A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.
Is everyone just a Capitalist deep down inside?
No, and to paint everything this way serves to delegitimize alternatives to capitalism. China is not capitalist, they are socialist. They have their own problems, because no system is perfect. But there are alternatives to capitalism, and not everything is “secretly capitalism in disguise”.
There’s no true Scotsman. China is both and neither. The US is both and neither. You need to talk about specific policies as one or the other.
Greed and envy (the roots of capitalism) are basic human drivers that we all have. It takes a lot of discipline, ethics, and an altruistic moral code or belief system to negate that. Some individuals are capable of that, but there is no societal system that has been able to overcome it.
We would never be able to completely move away from a capitalist system because it’s in our nature to want more, to be rewarded for our efforts, and to be jealous of others. It’s also why alternative systems never work as intended - the greed turns into corruption and ends up ruining the system.
The best outcome is to establish guardrails that limit the extent of the greed that is allowed in the system.