If we set a national policy today and didn’t allow local governments to set their own policies, I’m pretty sure we’d have a national policy of no help for the homeless at all. Be happy the places that do have support are allowed to because of states’ rights.
That’s the cartoon version of capitalism just like how “socialism is when the government does something” is the cartoon version of socialism. Capitalism just means that the means of production in a society are owned and controlled by private owners instead of by workers or the government as a proxy for workers. It says nothing about whether people are compelled to be greedy or anti-sharing or something.
Sure, different ones have different levels of dictorshipness. To be clear, democratic and authoritarian are not opposites at all. Chattel slavery in the US was extremely authoritarian and awful, yet it was democratic. Abolition was a minority viewpoint until around the time of the Civil War.
No European country or the US is anything like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Orders of magnitude different.
Billionaires get arrested and taxed all the time in modern China.
They don’t get arrested for the reasons you or I would arrest them, they get arrested for crossing the CCP. Billionaires do face punishment in the capitalist West.
Given the choice between greed with poverty vs greed with wealth, I choose greed with wealth aka capitalism. Like I said, capitalism at least does some good with the greed. Socialism, etc. pretends it can make greed go away, but it obviously can’t.
Sidenote, a vanishingly small portion of people in the US are killed or injured in school shootings. They’re obviously bad, but when comparing societies on the societal scale, they make basically no impact.
Sometimes corporations get bigger, sometimes they get toppled by new competitors. A lot of them that we think of as unstoppable are barely hanging on by a thread. Twitter/X and Facebook are examples that come to mind. People don’t realize how much power they as consumers have.
Everyone went from feudal backwater to something else in that era. The US was poorer than Argentina per capita. That’s not really saying that much. It’s also not saying that much because of course if you have a strong central authority you can divert resources from more valuable production toward national pride vanity projects like a space travel. What really matters is how productive your economy is, how much it can produce for its society, and on that front the US defeated the Soviet Union soundly.
I have nothing against a space program, I just don’t see that as a very strong indicator of the success of a society.
The two most stolen items (kolektiva.social)
alt textTHE TWO MOST STOLEN ITEMS IN THE WORLD: a pen labeled Surplus Value of Workers Labor, and a lighter labeled Indigenous Land
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Communist Filth/Capitalist Filth (lemmy.ml)
Never has never will (lemmy.ml)