Always amusing to see Anarchists trying to lecture the rest of us about economic theory.

It can be either Collectivist Anarchism or Anarcho-Communism but both are doomed to failure by a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature that Anarchists always refuse to accept.

Not sure what "human nature" has to do with the economic analysis set out above. We have had Osbourne and co. lecturing us on economics and it's clearly failing (almost) all of us on every level. I hope for all of our sakes that there is an alternative to the current setup which has us all heading for certain disaster.

"I hope for all of our sakes that there is an alternative"

Yes there are many alternatives but regretfully none of them are as good as market driven Capitalism, that's the problem.

After the death of feudalism in the 19th century, a choice was presented to the world: would the new politico-economic system be capitalism, communism, the “Third Way” or an obscure alternative? Communism sounded great on paper but never really worked as intended, and the most well-known group within the Third Way movement was the Nazi party, whether the rest of the movement liked it or not.

Fortunately, the country in which you are living today is almost certainly capitalist, and in this article I list the numerous benefits that democratic capitalism provides: an equal, happy, healthy society where you can have almost anything you want, for a price.


10
Health


With capitalism, more choice is provided than ever before. You can eat low fat food, organic food, free-range food… and you know exactly what you’re getting due to the statistics on the packet. There are plenty of diets easily accessible and gyms with top of the range equipment, unparalleled in other countries. There is greater awareness than ever of the importance of fitness due to government campaigns. All of these contribute to an extremely fit society, and, in desperation, one can always resort to liposuction or some other sort of surgery. Which is why everyone is thin and healthy – on the front of magazines, at least.


9
Social Good


It might seem at first glance that everyone is selfishly working for their own money, but dig a little deeper and it becomes apparent that every job has a benefit for someone else. Factory workers produce the products that we can’t live without; hairdressers perform a service that benefits us body and sould; and the police work to protect us and make sure we live in a lawful society. Even unpopular and ‘overpaid’ professions such as city bankers and sportsmen have a positive effect on society, whether it be helping us manage our money, entertainment or something else. The bottom line is that no matter the job; highly or poorly paid, glamorous or dirty, competitive or ‘easy’; everyone can have the satisfaction that they, as much as the well-known public figures, are doing their bit for society.


8
Equality


No matter where you start in life, everyone has an opportunity to make it big. The basic principle is that the harder you work, the greater your reward. Arguably no-one epitomizes this better than Li Ka-shing, who fled China in 1940 and entered Hong Kong with next to nothing. His father having died, Li left school at the age of 14 and labored 16 hours every day in a plastics trading company, where his sheer hard work and attention to detail allowed him to found Cheung Kong Industries in the 1950s, after which he never looked back. Li’s net worth today is $26.5 billion.


7
Human Nature


One of the most common arguments that capitalists use is that capitalism works perfectly with human nature or, more specifically, greed. And it does. Greed is rewarded duly with large amounts of money and the entire economy is fuelled by people working hard to furnish their own needs. In addition, greed causes competition, which is an essential part of advancing the human race. The power of competition is shown during wars, where huge technological achievements are made. For example, the Jeep was invented by the Allies during WWII. Though greed and competition often damage society, one cannot deny that these traits have moved forwards mankind at a rapid pace.


6
Being the Best


But what about the other aspects of human nature: altruism, patience and kindness? These have their place, too, in the capitalist world. Left-wing politicians like to claim that an extensive, expensive welfare system is the only way to provide a safety net for the poor, but in actual fact there are tens of thousands of registered charities providing not-for-profit activities, from The National Alliance to End Homelessness to Save the Rainforest. Centrally planned altruism is completely unnecessary and, in fact, limits what people would otherwise give on their own initiative.

Freedom


Most of you reading this list will have grown up in a world-class education system and taken it for granted that you can choose whatever career you want. At school you selected your favorite subjects and could study them as far as you wanted, followed by applying to a job you chose from the widest variety ever seen in history. This is capitalism at its finest: freedom to live your life the way you want.

