"Poverty" is a relative condition that couldn't exist without Capitalism. There is no objective state of poverty anyone has been lifted out of by Capitalism.
That's complete rubbish. Anthropologists and historians use measures in terms of nutrition, health, life expectancy, child mortality and leisure time that apply regardless of the economic system in operation and track changes over time in order to characterize changes in lifestyle. You can set benchmarks to characterize poverty regardless of whether the population in question live in an agrarian, capitalist, Marxist or whatever system. Arguing that the massive objective improvements in living standards generated in capitalist economies somehow don't count on obscure technical semantic grounds is pure Marxist* sophistry.
* It occurs to me that it's possible you might not be a Marxist, but the argument you're making is one often put forward by Marxists, along the lines that capitalism by establishing monetary systems to measure capital establish scales on which poverty is measured and therefore create that poverty. Of course every Marxist society ever created has also used a monetary system to measure and allocate capital. But then Marx never, in any of his publications or letters, ever described how a communist economy would actually function so obviously building one has proven somewhat problematic.
Your starred comment beautifully allowed you to knock down your own strawman. Nicely done. :D
It is worth looking at his comment with the "red" filters removed. The point is that every game has winners and losers. You actually can't have one without the other, by definition. One creates the other.
The real question is just how far do you want to tilt the board before all of the pieces fall off? Money is just a representation of material and effort. Do you really want to leave the decision about where all material and effort are spent up to those who figured out how to win this game? To some degree that's fair, but to what degree?
Remember: there are no self-made men. Anyone who thinks this is deluding themselves. We exist in an interconnected net, where everything is related. There is not one thing sitting within arms reach of you right now that you made completely by your own hand. You are standing, at all times, on the shoulders of others. Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
> Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
Of course this is true. The company I work for was founded by, and is run by very successful wealth members of the top 0.1%. The salary I get from that company feeds and clothes me any my children, provides us with a car, holidays, health care, a pension plan and all the other trappings of western civilization. Just because I work for them doesn't mean I have in any way 'lost'. I have gained massively. I hope they go on winning so they can employ even more people like me.
When my wife arrived in this country, she got a bottom-of-the-ladder job at a coffee shop. Within 2 months she was an assistant manager. She used the money she earned to support herself and pay the course and transport fees to go to a community college 'access to nursing' course and now 13 years later is head nurse at a specialist fracture clinic. Everybody won. They got a hard working Barista, and she got the resources she needed to build a successful career and their customers got great tasting coffee. Nobody lost a single thing.
>The point is that every game has winners and losers.
If so, then the point is wrong, because Game Theory[0]. With very few exceptions (e.g. futures and options contracts, IIRC) trade - that thing markets do - is a positive sum cooperative game, that is to say win/win.
Both sides can certainly win in a futures contract and often do. A farmer sells his future crop now at a discount so he can buy fertilizer he couldn't otherwise afford, but without which there would be less crop to sell. Meanwhile the future crop buyer gets the crop at a discount. Win-win.
Pure financial derivatives trading can generate absolute winners and losers, but they know that getting into the game, and the advantage for commercial participants is that the 'gamblers' increase liquidity in the market.
