The dynamics of capitalism

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A modest proposal
By Jonathan Swift, 1729. A mock proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, while making them beneficial to the public. A satire of pure economic “rationality”.
Mark Twain on Land Monopoly
Quotations from Mark Twain, including his “Archimedes”. Suggests that the owner of the means of production entitles the owner to the product, which reduces the worker to virtual slavery.
Comparative Advantage Today
By Imago Klast, 22 February 1998. The lack of present day comparative advantage in technology and production techniques results in overproduction; self-destructive drive to produce beyond the world's capacity to consume.
Capitalism's growth imperative and societal engineering
By Richard K. Moore, Chapter 1, section f, of A Guidebook: How the world works and how we can change it (2000). Does the creation of ‘free markets' enable the ‘most efficient’ operators to succeed—and thereby benefit everyone in the long run?
Guarding against capitalist way of life called for
Korean News, 28 November 2001. The capitalist way of life demoralizing people in a twinkle is little short of a dangerous drug as it degenerates them.
Capitalism, socialism and uneven development
By Giovanni Arrighi, [22 October 2004]. Discusses the notion that Capitalism is irrational, socialism is unfeasible, in the real world— people starve. If capitalism produces gross inequalities, why don't people just embrace a socialist alternative?
The End of Rational Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, March 2005. The twentieth century's dominant myth was that of a “rational capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter.
The benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker: The politics of happiness
By David Wearing, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2006. Should government concentrate on economic growth as an end in itself or should it also consider whether it is making people happier?
Selfishness and altruism
By Haines Brown, alt.politics.communism, 11 August 2006. Whether or not human beings are capable of altruism seems a modern obsession. In the Enlightenment, any impulse toward altruism had to reside within the individual, be an expression of human nature, a characteristic of the social atom. Because all needs are reduced to individual needs, altrustic behavior becomes selfish by definition.
Mystery: How wealth creates poverty in the world
By Michael Parenti, CommonDreams.org, 16 February 2007. How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty?
The distribution of capital
By Haines Brown, alt.politics.communism, 26 March 2007. If we fixate on the distribution of capital among its individual owners, we inevitably fail to grasp the dynamics of the capitalist system. The definition of class and ownership of capital.