CAPITALISM IS ORGANIZED ROBBERY, COMMUNISM IS ORGANIZED SLAVERY, AND SOCIALISM IS IN BETWEEN
Capitalism:
The mantra of capitalism is demand and supply, free markets, efficient allocation of capital and hopefully an egalitarian, happy society. These are lofty ideals that most humans will embrace, endorse, and execute, to the benefit of mankind. But when a few individuals control the elective process, the press, education, and capital, these ideals become a mirage. In practice, the initial acquirers of capital whether material or knowledge-based, will skew the process to their favor. They control the political rule-making process in such a manner that the rest of the population becomes mere cogs in their giant moneymaking machinery.
How did this happen? In the nascent capitalist system, the playing field is level, and anybody can acquire capital either through labor or inheritance. Once you acquire capital or corner a part of the economy, you start building barriers to prevent new entrants from establishing a beachhead in that part of the economy. Such obstruction includes compromising legislators to enact laws that will stifle competition, manipulation of prices to force competitors out of specific industries, and sometimes employing violence with the connivance of the authorities to eliminate the competition. Despite all these obstacles a few persons will join the rich capitalist club every year through innovation, guile, gumption, or greed. Greed is a euphemism for fraud.
Capital Huggers know that criminal or civil punishment is inversely proportional to the amount of capital that you command. It is becoming fashionable for companies to influence the political process through proxies in what the Americans call dark money. Maybe it should be white money because the offending companies are mostly owned by whites. Companies can vote as people but cannot be jailed as people. They only pay fines, which are usually less than a one hundredth of the damages they inflicted on society, or less than the company’s earning for one day!
Once the early capitalists have crossed the Rubicon of poverty, their sole aim in life is to protect their capital (wealth) by all means possible including murder. They manipulate the legislative process into enacting tax laws that rob the poor to pay the rich. In advanced capitalist countries, a few individuals at the top of the capital pyramid own a disproportionate amount of the national capital. Through their ownership of the financial institutions, the earnings of the rest of the population are used to service the interest owned to the Capital Huggers, further adding to their capital. The minuscule wage increases for the working masses do not offset the increases in the cost of living and/or borrowing. Your rent goes up by 8 percent annually and your wages remain stagnant or go up by one percent annually. You become poorer each year.
Advanced capitalist societies tend to be a two-class society of the very rich (Capital Huggers) and the very poor (Capital Deficient). The middle class (Capital Adequate) will continue to shrink until capital inequity is addressed legislatively. In vibrant capitalism, the three classes are dynamic with easy migration across classes made possible either by innovation, luck, labor, or all three or a combination thereof. Examples of such skewed capitalist countries include Russia, Great Britain, Nigeria, Angola, and USA where a few individuals at the top of the capital pyramid control the economy. This is economic robbery where capital manipulation is used by the Capital Huggers to rob the rest of the population.
The masses are pacified through propaganda and hope. Such propaganda include “you can be whatever you want to be if you try hard”, “land of opportunity”, “level playing field,” “a rising tide raises everybody,” and ” hard work brings great reward.” If you are not prepared, a rising tide may drown you and hard work without health care and adequate nutrition will buy you an early ticket to the cemetery! How can poor children being raised in poverty in inner cities (slums) where schools are ill equipped and gang-infested battlefields; where schools are populated with knowledge-deficient teachers; ever rise out of poverty? The only way to overcome poverty under such circumstances is to engage in the criminal enterprise of supplying drugs to the Capital Huggers and their children. People who choose this lifestyle have a short lifespan or spend their productive years in prison while their customers are unpunished or get slapped on the wrist by a rigged judicial system.
Communism:
In communist theory, every means of producing wealth is owned commonly by the people. This is akin to saying that the money in the National Bank is owned by everybody, but only a privileged few have the key to the bank. Consequently, the masses are unaware of how much money is in the bank and how that money is being doled out to the population. The few with unlimited access to the bank become Capital Huggers or Commissars and the rest of the population becomes the Proletariat or Slaves.
Since the Slaves are toiling for the Commissars and the only means of becoming a Commissar is through political debauchery, the masses will become lazy, anemic, and docile with the result that economic growth stalls and eventually the system will peter out and will be replaced by capitalism. During the transition from communism to capitalism, oligarchy may become the order of the day as in Russia. These Oligarchs are the Capital Huggers of Capitalism.
Socialism:
But Socialism strikes a balance between capitalism and communism. In socialism, the state steals capital from the Capital Huggers by taxation and distributes it to the Capital Deficient through the provision of infrastructure, welfare services, and health care. There are still billionaires and millionaires in a socialist system but not the crass inequality of income distribution seen in unbridled capitalism.
Discussion:
Communism is as bad as unbridled, unregulated capitalism. The state must rein in the Capital Huggers through legislation, regulation, and taxation (LRT). Stock market and commodity price manipulation must be checked for capitalism to flourish. By the time the public knows that Company A is buying Company B, the gains of the transactions have already been misappropriated by the insiders. One may wonder what the regulatory bodies are doing in this modern computerized trading world. This is the modern stock market and not the pen and paper stock market of yore. A newsflash that the President of Iran verbally insulted the King of Saudi Arabia will cause the price of oil to be delivered 3 months into the future to jump by ten percent or more. This is understandable. Meanwhile gas station owners who bought their supplies at the lower prevailing price will pick up their long sticks and immediately adjust their prices to reflect the projected three-month price. This is price gouging! The fat state regulators sit in their air-conditioned offices and attribute the usurious price increase to the “free market” forces of demand and supply. The same phenomenon is seen during holidays and other periods of heavy driving. Some oil companies are known to shut down their refineries for ”maintenance” during the heaviest driving period of the year! They are telling you to make your own gasoline if you do not like the price hike! But it is impossible to make your own gasoline. I am using gasoline prices as an example.
The same unjustified price increases also take place in other sectors of the economy under the guise of market forces but is really price manipulation. Inefficient capitalism is seen in the allocation of liquor licenses, taxicab medallions, and several other regulated licenses. Your granddad was given a liquor license practically for free in 1930, and today you are asking one million dollars for the same license, instead of returning it to the state for reallocation to the struggling new restaurant owner who cannot afford the “market price.” Market price has become an euphemism for greed and injustice. We should all be glad that oxygen/air is free! Imagine what a capitalist system of distributing oxygen will do to the world. The Capital Huggers will buy up all the oxygen and will force the Capital Deficient to work for nothing or be starved of oxygen or they could manipulate the price of oxygen that it becomes unaffordable for the poor. Either way, death looms for the poor masses.
The next battleground will be education, which the Capital Huggers see, both as a means of controlling the economy, and as a moneymaking enterprise. Give the masses an adulterated, hollow, and expensive educational experience financed by loans and watch them drown in poverty trying to repay the loans. This is like giving a drowning person a life jacket while simultaneously hanging a 1000 lb. steel anchor around the drowning person’s neck. The interest on the loans accrues to the Capital Huggers. Capitalism is good if regulated, for unregulated human greed only fuels part of the economic engine. On the other hand, regulated human greed benefits the entire human society and not just the Capital Huggers.
Nobody ever made it rich under any system without using other peoples’ sweat, other peoples’ inventions, stealing from other people or using infrastructure built by other people. That you pulled yourself up entirely by your bootstrap is a myth. The myth is that of self-made riches! If society does not try to correct these inequities, we will be moving closer and closer to a class warfare that will have dire consequences for all of us.