Comments by "Regis" (@Timbo5000) on "" video.

Johnny Fishfingers So it's happening in Norway too? I'm Dutch and over here in the Netherlands our government has been gripped by this neo-liberal idea of breaking apart our social services as well. "Marktwerking" they call it; privatising everything for maximum efficiency, they say. We've broken down our nationalised healthcare in favour of a system that Obama tried to copy later on with Obamacare: private insurance companies but everyone must insure themselves to keep the prices low. Those who can't afford it get government money to pay for insurance, so everyone is insured. It works, it works well, but there's a discussion going on whether we should go back to national healthcare and whether that was superior. In many other areas we're simply worse off with government austerity, which especially kicked in after the economic crisis. Nowadays, and this might be familiar to you too or perhaps it's just a Dutch thing, the government talks of the "participation society", which means civilians are expected to be more and more independent from the government and must take care of eachother so that the government doesn't have to. Essentially, we're expected to take our sick grandmother into our house and take care of them instead of sending them to an elderly home, so to speak. Guess where this is going... I wonder whether this neo-liberal trend is happening across Europe. Any of the Scandinavian countries were honestly the last places I'd expect this to be happening too. I thought it was just us in the Netherlands. And in Germany it always was terrible for poorer people and pensioners. Now more generally about capitalism, I don't think we're necessarily a victim of the market unless we personally are involved in it. Here in the Netherlands we have a pension system in which we pay small fees into a pension fund that is invested worldwide. This way we built an insane pension fund of right now 1400 billion euros for 17 million people. Just to illustrate how impressive this is: our pension fund is 60% of the EU total, just for 17 million people. Because of our collective use of the market. And if I have it right you have an even more impressive system with investing oil money into the market and funding social policies with it, also worth a trillion or more? Capitalism can be spinned to be to the benefit of the entire population. And there is an unspeakable amount of money left to claim just in tax evasion. All it requires is international action against tax havens. We used to be a notorious tax haven too, but in Europe we already are enacting policies against this phenomenon, which also has sparked the realisation that we must stop taking part in it. Regarding wages, yes that's a real problem with capitalism. If you ask me there should be more than just a minimum wage. Perhaps there should be a minimum wealth distribution percentage within companies. And a general salary + bonus limit to the CEOs and such. Normal rich is rich enough, exorbitantly rich is unnecessary and excessive. In the Netherlands we have a salary limit for government officials, which is around 300k per year. That's an excellent salary, but not exorbitant. Maybe corporate leaders could use similar limits. A fair percentage of the profit should also go to every employee, connecting them to the performance of the company. The biggest problem capitalism has today is globalism. We have no more control over corporations, they're no longer tied to our societies. They're entities that float above nations, looking for areas where they can gain maximum profit. This means settling in tax havens to pay minimal taxes. This means that if a country raises taxes or otherwise impedes corporations' max profit, the corporations will leave . International companies have unprecedented influence over our governments for this reason: we simply don't control them. The only remedy is to be too big for them to leave (think the size of the EU or US) and even then there are limits to what we can do as you seriously downgrade your competitionposition with too limiting rules. If you ask me, capitalism is workable as long as we can properly regulate it, but globalism is undermining that possibility. We can't battle tax evasion when corporations can go wherever they please and other countries take part in this race to the bottom of lowering taxes to rake in jobs. We need to either take global action against things like tax evasion or we must somehow tie corporations to their home country again. Then we can exert control over them and make capitalism at least sufferable and at best a pretty good system even for the lower classes.
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MICHAEL CALLAHAN Bernie wants to do what has already been done in countries like Norway, the Netherlands.... etc. Countries that are still capitalist, yet have some socialist policies that has resulted in them being the absolute top in quality of life and happiness lists, consistently beating the US. Bernie stands for something better . You're not only wrong when you call it communism (social democracy = capitalism with social policies), but you're also more obsessed with what something is called than what it can mean for you and how it can improve your and others' lives. And that last thing says something about your argument; it's red scare bullshit.
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I didn't expect that to be a quote from 1952, wow. This has been going on like this for a very long time...
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@ZeldagigafanMatthew Nazis were not capitalists, but fascists (and a special form of fascism at that, which made it a lot bloodier than regular fascism we've seen in other states). Calling fascists capitalists is about as inaccurate as those modern right wing talking points about fascism being a form of socialism (moreover, calling fascism capitalist actually was a far left talking point in the past as well. Stalin called national socialism the "natural end point of capitalism", which is of course ridiculous). Fascism is an anti-marxist/socialist, anti-democracy/liberalism and anti-capitalist system. It's the "third option", if you will. The only deaths we can truly blame capitalism for is the deaths it has indirectly caused by failing to provide for people. Having enough food but failing to distribute it properly. Being able to treat people medically but simply not doing it because they're not insured. Perhaps working people to death or at least into sickness due to bad working conditions. And it's a stretch to compare these types of deaths to the more or less active killings that happened under Nazism, Fascism and authoritarian versions of Communism/Socialism. In my eyes, an unnecessary death is not the same as summarily executing someone or willfully taking food away from them to have them starve. So yes, capitalism has its flaws, some of them major flaws, but let's not take that extra step and compare failing to distribute food to something like the holodomor under Stalin.
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Even the most amazing work on the planet doesn't justify 50 billion dollars in income. Saving the bloody planet doesn't justify it. Nobody needs that amount of money and if you know what you can do with it it becomes painful to hear him say he deserved it. Sure some work deserves more pay than other work. Some unique important work might even justify very high pay. But 50 billion is off the charts. He has it now, fine, but to say something like "I worked hard for it" is just.... eh. That's the yearly income of certain countries. One man can't feasibly work hard enough or be important enough to say his work is worth more than what an entire country can produce with millions of people. He has no sense of balance.
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Countries in Western and especially Northern Europe have extremely high quality of life ratings, beating the US soundly in almost every single way. If you look at those countries and still say that a politician wanting to achieve that same quality of life in America is wrong because it's democratic socialism, there is something seriously wrong with your moral compass. We are looking at policies that demonstrably work in other countries, demonstrably create a better society in those countries and don't lead to costs we can't overcome. The only acceptable argument against that is if there were special conditions in the US that'd make implementing those policies extra challenging and/or risky. Simply saying "but it's socialism" and trying to justify denying Americans those benefits purely because of that "reason" is nothing short of criminal behaviour.
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@You're Gonna Hate This A pyramid can work if the wealth is distributed in a more or less fair manner and the lowest branch has a comfortable enough life to stave away revolutionary sentiment. This is already achieved by enacting some socialist policies witin a capitalist framework, which is not difficult to achieve at all (EDIT: not to mention a properly functioning democracy and what that does to give the lower branches a feeling of self-government). What worries me more about capitalism is its goal of endless economic growth, whether that's workable and whether it can be combined with sustainability (both from climate change and more direct environmental considerations). If redistributing a bit of wealth (a bit higher percentage tax and international cooperation to ban tax havens would already be more than enough) was capitalism's main issue there'd be no systematic issue at all. But I fear there's more to worry.
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