I'm tired of worrying about people making a million dollars a year. Or I would be if I did that.

please you idiots Obama is gonna raise your taxes and ruin this country

Why do we care so much about the rich again?  They are a much smaller percentage of the population than the rest of the country.

And your just plain ignoring reality if you think everyone can afford to spend four years in college.  Not to mention the fact that the federal government has rolled back a lot of the financial aid and grant programs.

You act like at every point in a poor person's life they are given the chance to become a CEO of a major company.  While that may be true for some:

1) There can only be so many rich people, everyone else will be poor.

2) You act like a person's circumstances when they start in life don't at all influence the quality of their life, their education, there general knowledge about the way the economy works, and their likelihood of succeeding.

You act like it is just as probable that a poor person will become a millionaire as a person who started out life with millions of dollars in the bank already.  You like to throw out all these platitudes about how anyone can succeed, which in a sense are true, but which also flat out ignore the fact that not everyone can be rich and that people who are already rich are far more likely to stay rich.

America wouldn't work if everyone owned million dollar mansions.  A capitalistic system is based on sacrificing the many for the few.  But that doesn't mean we can't ensure basic rights for the poor.  I am not advocating handing every poor person a check, but what is wrong with paying for their healthcare or helping them out with their education, or even offering their children daycare.  It is far more difficult for women with children to move upwards in society as well short of simply marrying someone who is rich already.

I was going to write a response about how the poor are necessary for the rich to exist and you can't have capitalism without the poor, but Akuma already did a pretty good job of summing that up so I'll leave it alone.

But I do have to say that Mafoo's attitude is why all forms of government and economic systems eventually fail. Capitalism in theory is a sytem that like Akuma said, sacrifices the many for the success of a few, but then in turn those few improve the quality of life for the many. But like in every system, when the few manage to get to the top they say "screw the many, they are idiots. I deserve this." It's that fundemental human flaw that dooms all systems.

Reading your comment, I don't see how it is a response to what I said.  Who said anything about caring for the poor? My only mention of the poor:

"If you're poor, you'll be poor no matter what (even if the gov't pays for your healthcare or cuts a welfare check).

I'm saying rich people pay more taxes because they are the ones who care.  That is why more than half of them vote Democrat.

I'm not talking about college or "taking care of themselves"; I am talking about this fundamental idea:

"If you're rich then you have more to gain by keeping the gov't afloat and the masses pacified."   Government's primary role is maintain order.

I  may come to the same conclusions as Vagabond, Akuma, and all of them but I do not get there on the same logic.

You are so disconnected from reality it's scary. Capitalism is not " A capitalistic system is based on sacrificing the many for the few." That's communism. Also, you make it sound like the poor don't have a chance to not be poor.

I was poor, and to not be poor was really not that hard. I waited tables for 8 years while I went to school. Now I am in the upper middle class range. I am no more special then anyone else willing to put forth the effort I did.

And who cares how hard it is. Life is not fair. Life never will be fair. All that can be done is to give the people the ability to pull themselves up. You make it sound like a large percentage of Americans are just not good enough to be rich.

Sorry, I have more faith in people then that.

@Steven, make fun of California all you want. It's not so much that I love it, but I hate everywhere else I've been so far (New York and Boston mostly). I think I hate everywhere but Los Angeles, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Seattle, and Hawaii. I just think California is the greatest state for cultural/artistic/education reasons.


@Mafoo, what do you think is more important, democracy or a free market? Democracy gives the majority the power to vote for what they want. A free market makes the majority poor. Don't be surprised when the majority votes to kill the free market every time. The only reason it's taking longer in America than in Europe is because in America the free market party uses religion to get poor people to vote against their own interests. They'll vote for the free market guy not because they want to give power to the rich people that will shit on them, but because they hate gay marriage and abortions and they're voting based on "family values" and other random meaningless buzzwords. The free market half of the Republican party had a lot to gain by joining forces with the religious right, but it's finally backfiring and destroying the whole party.

Personally, I think the way the poor get more rights over time and how it eventually leads to democratic socialism is simple mathematics. You make everybody poor and then let them vote between the system that made them poor and a similar system but with free health care. I also think free health care is good for the rich because then all their workers will stop dying, but I guess I don't have the big business attitude of replacing drones as they die. It seems too 1800s and pure evil for me.

Rubang, I feel the same way about Florida.

Communism is explicitly about taking the wealth of the elites and redistributing it.  When it then FAILS it creates new elites.  Capitalism NATURALLY concentrates wealth into certain groups which will then become elites.

Why do people perpetuate this myth that Europe has abandoned the "free market," and that the US is the archetype free-market system? This has stupefied me for years. Both the US and Europe are mixed economies. It depends on which European nation you are comparing to the US, but in some aspects, certain European nations are actually freer than the US.