In a culture of deeply entrenched power gradients, in a culture that makes a virtue of greed and social Darwinism, capitalism becomes a fig leaf for social extortion and the gaining of slaves via the ownership of their basic needs.
Just as a large house is made of more bricks than a smaller house, the "larger" or higher value currency is built from more Global Work Hours.
If a house rises by 20 thousand in a year, it's a free 384 to the owner; so when we talk about 'spongers' and 'free benefits' can we remember who the key workers are and change the conversation? Because achieving social health depends on us taking the self-serving blinkers off. Is capitalism a kind of socialism which concentrates benefits only for the already wealthier members?
Capitalism is a pathological ideology that breaks the young and blames them for being broken. It idealises predatory behaviours that consume the total health of others to guarantee the total health of the power brokers. Let's not be binary. Let's not continue saying the only two possible political systems are capitalism or communism (as currently implimented). There are infinite possible permutations of running society more compatible with human biology and our planet's ecology. Why aren't we talking about that? Where's that conversation?
So, your "charitable" gestures are buying luxury products for yourself because the company selling them employs a lot of people to make them? As a philosophy is it not a little self serving? The logical extrapolation of it is a reversal to a society of "royalty" and "starving peasants," is it not?
We can't keep on using capitalism as late stage "contraception," once folks are born we call that "social murder." The system was set up, in part, as population control. It is cruel.
Capitalism is dependant upon having a large mass of relatively uneducated cheap labour and is thus a major factor in social decay, political instability and poor health of populations.
To what extent, we wonder, is capitalism a form of sophistry?
Capitalism is ten kids with twenty cookies. One kid gets ten cookies. Two kids get three cookies each. Three kids share two cookies. The other five kids compete over the last two cookies.
Roll up! Roll up! Come see the capitalism magic show, while you watch the coins, your resources will disappear right before your eyes!
Capitalism replaced colonising wars - all of the results with none of the hassle.
Capitalism is designed to reduce labour cost and maximise profit, thus it relies on poverty and desperation to function. This system born in the Victorian genocide of the aristocracy on the poor is still causing massive death and starvation globally - twenty one thousand child deaths from malnutrition related causes daily, hellish lives, early deaths. It's time for a new system, one that is built on love as the philosophical first principle, as a tree trunk from which all branches must grow. We need social evolution.
Unemployment is a build in aspect of capitalism; the pool of surplus workers acts to bring a downward pressure on wages, to bring a downward price of the product or service, thus enhancing international competition between nations. It is a pyramid system with worker competition (all against all, atomising society), so that some may strive higher yet there will always be the same proportion at the bottom. Thus, social fairness in this system is prevented by the system itself.
Emotional indifference is the opposite of love, the opposite of what the core of every faith and secular humanitarians call for. Thus, since our daily choices build who we are as individuals and community members, the capitalistic system with necessary emotional indifference to the poorest on Earth, is incompatible with our ongoing social evolution. Everyone matters, quality of life matters, children everywhere matter more than an invented system that was born in barbaric times.
Capitalism was born in the days of slavery, when its founder, Adam Smith, considered the waged-servant a cheaper alternative to owning slaves since they "decayed" at their own expense. It was the capital available that determined how many of their children lived and died and kept the "race of servants and journeymen" at a useful level for the "upper race" of employers to exploit. As such the stark similarity between the boom and bust cycle of the world of money and a predator-prey cycle should be a somewhat obvious connection. More capital meant more children survived to become workers and all death rates fell, less capital meant more children died and death rates rose. Those people in long ago saw workers as no more than self-replacing tools and no level of inhuman treatment was too low.
The price of capitalism (of any money-nexus world) is child trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking, human organ sales, factory slave labour and the destruction of earth's natural environment... Who is really paying for this token-based trade system? What are they paying with? What does it cost them? Who is willing to shine lights in the darkest of places of our world and take the real action required to stop it? We can provide food and shelter for free - stop parents selling children into slavery... we can stop buying products made by child slaves - those are good places to start, yet from its start capitalism required a large pool of slaves, always the most vulnerable in society, those with the fewest champions. So champions stand up, shine lights, be heard. The world has enough food and real change is as simple as sharing and caring, it always was.
Since ye olde times, since times of yore, the morally bankrupt have sort to capitalise on hate.