The shamelessly disingenuous libertarian bullshit website you linked to is playing Three Card Monte with cause and effect, and conflating relative poverty with absolute poverty. The countries showing the largest recent decreases in extreme poverty have vastly different economic systems and histories. India’s population suffered brutally under some of the purest capitalism ever seen, and the current Indian state with the highest HDI is governed by full-blown communists. China’s population is making huge strides under a very not-free, quite corrupt, state-run market economy.
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So, based on those examples—exhaustive, no doubt—you’re saying economic freedom should be restricted?
If the “essence of capitalism” is so bleak, how then to explain USSR>Russia?
The caste system tho.
The problem is “economic freedom” doesn’t really mean anything. Policy makers don’t have a dial in their villainous underground lairs that says Freedom at one end and Oppression at the other where they delight on cranking it over to Oppression just for the heck of it.
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I’m not claiming any particular economic policy should be followed. You’re the one doing that, by citing bullshit that assumes its conclusions for propaganda purposes.
You might want to take a closer look at Russia too before trumpeting it as an unqualified capitalist success.
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Tell that to an Indian stuck in a caste post-Independence who then emigrated to the US, earned a PhD, and developed wealth.
At least I have cites. You’re simply spouting thoughts that align well with your priors.
Who did that? Seems like it was you!
Of course you may want to study your Russian history better before implying things didn’t improve, drastically, in the last 30 years for the poor.
Lol you left out the entire substance of what I said.
Sometimes! Thanks for playing.
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I read it all. I don’t think they necessarily have dials, but guys like Maduro definitely want the people to have less economic freedom. It protects his power.
Agreed! Thanks for agreeing!!
Billionaires in the US also want people to have less “economic freedom” to protect their power.
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I don’t think Zuckerberg wants people to have less outlets to communicate. That kinda hurts his business model.
lol @ the random Maduro shout out. FREEDOMBOT-2.2 needs better programming.
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Your arguments suffer from terrible lack of definition. Economic freedom = “outlets to communicate” now? Weird.
Seems to me that all your doing is saying Capitalism produces good outcomes except when it doesn’t in which case it is not true Capitalism, so Capitalism is therefore the best. This is certainly a defensible position in that it is protected by a solid titanium wall of circular reasoning. The problem is you can search and replace Capitalism with literally any socio economic system and it all sounds good. But its actually vacuous.
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There’s also a terrible unjustifiable linearity to the argument that is common among stupid people (no offense). When you add a little something to a system it might create better outcomes, but it is a common failure of over simplistic thinking that therefore the system can be optimized by continuing to add more and more and more of that to the system with no limit. Like a typical couch potato will get healthier by exercising 15 minutes per day and consuming fewer calories. Thinking like a dogmatic libertarian will lead one to believe that DERIVING FROM AXIOMATIC FIRST PRINCIPLES the healthiest lifestyle is LOGICALLY therefore to exercise 24 hours a day and never eat. Where do I go to pick up my Nobel Prize in Economics?
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That article is a bunch of libertarian bullshit arguments in one place. You’ve got a bunch of greatest hits here.
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Picking extreme poverty is very intentional. 2$ a day poverty isn’t a thing in the United States because rent on a 1 BR apartment is 800 dollars a month and 2$ buys you essentially nothing. This guys argument hinges on the idea that if you earn more than 25% of what a minimum wage employee earns in an hour per day you’ve got nothing to complain about. The 2$ a day thing was already right wing propaganda to slander people living a mostly cashless subsistence farming lifestyle (which admittedly was pretty damn spare when it came to things like sanitation, always having enough to eat, and material comforts) when it was originated decades ago, but now it’s extra silly because of inflation. They were already having to adjust it for inflation so that it didn’t make the Soviet Union look good in the early 1980’s as the author does in this very article.
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Even if we accept extreme poverty as a metric when we should be laughing at the author he’s essentially equating development, which does uplift people from poverty as there is more stuff to go around, with capitalism. Development as other posters have pointed out has happened basically world wide. This is the right wing version of expanding the meaning of capitalism where they take all good things and label them capitalism. The alternate version of that which is very popular on this board is to take all the bad things and label them capitalism. Both annoy me and are a pet peeve.
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He claims that people are rich because of economic freedom when there is no proof of that, particularly given that we actually live in an anti competitive dystopia run by mega corporate trusts who routinely engage in anti competitive behavior that hugely restricts economic freedom. He also claims income inequality isn’t a real problem in his first paragraph because that’s the thing he really wants you to think when you finish the article. Here’s an article written by a Billionaire explaining in microscopic detail why that isn’t so.
That article is really bad, and if you’re reading stuff on that website I would stop. It’s straight no chaser propaganda that tells several straight up lies and cherry picks and misrepresents the rest. You could find Q anon stuff with more intellectual nutrients in it.
Income inequality hilariously is absolute proof that the libertarians have no idea whatsoever how the world works. They said a rising tide would lift all boats if we removed all the regulations and stopped making the rich people pay taxes. What happened is that the rich people got way richer than everyone else got slightly worse off in the process. They want to claim income inequality is no problem because it’s evidence that their ideas are bankrupt.
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I like how pure logic and first principles ALWAYS somehow lead libertarians to the conclusion that climate change isn’t real, or if it is there’s nothing the state can do about it.