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.