Capitalism vs. Socialism

Originally posted by sasquatch672
Interesting question.

Capitalism most mimics nature (survival of the fittest). I think that some countries appear to do socialism right - Scandanavia comes to mind. But I also think it true that socialism stifles individual achievement and initiative.

The regulation of human affairs is an unwiedly endeavor and is almost never gotten right, I t ...[text shortened]... ey belong, and distribute it to angry middle-class white guys like me. I get dibs.

Of course the problem is what do you do when all those big bucks
run out and EVERYONE has no money? Some people create
economies based on their own work, like industrial leaders, then
millions of people at least get work and can buy food and raise a
family. Of course the Bill Gates and Westinghouses out there get
megarich but if you simply distributed all their wealth to all the people,
there wouldn't be but a few hundred bucks total for each one and
then you have a bankrupt Gates or whoever, unable to bring out
the next evolution in technology. New technologies which we all
like, like new medicines or the latest Ipod for that matter, don't
just magically appear in the marketplace. There has to be a Gates
or a Steve Jobs to envision the new stuff in the first place. If everyone
was in abject poverty, how could a new Steve Jobs get anything
started?
Say you are on a savanna hearding sheep and you get this
incredible idea for a way to make filtered water cheap or something,
how does someone like that ever get to even communicate these
ideas to anyone who would help?
Our civilization is not the result of magic, its the genius types who
start with an idea at the right time with the right resources behind
him or her and gets to push those ideas forward. If the genius ideas
are generated by a girl pushing rice in the ground who is surrounded
by 7 million other rice farmers for 1000 miles around, how is she
supposed to even be able to communicate her brilliance to the
outside? First off, a girl is prejudiced against in the first place so
there goes a lot of ideas from 50 percent of the whole human
race right there. So we are left with mostly the brilliance of men
in urban settings starting things going. Its the urban setting which
gave them the background to pursue some idea and if everyone
is pushed down to the same level, very few good ideas would
emerge. People like to think, as much as Marx or Engle would like
to deny, that they want to have their own possessions and not be
so controlled by some governement that they are unable to even
move out of a bad district and find something better which
you know full well is what happens when government creates
'Projects'. You get jammed into a system you can't get out of for the
most part. You go on the dole and your creativity just gets eaten up
by becoming an alcoholic. All you have to do to prove that is to look
at the government controlled reservations of indigenes around the
world. Those indegenes have just as much genius per cubic inch of
brain as any other group but how much of their genius gets out
to the rest of the world? They can't because a lot of them are driven
to alcohol to try to drown the sorrows of their supressed existance.

Originally posted by Conrau K
I dont agree with either socialism or capitalism. I propose a meritocracy. All the smart people in the world will be rulers. Considering most smart people play chess and RHP is a chess site, it logically follows RHP will rule the world. I think this ideology is superior to both capitalism and socialism.

lets have a tournament to decide who gets to be emperor.