However, some argue that advertising infringes on one’s freedom. Don’t like advertising? Don’t switch on the TV or the radio and don’t walk around large towns or cities and you will never meet any. That is the beauty of freedom.


4
Built on Democracy


One of the greatest things about capitalism is that it works perfectly with democracy: everyone gets 1 vote, and thus equal power politically, whatever their race, political views or gender. In Britain, recent legislation has even allowed some prisoners to vote. Once you reach a certain age, you have as much power to choose the new government as everybody else above that age – whether that be your father, your boss or Bill Gates. Right?


3
Growth


Capitalism allows the economy to grow exponentially. It is a basic fact of economics that the more money a firm makes, the more it can invest in production, and the more it invests in production, the more money it makes. So long as no unfortunate events befall the firm, this growth can, obviously, continue indefinitely. Many see a problem arising with this: there are only a finite, or ‘scarce’ amount of resources on Earth, so this huge growth of production will one day run to a halt.

However, as argued by Julian Simon, the rarer a resource, the greater its monetary value, which leads to innovation. For example as oil begins to run out we are seeing significant increase in prices, which has increased the reward and made it economically viable to search for new oil fields. Sites which were previously too expensive to profitably drill have now become available; and we are also developing new methods of harnessing alternative energy such as wind, solar and nuclear power.


2
Viable Alternatives


Perhaps the strongest argument working in favor of democratic capitalism is that there is no alternative politico-economic system which has proved itself to work in our modern age. Almost every attempted implementation of communism has failed (for example, look at China – they abandoned total communism long ago and are slowly creeping towards capitalism) and any central government risks large amounts of corruption. What’s more is that if, for example, America became socialist and imposed many strong measures on corporations to regulate their behavior, the largest companies (Trans-National Corporations) would most likely move their industry elsewhere, and potential entrepreneurs would be scared to invest in capital, irreparably damaging America’s economy. So as you can see, changing the economic system isn’t even an option.


1
Happiness


If you look at this happiness map published by scholars from the University of Leicester, you can clearly see that the foremost democratic, capitalist countries like the USA, Canada, New Zealand and the whole of Europe are the happiest in the world. This is because in these countries, thanks to the free-market, whatever products people want, they can get. Where do all these thousands of products come from? Well, the less happy countries like the Asian Tiger economies tend to be the main exporters of consumer goods. In conclusion, all these unhappy countries need to do is start consuming more than they produce, like Europe, and the wealth and happiness will start flowing in.

Hip hip hooray for capitalism, I think it's just spiffing. And thank goodness for an education system that turns out bright young minds like the previous poster.

But, at least I'm not ordered to work in a field for my entire life. I have a heck of a lot more options than are available in any other system And I probably have to work less, will live longer and am happier. Travel to any other country without capitalism and realise how shit things are. No choices, no freedom, working for a pittance. Fuck that.

I like doing graphics and multimedia. I can't "live" off those things, without somekind of capitalism to allow me to do it. What would really, really suck for me, would be somekind of anarchist commune where i had to grow all my own food and make my own horseshoes etc. That would be hard work and doesn't really interest me.

Sorry but I really turned off when you said that we currently live in a capitalist country? Really? I mean WTF! Where is your evidence for that statement?

We currently live in a corporatist oligarch state, which by definition is fascist, yes?
we, the citizens of this country have been financially propping up the corporations directly and indirectly by stealth subsidies like the Common agricultural Policy to large land owners (which is costing each UK family over £1000 per annum) for some time now.

It's only becoming more obvious and blatant now because of the sub-prime mortgage backed derivatives that exploded and then Paulson convinced the US congress to bail out the "too big to fail" banks.

Your capitalist world has over $700 trillion in present derivatives on the books, The US has nearly $200 trillion of this, the TBTF banks have got even bigger.

You also mention a free market, now this is not one Adam Smith would recognise or I think would advocate.

You do I hope understand how a fiat system works, yes. Where private central banks print money, a currency out of thin air, virtual money, it costs them nothing to do this, we've just forgotten that we gave them a charter to do it. The private central banks then loan us, as a country, this money at interest.

