Comment by InstanceOf
8 years ago
> there were no poor people before capitalism
Definitely said nothing like that. In the US there are 6 unoccupied house for every homeless person. Somehow this is better because you found a way to decentralize the dictator and blame the victims?
It's better because fewer people are poor and the number continues to decline: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/
I guess that's worse than the utopian ideal of there not being any poor people at all, but since I live in reality I'll go with capitalism.
You're free to have an opinion about which economic system is better. But the opinion that communism implies genocide and capitalism implies freedom is quite non-negotiably uneducated.
Your link makes no effort to suggest that capitalism is a positive force in reducing poverty or that communism is a negative force. In fact, it seems more likely you'd draw the opposite conclusion:
> Second, we can also see from this chart that despite remarkable progress, in some rich countries—notably the United States—a fraction of the population still lives in extreme poverty. This is the result of exceptionally high income inequality
The best conclusion I can draw here is that Western powers are rich because they imperialized other nations effectively and survived key historical wars. Africa is doing bad because they were heavily colonized and met the bad end of several wars. Communist nations failed to reach US levels of power because they imperialized less effectively than the US. No where in history or that article do you see "they became communist then became more impoverished"
The article even goes forth to mention poverty traps, a problem well known to critics of capitalism. A problem that socialism reduces and communism eliminates.
Again, you're free to pick capitalism as your ideal economic model, but you should at least start with factual information on the alternatives.