Someone once told me, after this someone contemplated the buying of a sporting event ticket to scalp (sell) it at a profit of twice its “face value” and after me replying that this would be a “capitalist act,” that “it is not capitalism if you are poor.” I rolled my eyes at him. Anyone else come upon events likes these? Please share yours.
Yes. When ever I hear or read someone saying, “This crisis just illustrates the failure of capitalism and the free market…”
I throw up in my mouth a little every time.
This same person once told me, in regards to the bailouts, “they’re trying to fix capitalism with more capitalism.”
That is correct. Capitalism implies that you own capital. The poor do not.
What he is doing is arbitrage, not capitalism.
Lol whenever anyone tells me about the plight of the poor I just tell them about my father who could get out of the debt from his quite unfortunate life if the state would only stop taking away a fourth of everything that he owns, and especially if everything else that he bought was cheaper.
This is not always true; it does not even hold true most of the time. The poor can come to own quite a bit of capital. In any case, what the guy who responded to him implied is really that “capitalism doesn’t work when you’re poor.”
Then he is not poor. Or, was the money in his pocket is not capital?
Such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.
Or “doesn’t apply when you’re poor.” Shades of polylogism seeping through these types of statements.
How so?
Poor is kind of a relative term. Does ownership of capital make you not poor? I have never made more than $20,000 a year, well below the poverty line. About 20% of my income is eaten by taxes, though I get some of it back at the beginning of the next year. This year, I made less than $8,000 take home pay since I can only work part-time with the course load I am taking. By most standards, I am poor.
I own stock. Not much, I’ll grant you, but some. Stock is capital.
So, I am a poor capitalist.
This is what Stranger needs to clarify. Is it not poor if all you have $20 in your pocket? If this is so, then no one is poor. But this is obviously not how the guy I was talking to is was defining “poor.”
You might not be a capitalist if you are not investing capital in the strictest of definitions, but the term used was not capitalist but capitalism. Just because you are not investing capital does not mean that “it’s not capitalism”.
You own assets, but you don’t really control capital. You can’t direct how your investment will be used. That makes you more middle class than capitalist.
a Phd in history told me that capitalism was the act of enriching business while socialism was the act of making incomes equal.
She’s a professor.
Historians are just the greatest at economics & political theory aren’t they?
So no one is truely a capitalist since there is a plethora of regulations and laws that dictate how capital may be used.
So is been bernakey
This sounds like enlightenment.
It also sounds like you using your definition in the wrong context.