You would also understand how banks "leverage" on this debt, the European Central Bank is, I think, leveraged at about 50 to 1. This means that for every 1 Euro deposited the ECB then loans out 50 Euros.

This is how they are creaming off the actual real assets in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, and soon Italy. The bail outs are predominately for the interest, how the fuck has an original loan to Greece of 65 billion euros balloned to over 200 billion.

Maybe you should take a look at Iceland, Where they had an online referendum and decided to form a new government, no one in the previous one was allowed to be a part of the new one, where they prosecuted the bankers and former prime minister and where this week they announced mortgage debt forgiveness for the population.

Get that for a fucking solution, throw the fucks in prison and write off the debt. All do-able.

Another solution is to buy actual physical gold and silver, Because when you measure the world derivatives market against gold then gold should be priced at just over $10,000 an ounce, not the present manipulated price of $1,600 an ounce.

Just a thought, but maybe you should read around about real economics and not just what you've been told in class

Thanks for posting the info on the happiness map. Interesting to see Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Bhutan and Kuwait are all happier than the UK. In 2006 Ireland was 11th. I wonder where they are now. America is surprisingly high, maybe because of Prozac? At least big pharma is good for the economy. I don't see the happiness map has anything to do with capitalism, that's ridiculous. If anything, it might back up the Spirit Level theory that inequality breeds unhappiness, but from this data there is no link whatsoever to capitalism and happiness. Please return to your studies. C-

"Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Bhutan and Kuwait"

Saudi and Kuwaiti people are rich
Bhutan people now have a UK overseas funded health scheme that has seen massive changes to the lifespan over the past 15 years
Venezuelan's are seeing the result of Chavez taking the money from the rich and giving it to the poor and using the countries oil wealth to subsidise transport and heating.

"Not sure what "human nature" has to do with the economic analysis set out above. We have had Osbourne and co. lecturing us on economics and it's clearly failing (almost) all of us on every level. I hope for all of our sakes that there is an alternative to the current setup which has us all heading for certain disaster."

Regretably there isn't.

There might be in Labour but that's just austerity on a fresh page.

The fundamental problem we face is to do with the way the global economic environment works. Slow-down in international trade equates to shrinkage here in the UK. Nothing the current government can do and certainly nothing the 'government in waiting' can do to change that rather simple and obvious fact.

We have run out of political options. The rest of the world has recognised that but we haven't.

Its a shame but there you go.

The key prediction of Marx that is currently being fulfilled is the backlash from the enormous increase of participants in the worldwide labor market. Hence the rise of poverty, the decrease of freedoms, the crisis of overproduction and the economy of war. And in the pound zone short selling allows the capitalists to damage each other and even the euro zone efforts to establish debt slavery with the printing press alone. It is becoming obvious that the looting of the Earth is not only in contradiction but so much at conflict with itself that none of these currencies might survive an European Fukushima.

We don't live in a Capitalist economy. We never have done!

Our economy is a market economy with business to business and business to public transactions forming the vast bulk of all transactions. These transactions are simple transactions, you sell and buy products. That's it.

Capitalism simply describes an extra layer of abstraction that envelops these transactions. So you have a layer of extra transactions taking place.

For example, you go into a shop and pick up a pint of milk, you select that product and you take it to the till. The shopkeeper tells you what the price is and you agree to purchase based on the price he states. You pay him the cash price, he accepts your money. He has your money, you have his product. This is a simple transaction in a market economy.

Now repeat this scenario again but this time use a debit card as your payment method. At the moment you pay, the shopkeeper informs you that there is a charge for this type of transaction which you have to pay. Your pint of milk is now more expensive. This is Capitalism.

Capitalism is now in crisis. The underlying market economy is unaffected.

Understand where the problem actually exists and stop attributing the problem of Capitalism to the market economy. That's the kind of thing only a Capitalist would do...and usually for reasons of self preservation.