'Capitalism failed': Jacinda Ardern signals major economic shift
thenewdaily.com.au
thenewdaily.com.au
Capitalism can work with appropriate safeguards - which are often based on the ideals of socialism.
Communism appears to be working for China as per its growing worldwide influence, but the worldwide influence it has gained appears to be based on strong capitalist ideals, externally at least.
The answer lies somewhere in-between. As it always does.
Exactly. It's called social democracy and its proponents are social democrats.
NZ population: 4.8 million, of which 900,000 are under the age of 16. So she's talking about a vast proportion of their children living in utter misery (one third? half?).
Life in NZ must be really awful, courtesy of free markets. It will be interesting to observe how much regulation and socialism they will implement, and how much better children fare after that. Are there examples of countries that have embraced socialism, and thereby improved their lot?
I'm not sure that the politicians and media who report on these things fully comprehend what these researchers are saying. In fact, from what I've seen most of the media and politicians in New Zealand lack basic maths skills.
FTFY. Or maybe even:
>In fact, from what I've seen most people lack basic maths skills.
Yes. It's fundamentally a rhetorical trick. If the bottom third had a median income of $500,000 per year, they'd still be counted as being in "poverty".
I strongly suspect that Zimbabwe, Haiti, or Bangladesh-level poverty (i.e., real poverty) doesn't exist anywhere in New Zealond.
so yes, money is fundamentally a rhetorical trick.
Do you have any evidence that Haiti, Bangladesh, or North Korea-level poverty (i.e., what most people think of when they see the word "poverty") exists on any meaningful scale in New Zealand?
Hint: no, you don't. Because it doesn't.
Are you deliberately using the word "poverty" to mislead people?
Hint: yes, you are.
the dollar amount of money is irrelevant. talk to someone from Zimbabwe..
money is a rhetorical device which describes power. if the spread of wealth or income is relatively flat, the power is mitigated. if it is sufficiently broad as to cause significant inequality, money can be used to enforce poverty.
so, let's say for the sake of argument I am using poverty to mean whatever it means where you live, let's assume the US, and $500k as the buying power of whatever it means where you live. give everyone a half million, give it a few weeks and then tell me how much it costs to get a place to live, or a cup of coffee for that matter..
No, you are missing the point.
People pushing an agenda use the word "poverty" as an emotional appeal, because it makes people think of starving kids in Africa covered with flies, etc. It wouldn't have nearly the impact if it was made clear that someone in "poverty" can have a house, a car, and plenty to eat.
> money is a rhetorical device which describes power.
The word "rhetoric" does not mean what you apparently think it means.
I can only imagine you have never met anyone living in poverty in New Zealand, or the US, given that you seem to have so little regard for them. If you actually think that the bar for poverty should be set so low as to be the point of actual starvation, then I really don't know what to say to you. My empathy, for one, extends a little further to my fellow man.
But anyway, my argument restated in case I am misreading you.. in fact, definitions of poverty do not matter once you understand that differentials in power create the conditions for poverty. It is lack of power then, not money which creates poverty. And once you understand that money is not an actual thing, but an agreement.. a societal construct to codify peoples access to power (to have control over their wealth). It is designed to be persuasive, it is a promise of your own power and the ability to confer it on someone else. But it lacks any content itself, ultimately, money only works because of the implicit threat of the state or group which creates the agreement. It is a device I would describe as rhetoric.
ie. rhetoric: language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect, but which is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.
Note that I am an American who found that site after one DDG search, and have no idea whether it's full of BS or fully factual. The incomes they state for the poverty line (after housing), based on current exchange rates, were about 20K for a family of 4 (2 adults) and 14K for a one parent, one child household.
Just about most of Europe, by the American definition of socialism. And it's quite clearly much better to be poor in Europe than in the US.
Capitalism might concern itself only with only the "private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit" [0], but there is no reason that it strictly has to be deployed in a manner that is insensitive to human needs and desires. If anything, sufficient ignorance of these long-term objectives only makes it more likely that whatever flavor of capitalism that is deployed keeps consuming until it causes events that lead to its own destruction.
Good? Bad? I dunno but you're in 'culture' territory here so be careful with your comments - NZers live on a giant farm and we have hungry kids underperforming in schools/employment and our beautiful rivers chock full of literal crap. Lot's of Kiwis are very unhappy about _any_ system that thinks this is an acceptable tradeoff for unevenly distributed $$.
Or let's maybe not.
Cuba could, and did, trade with essentially every other nation on the planet, so blaming "U.S. sanctions" is not a realistic excuse for their failure.
And? 56% of Venezuelans voted for Hugo Chavez.
The only "flight of fancy" here is that Marxism can somehow ever be made to work. One would think that a hundred million dead bodies piled up over the last century would be enough to constitute persuasive evidence, but True Believers gonna believe, I guess.
Settle down with the extremes.
Try this instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Banana_ma...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
There's a lot more where that came from.
That's not a hundred million. Not by orders of magnitude.
There is no "other side of the story" here.
Economic policies form a spectrum of trade-offs, balancing needs and priorities of different socioeconomic groups and legal entities.
It seems to me that people are either (a) brainwashed into thinking that way so that they accept massive inequality as the inevitable cost of avoiding economic collapse and misery, or (b) using such an argument disingenuously to support their own advantage or emotional attachment to a particular worldview.
Whatever the reason, it makes the speaker look silly and stifles serious debate.
The real question is “how do we make things better?” The free market policies of the last few decades have made plenty of things worse. Let’s try to improve the state of some of those things.
Capitalism doesn’t imply lack of a social safety net or regulations. Even its most classic proponent Adam Smith saw a role for the state in providing public goods and regulating industry.
The trick is to balance capitalism and socialism, as in a social democracy.
Of course that's not the inevitable alternative, but if you have no understanding of what capitalism is and is not, as seems to be the case with Ms. Arden (and 95% of the rest of the people on this planet), that's where you can end up before you know it.