billion people under you
I'm honestly offended. I do not make enough to fit into your equation but my mother does as a teacher in a union. Please tell me why you consider a union member, who doesn't own her home, and doesn't support capitalism, a capitalist pig. Why do you wish to reinvent the word capitalist to mean anyone who's wages(yes you include some wage labor in your definition) are above some simplistically created average amount of cash? Why call people who dont own capital capitalists? Also, money isnt the best way to measure wealth. What you can get with it differs by where you are. You can have someone making $34k in the states and unable to afford health care for their family or someone making $30k in Thailand running a factory and living in a large home care free.
Capitalism isn't a bad thing..If I invent something people need, spend years in college or, make music people can relate to, I deserve more than a Mc Donalds employee straight up! I think the idea of everybody getting 1/4 an acre, and the same exact amount of money no matter how much work you do (Communism,) is not fair and doesn't really give individuals an incentive to work hard!!
What we have today is closer to communism than capitalism. I mean, when you have private banks than can print up unlimited money from nothing, then allocate that money to wherever they want it to go, that is not free-market anything. It's a monopoly. It's monopoly capitalism/corporatism/fascism controlled by the elite, which is why the people in control favor socialism so much. Of course there is a big difference between the socialism practiced by the bankers, and the sugar coated version sold to gullible leftists, which is nothing more than a pipe dream.
We've been printing money like this for last 100 years and the banks have been in control for the last 200. By that definition we've always been more communist then capitalist.
Capitalism should not be confused with free-market. Our current form of capitalism is more or less a command economy. Every market in every major commodity, including intangibles like mortgage-backed securities, is manipulated by forms of mandatory spending like subsidies (paid for by taxes) etc etc. The current economy is not a free-market economy. The power backed by the most capital is protected by political cronyism from being subject to the vagaries of actual markets. This is modern capitalism as we know it. It is largely a command economy and in that sense could be said to be "close" to communism. Better to call the teacher a recipient of capitalist privilege than a capitalist herself. Her privilege comes from her temporal and geographic location and from her ancestry. Not the same as being a capitalist pig herself.
So the choices are capitalism or cannibalism? I must admit that does indeed come close to symbolizing the difference between the right and the left, as well as private funded charity and government funded welfare in bringing about a 'bite the hand that feeds you" attitude as being morally proper and socially just means of government to achieve desirable ends, which might be best described as a more equal ruled society.
