Capitalism- Oh isn’t it the best thing since sliced bread!

[L.B. Neill]

 

Capitalism is ‘the greatest thing humanity’s ever done,’ says the multimillionaire running Whole Foods (msn.com)

The Article from MSN points out Mackay’s defense of capitalism: 

 

A recent survey from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation backs his claim by showing that support for capitalism among millennials dropped from 50% a year ago to 43%. What’s more, 35% of millennials and 31% of Gen Z support the gradual elimination of the capitalist system in favor of a move toward socialism, according to the VOC figures.

“That is wrong. Capitalism is the greatest thing humanity’s ever done,” Mackey said. “Socialism has been tried 42 times in the last 100 years, and 42 failures, it doesn’t work, it’s the wrong way.”

The greatest thing humanity developed is capitalism: amplification of poverty and war, normalised destruction and its budgeting for it, social division, better and lesser thinking… social pathology… modern mental health issues, alienation, layoffs, casualised work, lack of opportunity for the many… rampant greed and selfish antisocial behaviour, environmental degradation, global warming… and sliced bread!

 Oh the thinks we think! (Dr. Seuss) comes to mind.

 

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[J Surman]

I never did like sliced bread either!

[rodshaw]

As the saying goes, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

[ALB]

He was the idiot who some years ago called Obamacare “fascism” and then had to retract as his firm was losing customers;

https://www.reason.com/2013/01/18/john-mackey-was-right-the-first-time-oba/%3famp

[james19]

Marx: In each epoch every ruling elite has claimed their social system to be the greatest social system in history. Only for it to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Replaced anew with better ways of organising things.

Many of these ‘whole food’ businesses, start off with the ethos, to benefit the health of people and planet, rather than stockholders. As bread has been mentioned. When you buy a loaf of white bread, it has been processed, the  bran is removed from wheat. Bread manufacturers then take the bran and sell it as “beneficial for good digestion”….at a premium! Whole food shops by and large sell whole wheat bread, at a premium! Not to mention these health food stores (strangely) sell   ‘health supplements’ …..which by and large have no health benefits whatsoever. As they would often claim themselves, ‘nutrition’ is in the whole foods they sell, again which are sold at a premium! It’s not much short of a license to print money! This is the reason Amazon presumably paid a lot of money to acquire the business.

Whole Foods (it appears) then sells out to Amazon., who puts its stockholders first against Whole Foods very ethos! Now, before the health of its employees it seems, it has scraped the extra $2 an hour for employees who have continued to work though the pandemic!

It’s all a complete and utter sham…the only thing that’s ‘organic’ about Whole Foods, making large profits for its parent….. Amazon!

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[rodshaw]

The pity is that it’s not just the capitalists who vaunt their system as the best possible. You have journalists such as Liddle in The Sunday Times saying the same thing, because it produces good as well as bad.

And sadly the ‘move towards socialism’ desired by a significant minority of millenials is at best a watering-down of capitalism’s worst effects while leaving the system itself intact.

[james19]

Another oft saying. If Capitalism didn’t exist it would have been invented.

rodshaw As the old adage goes:

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Capitalism is on our side. A million people in the UK, 40m in the US have lost their jobs. The ticking time bomb, this is the prospect of millions losing their homes, for failing to keep up mortgage* repayments on their property and others falling behind with rent.

* Many who believe that they own their own home will find out how much they own!

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[Anonymous]

He was the idiot who some years ago called Obamacare “fascism” and then had to retract as his firm was losing customers;

 

Like the ones shouting Fascism and coup dtat because Donald Trump has not conceded yet, but is the  US  ruling class going to overthrow itself ? They should read the December edition of the Socialist Standard .

 

 

 

[rodshaw]

Another journalist, Matthew Syed, singing the praises of capitalism in yesterday’s Sunday Times.

“Join me in a toast to capitalism – still our only hope for progress”

In part he’s writing in criticism of Mark Carney’s Reith lecture in which he said we should move away from market norms to “moral norms”.

What in fact he’s railing against is the big, dominant corporations that keep the smaller players out of things and lead to corruption. All free markets need is better people in them, he says.

He mentions socialism but to be fair, the type of “socialism” he compares free market capitalism with is the rigid, centralised state control which we in the WSM would call state capitalism.

“It’s easy to forget how systems of free exchange miraculously assemble technology such as toasters without any single person having a clue about what’s going on”.

He concludes that we should liberate the virtues of free exchange. “It’s a though that strikes me every morning when I use my pop-up toaster”.

There’s no mention of the poverty, unemployment, racism, war, environmental destruction and other ills that are the product of the wonderful system he supports.

And as if a sane, democratic, free socialist society wouldn’t have the nous to produce toasters! And they would have more of a clue about what’s going on, too.

[Author]

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