Americans Work Too Hard

<blockquote><em><a href="#304159">In reply to lvthunder:</a></em></blockquote><p>Capitalism and communism are opposite sides of the same coin. They are both at the extremes of social acceptability and neither has a very good track record.</p><p>If they were implemented properly and ran as per their ethos, then both systems <em>could</em> provide a perfect world to live in. But they both have one huge, insurmountable problem, the systems rely on humans to run them and humans cannot manage either extreme right. There is too much greed, megalomania and psychosis in those that gravitate to leading these companies or countries. </p><p>To use a couple of historical quotes:</p><p><em>"Power attracts the corruptable."</em></p><p><em>"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."</em></p><p>Both of those apply to communism and capitalism, and pretty much any other form of centralized power.</p><p>I look at large companies making large profits and think: if a company can afford to sponsor a sporting event / team, make large commercials or bank obscene profits, then their products cannot offer good value for money. On the other hand, a company that is struggling to make a profit is probably not going to be there next month. There needs to be a happy middle ground.</p><p>One of the biggest problems facing capitalism at the moment isn't the ideas behind capitalism, but the short term thinking. In the past, people made businesses to last, they would work their whole lives for a company and hope it does well enough that it is still going when they retire and their pension fund will be worth something.</p><p>In the current climate, companies can't really look to the future, at least not publicy listed ones. It is irrelevant if they have plans for the next 10, 50 or 100 years, if they can't increase profits for the next quarter, they have failed and people bail on them. This is completely the wrong attitude towards business. We shouldn't be looking at making the biggest profit in the next quarter and selling the shares to some other mug, before the pyramid collapses, we should be looking at the companies plans for the future and rewarding those companies and penalising those that only think about the next quarter.</p><p>But we are stuck with the "human problem", most humans, especially greedy humans, can only think about the <em>now</em>, they want instant gratification and the media is pushing this in every thinkable form, the capitalistic system is its own worst enemy at the moment.</p><p>I'm not saying socialism is the right answer, but it is at least, at our current time, more balanced. There are checks and controls to try and stop businesses becoming too poisonous to the population that supports them – take a look at climate control, the "whole world" came together and agreed, that whilst climate change is real and it can't be proven that humans are solely responsible, it is recognized that we have an effect on it. Therefore we should work forward to reducing our influence on it as much as possible, to slow it down, whilst solutions to the problem are found, or life can adjust to the phenomenen.</p><p>(Just look at the situation in Europe at the moment, due to the prolonged, excessively hot summer, fish have been dying off in lakes and rivers, because the water has become too hot and hot water cannot contain enough oxygen for the fish to breathe. They have been pulling dead, rotting fish corpses from the lakes by the tonne. The same is true of coral reefs, they are a delicate balance, but due to rising water temperatures they are dying out.)</p><p>The problem is, a lot politicians didn't want to agree to the changes needed, because it would cost them money, but more importantly, traditional big businesses, like the coal and oil industries would be affected and they would lose a lot of money. That is bad for the companies, bad for jobs, bad for lobby money, bad for the politicians.</p><p>Likewise, the emerging markets, like India and China, which still have large coal reserves were saying that they have these reserves, it is cheap and, hey, the West has used coal for the last 150 years, why shouldn't we?</p><p>But even Al Gore* didn't come up with the obvious argument, that we have since learnt that coal is bad and we shouldn't use it, where we can find an alternative. Nobody looked at the problem from the obvious angle: those traditional industries might decline and / or die out, but you need new industries to replace them, their product can't just be replaced by air, you need to make alternatives – wind farms, solar panels etc. those are better skilled, better paid jobs. Instead of talking about areas of investment, job retraining etc. they just looked at the losses of jobs in the traditional industries.</p><p>Just imaging if the horse and buggy lobby had been as big as the oil and coal industries, the internal combustion engine, steam engine and electric engine would never have gotten a foothold, we would still be going round on horseback today!</p><p>But we now have the situation where relatively few businesses and industries have undue sway on the economy and on politicians – just look at Trump, instead of looking at what is good for his country's future, what is good for his citizens, he walks away from the climate change agreements and will support the coal industry.</p><p>In Europe, on the other hand, whilst we have big business, we also have a social contract between the goverments and their citizens. The governments are there to ensure the wellbeing of their citizens, protecting them from themselves, from external threats and internal threats, whether they be from other countries, terrorists or businesses out of control. It isn't perfect and the "American corruption" seems to be slowly drifting across the rest fo the world.</p><p>* And no, I'm no Al Gore fan, I just happened to see his new film last week, so it is still fresh in my mind. I'm not an eco freak, I don't just eat bio (wholefood?) products, but I do try and avoid waste, excessive use of plastic etc. because I recognize that we are destroying our environment.</p>