Capitalism: The Economic Utopia Never Visited

Lew Rockwell skriver om Socialismens triumf över världen, i alla fall enligt den BBC-undersökning som gjordes av 29.000 personer runt om i världen.

A new BBC poll finds that only 11 percent of people questioned around the world — and 29,000 people were asked their opinions — think that free-market capitalism is a good thing. The rest believe in more government regulation. [...] One quarter of those asked said that capitalism is ”fatally flawed.” In France, 43% believe this. In Mexico, it is 38%. A majority believes that government should rob the rich to give money to poor countries.

In only one country, Turkey, did a majority say that less government is better. [...] While most Europeans and Americans think it was a good thing for the Soviet Union to disintegrate, people in India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Russia, and Egypt mostly think it was a bad thing.

[...] And it comes as something of a shock twenty years after the collapse of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe revealed what this system had created: backward societies with citizens who lived short and miserable lives. [...] those who would despair at this poll, consider that it might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. [...]

Lew Rockwell undrar till och med om folk egentligen vet vad Kapitalism betyder:

What, for example, is capitalism? Do people even know? Michael Moore doesn’t know, else he wouldn’t be calling bailouts for elite, Fed-connected financial firms a form of capitalism. Many other people reduce the term capitalism to ”the system of economics in the United States.” It is no more complicated than that. This is despite the reality that the United States has a comprehensive planning apparatus in place that is directly responsible for all our current economic troubles.

[...] let’s take this further. Among the many people around the world who do not like the US empire, many believe they don’t like capitalism either. If the US economy drags the world down into recession, that is a prime example of capitalism’s failure. Even more preposterous, if you didn’t like George W. Bush, his ways, and his cronies, and Obama is something of a relief, then you don’t like capitalism and you do like socialism.

[...] Another point of view misunderstands the idea of capitalism itself. It is not about creating economic structures that benefit capital at the expense of labor or culture or religion. It is about a system that protects the rights of everyone and serves the common good. Capitalism is just the name that happened to be identified with this system (av Marx, kanske? min anm.). If you want to call freedom a banana, fine, what matters is not words but ideas.

På sätt och vis skrämmande läsning när man inser att den generella folkliga (ähum, och politiska) förvirringen och okunskapen på området är så stor om vad Marknadsekonomi och Kapitlalism betyder och är avsedda att åstadkomma för det gemnensamma bästa när den får fungera utan välvilligt vurmande politikers regleringar.

Det enda det inte råder någon förvirring kring i de folkliga lagren (ähum, och i de politiska), det är hur makten alltid har vetat hur de skall se om sitt hus. Det kanske är dags att tänka ett varv till?