Crazy Old People

From a person in a nursing home.

”Organized capitalism is an evil thing in itself,” he said in an interview in a shady courtyard of the Spanish-style residence home. ”It’s profits versus people.”

I’d like to see a country where everyone operated at a loss. A people’s country.


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9 responses to “Crazy Old People”

  1. Randy Avatar
    Randy

    Just another example showing that many people don’t understand what profitability indicates. Profits indicate efficient use of resources.

    When the profit motive is removed, resources are invariably misallocated to the detriment of us all. Our bloated leviathan Federal Government is an example of this.

  2. captain*arizona Avatar
    captain*arizona

    How many people has this person killed:0 How many people has organized capitalism killed to numerous to count!

  3. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    Perhaps he never killed anybody, but only because he failed. When he joined the Communist Party, he joined a conspiracy to genocide.

  4. Al Avatar
    Al

    “To numerous to count”=”I can count to ten!”.

  5. Simon Avatar

    Capitalists would be holding winter sporting events at a resort known for snow.

    The cost of hauling snow to Sochi by aircraft is estimated in the 10s of billions. You can feed a LOT of hungry people with that kind of loose change.

    Potempkin Villages return.

  6. Simon Avatar

    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-potemkin-village-20140211,0,7970143.story

    In the 1920s and ‘30s, socialists from Britain and United States were given tours of Soviet collective farms where joyful peasants appeared to be producing wheat in abundance. The Westerners were fooled into believing they had seen the vanguard of a glorious egalitarian future, when, in fact, the forced collectivization contributed to the famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Russians.

    In the 1970s and ‘80s, the bluster of Soviet leaders hid the truth that the Russian economy and military were hollow shells. Of course, just like the duped left-wing “fellow travelers” earlier in the century, American military and political leaders chose to believe the lie because it reinforced their own ideological goal — in their case, continuing the Cold War arms race.

    Now, Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent $50 billion on an Olympics that looks real enough but may be as ephemeral in its own way as Potemkin’s fake town. The snow is mostly manufactured. The crowds of international travelers have stayed away, scared off by threats of terrorism, the hassles of Russian bureaucracy and the exorbitant cost of attending the Games. The new resort infrastructure — built on a mountain of graft and bribery — is hardly guaranteed to become the destination for jet-setters Putin says it will be.

    And, just as the dazzling evocation of Russian history presented in the opening ceremonies left out the dark episodes of oppression and cruelty that are the central theme of that history, the image of Russia being projected by these Olympics masks the reality of Russia’s stagnant economy, weak legal system and stunted democracy.

  7. captain*arizona Avatar
    captain*arizona

    how many died at bophal or johnstown or asbetos from manville its more then ten from those alone. Also read the book the social history of the machine gun!

  8. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    Aral Sea. Ukraine famine. Industrial accidents in the USSR. The Gulag. North Korea’s extermination camps. Pol Pot. The Shining Path. “Up against the wall”. The “midnight knock on the door”.

    cap*, you are equating technology with capitalism. But technology kills more people under communism and socialism.

  9. c andrew Avatar
    c andrew

    http://www.stephenhicks.org/2013/07/14/lessons-from-bhopal/

    Bhopal is an important case to learn from, but it is absolutely crucial to attend to all of the relevant facts, many of which the standard accounts omit[2]:

    1. The most important is that Union Carbide’s (UCC) presence in India was governed heavily by the Indian government and its aggressive, top-down industrial policy.

    2. The decision to use the hazardous chemical MIC was the Indian government’s, not UCC’s. bhopal-protestUCC’s initial plan was to import already-combined chemicals and to process diluted and safer pesticides. But the Indian government was pursuing a policy of national self-sufficiency, requiring that everything be “Indianized.” MIC could have been imported much less expensively, as UCC initially planned, but UCC was required by the government to manufacture pesticides from scratch. This in turn required the storage and handling of large amounts of hazardous MIC.

    3. The government directives also required the building of larger facilities. As the parent corporation, UCC was allowed to submit generalized guidelines for the design of the safety systems. But in the name of national self-sufficiency, the Indian government required that Indian consulting firms do the detailed design and installation of the safety systems.

    4. The Indian government was also pursuing an affirmative action program. The effect of affirmative action was to replace UCC’s foreign experts in engineering and agricultural chemistry with locals. Not surprisingly, many of the locals were under-educated, and many happened to be friends and family members of Indian politicians in charge of regulating the facility. bhopal-homicide1

    5. Finally, the decision to situate the chemical plant in the middle of a residential community was the Indian government’s, not UCC’s. The local Bhopal government was pursuing a re-zoning policy, which included giving thousands of Indians construction loans to encourage them to build their homes near the chemical plant.

    So before jumping to conclusions about culpability, it’s important that we frame the investigative questions accurately:

    To what extent was Bhopal a corporate failure and to what extent was it a government failure? Does the Bhopal disaster indict business executives or government bureaucrats — the pursuit of profit or racial quotas? Is capitalism or statist industrial policy at fault?