- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Those details

In Reply to: I expect you'll argue on the details posted by Mike Bednarz on August 25, 1997 at 19:17:39:

: Were most great inventions pruduced in a non-competitive University-like setting, or under pressure and for personal "commodity fetish"? Transister, Light Bulb, Fiberoptics, Combine, Computer, Nucular Bomb, Automobile, MicroChip, Firearm, Color TV, Sewing Machine, Web Browser, Quartz Crystal, Aspirin, Toilette, Turboprop, Refinery, Communications Satalite, Rocket, Microwave, Pooper-Scooper, Watercraft, Printed Circuts, Big Mac-- all of these apply to the latter catagory. Is it an accident that competing parties produced inventions first, better, and cheaper than non-competing. I don't think so; by way of competition, people were challenged to make items better then before, standards and expectations be damned. Nothing prohibits people from inventing in socialism, theres just no reason for them to.

Can't think of one thing in your above list we really need (except the pooper-scooper, and was there really a pooper-scooper competition? I missed that one!). Ok, the toilet too. But I think a socialist could have conceived of that easily enough.

: And one last thing: don't give me that bull about starvation; no body in the US has been *starving* for quite some time.

Now the US has exported starvation, conveniently out of sight of the average concience. You wouldn't have all these gadgets without someone starving somewhere. But make no mistake about it, the starvation WAS here in mass and would still be if not for the rise of labor (and still has small pockets if you look carefully).

Do some research about labor conditions in the US and you will see that most of the fortunes handed from one generation to the next were built upon the backs of hungry workers.

Until all working people of all countries have a say in how things should be, people will starve so that others may be gluttons.

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